On Saturday, Fortune first relayed the news of Amazon’s latest price hike, and it’s hitting the company’s most popular tech products, from e-readers to smart home gadgets and more. Practically every major Echo device is experiencing a price jump. The worst offender is the Echo Show 21, which used to demand $400 and now costs $500. Meanwhile, the more-recent Echo Dot Max only saw a $20 price hike to $120.
It was only a matter of time before Amazon hiked prices, of course, blaming the ongoing RAMpocalypse for the trouble. However, even we were surprised how deep the price hikes go—impacting everything from Fire TV sticks to Kindles that never had much computer memory to begin with.
- Echo Dot (5th Gen): $50 → $80 (+$30)
- Echo Spot: $80 → $110 (+$30)
- Echo Show 21: $400 → $500 (+$100)
- Echo Dot Max: $100 → $120 (+$20)
- Echo Show 15: $300 → $350 (+$50)
- Echo Show 11: $220 → $250 (+$30)
- Echo Show 8: $180 → $200 (+$20)
Fire TV sticks are another casualty of Amazon’s price-squeezing. Sure, a regular HD Fire TV will only cost $5 more, but the 4K Max stick will demand nearly 41% more, now up to $85. The 4K Fire Stick makes use of 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage.
- Fire TV Stick 4K Max: $60 → $85 (+$25)
- Fire TV Stick HD: $35 → $40 (+$5)
Perhaps the most surprising price uptick is in Amazon’s longtime Kindle brand. Every one of the company’s e-reader models is jumping in price by an average of 28%. At the same time, the starting prices for the note-taking-capable Kindle Scribe and Kindle Scribe Colorsoft remain untouched at $400 and $680, respectively. Those devices contain more memory than all the lower-end Kindle devices.
- Kindle (16GB): $110 → $150 (+$40)
- Kindle Kids (16GB): $130 → $180 (+$50)
- Kindle Paperwhite (16GB): $160 → $200 (+$40)
- Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition (32GB): $200 → $250 (+$50)
- Kindle Colorsoft: $250 → $290 (+$40)
With a mere 512MB of RAM and 16GB of storage for the base Kindle, these e-readers were built to be as cheap as possible. A Kindle Paperwhite is only marginally faster, with 2GB of RAM, but it’s still limited to 16GB for storing all your e-books. Amazon claims that the price of memory has become so obscene that even 16GB of storage is somehow worth $40 more.
An Amazon spokesperson told Fortune that the company (and the tech industry at large) is “facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs. After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines.”
Amazon isn’t basing its price hikes solely on the amount of RAM in each product. A Kindle Colorsoft only saw a 16% increase, while the Kindle Kids experienced a 38.5% hike. Amazon is clearly considering the popularity of each product and its total margins. Other companies have calculated their price hikes differently. For instance, when Apple raised prices on all products other than iPhones earlier this year, it pushed the cost of a HomePod mini by $30, up to $130. That device has only 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. Meanwhile, a high-end M5 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and 1TB saw a $300 hike.
Amazon’s Kindles were always meant to be cheap. They’re a means for the e-commerce giant to entice users into Kindle e-book subscriptions. As if that wasn’t enough monetization, devices like the base Kindle Paperwhite also are stuffed with ads on the library and lock screens. The company recently bricked a slew of pre-2012 Kindle e-readers by dropping software support, essentially forcing many current users to upgrade to these newly higher-priced models. The price-gouging is obscene enough that it may be time to start thinking of alternatives.
