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Between President Trump's tariffs, global instability, and historic demand for RAM, the past year has had an outsized influence on tech prices. It seems that just about every major company has announced price hikes recently, from laptop manufacturers like Acer and Dell to gaming companies like Sony and Nintendo. It's an odd turn of events: In the past, you only needed to wait for a new piece of tech to get cheaper. But now, if you didn't buy a Switch or PlayStation at launch, you'll pay more for one today.
Despite these increases, Apple has largely avoided passing higher costs on to consumers. It has some tricks up its sleeve, of course: The company eliminated some cheaper device tiers, so the cost of entry for products like the Mac mini and MacBook Air technically increased, but it did so without actually raising prices. Over the past year, not only have Apple device prices stayed the same, the company has also released new low-cost options like the MacBook Neo, which offers a full Mac experience for the cost of an iPhone 16. (Perhaps there are some perks to being a $4 trillion company.)
Sadly, this isn't a story about how Apple is continuing to keep prices stable. On Wednesday night, The Wall Street Journal published an exclusive, sharing news direct from outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook. "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," Cook told the newspaper. "We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable." In other words, Apple products are about to get more expensive.
Cook went on to say that both RAM and storage chip shortages are driving factors in these issues: "There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases." In a rather ominous aside, he added, "I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years."
There are few details in the piece outside of the quotes from Cook. We don't know which products are going up in price, nor exactly when. The Wall Street Journal predicts that Apple will need to "substantially" increase prices if its goal is to maintain its current profits to cushion the impact from more expensive RAM and CPUs. Regardless, visit Apple's online store and take note of the MSRPs you see: They'll likely never be lower than they are right now.
Should you buy Apple devices now to beat the price increase?
Choosing when to buy tech is a bit like judging the stock market. You can make your best guess and hope you're getting the lowest price, but tomorrow, a massive sale could make your deal look paltry by comparison. Or you could wait, and prices could creep higher. There are no guarantees anymore.
That said, we can make some educated guesses. Tim Cook is calculated, and while he may be passing the torch to John Ternus soon enough, he wants to ensure Apple's valuation only continues to grow. As such, my guess is these price hikes are not immanent; rather, they likely will kick off with Apple's next hardware release cycle, which the company will almost certainly announce in the fall. That could mean the iPhone 18 will cost more than the iPhone 17, or the Apple Watch Series 12 will cost more than the Series 11. The "iPhone Fold" has no successor to compare it to, but perhaps it, too, will cost more than Apple originally intended. If that's the plan, Wall Street (as well as the rest of us) will no longer be surprised when the new products cost more than last year's.
If you're set on buying a new Apple device as soon as it's announced, you'll need to anticipate paying more. But if your goal is to get a device at the best possible price, I'd recommend buying sooner rather than later. While it seems probable that Apple won't raise prices before the fall, it could also choose to implement hikes long before then. As such, I'd encourage you to choose the device you want rather than getting fixated on paying a certain price. Use price comparison tools to see what deals are out there. If it looks like a device is at a relatively low price, jump on it now. You can no longer trust that older devices will be cheaper once Apple releases its next crop of products; if the iPhone 18 costs $200 more than the iPhone 17, there won't be that usual market incentive to drop the price of the latter.
The timing here is actually good, at least: Next week is Amazon's Prime Day (which should be called Prime Week now), and there are already early Apple deals with considering. A great discount on AirPods Pro 3 came and went (at least at Amazon; you can still find them for $70 off at Best Buy), but you can still score solid deals on the AirPods 4, with and without active noise cancellation. It's worth keeping an eye out next week for any deals on Apple products, including Macs, iPads, and AirPods. Again, no guarantees on what will get discounted, but we know two things for sure: Amazon is having a sale, and Apple is planning on raising prices at some point. More so than usual, the timing of your purchase matters.
