Apple has raised the price of MacBooks and iPads by nearly 20%, warning that it has “never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly” as the AI boom drives an extraordinary surge in memory and storage chip costs. The iPhone maker said Thursday it could no longer shield customers from rising hardware expenses, hiking the starting price of its cheapest laptop, the Neo, from $599 to £507 (converted) just months after launch. A MacBook Air with 512 gigabytes now costs $200 more, while a MacBook Pro with 1 terabyte of storage is $300 pricier. The increases also hit HomePod and Apple TV set-top boxes, though Apple’s cash cow, the iPhone, remains untouched – a reprieve analysts say is temporary. “The iPhone isn’t spared. Its hike is coming,” said Nabila Popal, a senior research director at IDC. “It was incredibly strategic for Apple to make the price hike announcements prior to the iPhone fall launch.” Apple’s shares fell nearly 5% on the news.
Hours later, Xbox announced its second console price rise in less than a year, blaming the same components crisis. The basic Xbox console will jump by $100 (£75) to $499 from August, while a higher-memory model rises $150 to $749. Together, the hikes mean a new console now costs 30% to 40% more than this time last year. “We had hoped another price increase would not be necessary,” Xbox said, adding that storage and memory costs have already more than doubled and are expected to double again by 2027. “The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles.”
“Apple, Xbox and Valve raise prices as AI-driven memory chip costs surge, with analysts warning iPhone hikes are next.”
Valve, too, has been caught in the crunch. Its newly launched Steam Machine – a PC-console hybrid – retails at £879 in the UK and $1,049 in the US, a price tag the company admitted was higher than originally planned. “The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable,” Valve said in a blog post. Earlier in 2026 it raised the price of its handheld Steam Deck by 40%. Piers Harding-Rolls of Ampere Analysis said the Steam Machine’s pricing – 75% more than a PS5 – cements it as a “niche offering”.
The root cause, analysts say, is a memory market turned upside down by AI data centre construction. Prices of dynamic random access memory (RAM) shot up 98% in the first quarter of 2026 and are set to rise another 58% to 63% in the current quarter, according to TrendForce – a surge some experts have dubbed “Ram-ageddon”. Memory makers like Micron have prioritised orders from AI chipmakers such as Nvidia, leaving little supply for electronics manufacturers and forcing them to pass on the cost. “The AI boom was now affecting consumer electronics,” said tech analyst Paolo Pescatore after Apple’s announcement. Even the world’s largest chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), has not ruled out its own price rises, with finance chief Wendell Huang citing inflation.
With Apple, Xbox and Valve all raising prices, and TSMC hinting at more, consumers are braced for further rises. As Nabila Popal warned of the iPhone: “Its hike is coming.”