Apple stock sinks 5% after price hikes on MacBook and iPad

Apple announced price increases on MacBooks and iPads on Thursday; This is the first official move to pass on higher memory and storage costs to consumers after CEO Tim Cook said increases were becoming inevitable.

The company’s shares fell more than 5% on Thursday following the price change; this was the worst decline since April 2025.

Here are Apple’s latest changes:

• MacBook Neo entry increases from $599 to $699
• MacBook Air 512GB Increases from $1099 to $1299
• MacBook Pro 1T Increases from $1699 to $1999
• iPad Air 128GB Increases from $599 to $749
• iPad Pro Wifi 256GB increases from $999 to $1199

Apple’s online store briefly closed Thursday morning and was updated with price changes.

“The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge,” the company said in a statement. “The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created a tremendous increase in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen component prices rise this fast.”

Apple added that it had “reached a point where we need to start increasing prices on a number of products” and left the door open to further increases in the future.

“We know this is not welcome news and are working tirelessly to find a solution,” the company said.

Cook told Wall StreetJournal Last week, it emerged that Apple could no longer fully protect its customers from the rise in component costs tied to the AI ​​boom.

“This is a hundred-year flood,” Cook told the Journal. “I haven’t seen anything like this in any region in over 40 years.”

Memory and storage prices have quadrupled over the past three quarters as suppliers shift more production to high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers, according to Counterpoint Research.

Memory crisis has been a boon for suppliers MicronIt reported that its revenues quadrupled and that its gross margin increased from 39% last year to 84.9% in the latest quarter. Nvidia And Meta.

Apple’s pricing tactics have historically included removing the lowest-cost option, making higher storage or memory the new starting point, or pushing buyers toward Pro models and higher-capacity versions.

The Mac mini offered an early sign of this approach. In May, Apple stopped selling the lowest-priced configuration and removed the $599 256GB option from the lineup. The remaining entry model started at $799. Apple has also long used storage upgrades to increase the price consumers pay for its devices.

Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research, estimates that higher component costs could add about $200 per iPhone for Apple. He expects price increases of around $150 to $200 across the product line, which focuses on higher memory configurations over base models.

AI support gives Apple another reason to emphasize higher memory configurations.

IDC expects all new iPhone models to move to 12GB of RAM; because Apple is trying to avoid selling new devices without access to the full range of Apple Intelligence features.

More advanced AI features on the device require more memory, and Apple’s new Siri experience will only work on newer hardware. IDC estimates that approximately 54% of iPhones shipped since 2022 will not support the full new Siri experience.

This gives Apple a potential way to frame higher prices around more capable hardware, rather than simply ignoring component inflation. IDC predicts Apple’s average selling price will rise 12% this year, helped by a richer product mix and the anticipated launch of the foldable iPhone.

WRISTWATCH: Apple will pass on memory cost increases to consumers