A week after Apple CEO Tim Cook warned that price hikes for the company’s devices were “unavoidable” due to soaring costs in key components, consumers woke up Thursday to just how steep and immediate those increases would be.
Try up to 20% for many of Apple’s laptops. Up to 25% for iPads.
On Apple’s website, the price of the base MacBook Air now is $1,299, which will set you back $200 more than before the increase. At $1,199, the iPad Pro costs $200 more now, too.
For now, iPhone prices haven’t changed, but that’s not likely to hold. Apple is scheduled to unveil its iPhone 18 in September, so look for iPhone fallout around then if not sooner.
The culprit, Apple says, is the soaring costs of memory and storage computer chips. The prices for those components have risen by roughly four times over the past year, according to The Wall Street Journal, due in large part to competing demand from data-center developers who have a lot to answer for these days.