Apple CEO Tim Cook has given the company’s legion of fans the bad news: your next iPhone or Mac will be more expensive due to spiking memory prices across the board. Now, every prospective iPhone 18 buyer has to ask themselves whether Apple Intelligence is worth an extra $200—potentially more?
The outgoing Apple figurehead told The Wall Street Journal in an interview posted late Wednesday that, despite his best efforts to keep RAM prices from hitting consumers, “the situation has become unsustainable.” In other words, Apple’s margins will no longer make sense if it maintains its current prices.
Just how much will the next iPhone 18 Pro cost? The Wall Street Journal suggested that the price tag will be close to $1,300. That’s $200 more than an iPhone 17 Pro. But let’s get one thing straight: only Apple determines the next price of your devices. It will have to balance user expectations with its own bottom line.
“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook told the publication, adding that Apple would need to see memory prices come down before consumer electronics can again return to the realms of affordability.
Cook is set to retire as CEO Sept. 1, likely just a few weeks before Apple announces whatever it’s got cooking on the iPhone 18 and—according to a slew of rumors—the long-awaited foldable. Current VP of hardware engineering John Ternus will take up Cook’s mantle, so he’ll be the focal point of these inevitable price hikes. This new iPhone will inevitably be built with Apple Intelligence in mind. The irony, of course, is that AI is the main reason why that phone is getting more expensive.
Apple has been more resistant to memory price fluctuations than many manufacturers, largely because it has such a strong command of its supply chain. The company can normally leverage its dominance in computing to get the best deals, but that’s evidently no longer the case. Memory manufacturers—namely Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix—have retooled their businesses to supply the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) necessary for AI data center projects. As a result, their profit margins and stock prices have soared to the point that they can ignore any old partners’ pleas for more memory.
Earlier this year, Apple shipped a new iPad Air with M4 and a new iPhone 17e without raising prices. The latest MacBook Air models cost $100 more than previous versions, but they also come with 512GB of storage, double the previous generation’s starting capacity. The cracks have started to show in the past few months, starting when Apple removed its base-level $600 512GB Mac mini option from store shelves.
The company can’t keep pretending everything is okay in the world of gadgets. Even if memory prices come down in a year or two, gadget prices may not necessarily follow. If Apple sells enough $1,300 iPhones, it knows that’s a price customers are willing to pay. Now, those customers will have to ask themselves if Apple Intelligence and an AI-ified Siri are worth a significant chunk of change.
