Apple has increased the price of some MacBooks and iPads by nearly 20%, blaming an “unprecedented challenge” from a surge in demand for chips to power AI data centres. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” the company said on Thursday, adding that it was working to find solutions.
Within hours, Xbox announced its second price rise in less than a year. The Microsoft-owned company said the cost of its basic console will go up by $100 (£75) to $499, while the version with more memory will increase by $150 to $749. New prices take effect from August. “The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles,” Xbox said, adding that while memory and storage costs have already more than doubled, they expect costs to double again by 2027.
“Apple and Xbox raise prices by up to 40% as component costs surge, but oil falls to pre-war levels.”
Valve, the gaming giant behind Steam, launched its Steam Machine computer-console hybrid on Monday at £879 in the UK and $1,049 in the US – a price it said was driven by soaring component costs. “Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components,” Valve wrote in a blog post. Piers Harding-Rolls of Ampere Analysis said the market research firm had estimated a starting price between $700 and $800, but rising costs meant “Valve has been unable to deliver a more accessible price point to consumers”. The Steam Machine is priced at 75% more than a PS5, cementing it as a “niche offering”, he added.
Yet amid the wave of price hikes, there was a rare glimmer of relief for household budgets: oil prices have returned to levels last seen just before the US-Iran war began, bolstering hopes of a respite from cost-of-living pressures. The fall in oil – a key input for transport and manufacturing – could help offset some of the inflationary pressure from rising electronics costs, though analysts caution that the impact on consumer prices may take months to feed through.