Mac and iPad price hikes hurt Apple more than it hurts you
Apple’s latest round of price hikes may leave consumers paying more for Macs and iPads, but the bigger impact could actually be on Apple itself.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple didn’t raise prices because it wanted to. The company reportedly spent months trying to avoid passing higher costs on to customers, but surging memory and storage prices due to the AI boom eventually made it unavoidable without hurting its profit margins.
The biggest increases affect Apple’s entry-level products, with the MacBook Neo rising by RM500, the MacBook Air by RM800, the base iPad by RM450 and the iPad Air by RM500. On top of that, home products such as the Apple TV 4K and HomePod lineup have also become more expensive.
While consumers will certainly feel the pinch, Gurman argues Apple could face the bigger problem. More expensive Macs and iPads may encourage buyers to delay upgrades altogether, while enterprise, education and government customers purchasing devices in bulk will see costs rise substantially. It also means less people in general switching to Mac, which has the knock on effect of less services such as iCloud or Final Cut Pro being bought by users too.
Curiously, Apple left iPhone pricing unchanged for now. Gurman believes that’s because smartphones remain far less price-sensitive thanks to telco subsidies, trade-in programmes and instalment plans, unlike Macs and iPads which are typically bought outright.
The AI boom is of course the reason for all tech and computing rising in price. Massive spending on AI infrastructure has driven up demand for GPUs, memory and storage, pushing hardware costs higher across the industry. Although Apple has focused on running AI features on-device instead of relying heavily on cloud infrastructure, it hasn’t escaped being part of the collateral damage from rising component prices.
In the end, higher prices could slow Mac and iPad sales, even if Apple’s revenue remains healthy, making this pricing reset just as challenging for the company as it is for buyers.
Read more of our articles below!
