Apple CEO Tim Cook may have just put words to a fear millions of Americans already had about the AI boom. As his company started raising prices on Macs and iPads this week, Cook described the cost spiral driving those hikes in language that sounded less like a quarterly update and more like a warning. “This is a hundred-year flood,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.” The cause is the data-center buildout—the same sprawling infrastructure many people have grown wary of—now reaching into their pockets through the price of a laptop.
The chips inside your phone are now competing with AI servers, and consumers are losing
Apple raised Mac prices by roughly 15% to 20% and iPad prices by 15% to 25% on Thursday, according to the Journal, which first reported Cook’s comments in an exclusive interview last week. The base MacBook Air jumped $200 to $1,299. The MacBook Pro climbed $300 to $1,999. The iPad Air rose $150 to $749, and the iPad Pro went up $200 to $1,199. The entry MacBook Neo saw a smaller $100 bump to $699.iPhone prices stayed flat for now, but Apple left the door wide open. “The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage,” the company said in a statement. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.” It added that it had “reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products,” then struck a more apologetic note: “We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.“The culprit is memory. DRAM, the chips that run active apps, and NAND, the storage that holds your photos and files, have both quadrupled in price over the past year. The reason is the AI arms race. Hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are pouring hundreds of billions into data centers, and chipmakers are steering production toward the high-bandwidth memory those servers demand. That leaves less for consumer devices, and what’s left costs far more.
Apple sits on a mountain of cash, so why pass the bill to you?
Cook told the Journal the increases had become “unavoidable.” He said Apple had tried to absorb the blow as long as it could. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable,” he said. The squeeze itself he laid out plainly: “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices, and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases.“It’s a notable admission from a company famous for using its buying power to squeeze suppliers for the lowest prices. Cook said Apple was even willing to spend to ease the crunch—”We’re willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part of the solution”—but ruled out building its own factories. “We can’t do everything. We know what we’re good at.” Now, with AI firms signing multi-year deals and prepaying in cash, even Apple has to wait in line.The squeeze isn’t Apple’s alone. Nintendo, Sony, Dell and HP have all raised prices on memory-heavy products. For chipmakers, it’s a windfall—Micron just reported gross margins above 80% and said tight supply will stretch past 2027. For everyone shopping for a new device, Cook’s flood metaphor may prove uncomfortably accurate, and there’s no sign the water is receding yet.
