Apple Products To Get Costlier? CEO Tim Cook Warns of Impending Price Hikes Amid Global Memory, Storage - LatestLY

Apple faces inevitable price increases across its product lineup due to soaring costs and tightening supply of memory and storage chips, according to outgoing CEO Tim Cook. In an interview with The Wa... Read original →

The insatiable demand from AI data centers for high-bandwidth memory is fracturing the consumer electronics supply chain at its core. Apple’s impending price hikes reflect a structural reallocation of foundry capacity—TSMC and memory makers are prioritizing HBM stacks for NVIDIA’s GB200 systems, which alone consume nearly 30% of SK Hynix’s HBM3e output. This cascades into acute shortages of LPDDR5X and UFS 4.0 for smartphones, inflating BOM costs by over 15%. U.S. export controls on advanced memory tech, while not directly targeting consumer devices, distort global inventory flows and complicate Apple’s localization efforts in India and Vietnam due to certification bottlenecks. Competitors like Samsung and Google will accelerate in-house TPU-DRAM co-design to bypass commodity markets. Within 18 months, 'performance inflation' will dominate: mid-tier devices downgrade specs while flagship pricing anchors shift toward $2,000, permanently redefining market segmentation.