The Apple lineup is already considered premium almost across the board. Just like medical aid and insurance, that premium is about to go up. Company head Tim Cook, speaking to the Wall Street Journal, confirmed what we’re expecting from… every tech brand this year.
It’s not like companies need a reason to raise prices, but the stated reason for this particular one is artificial intelligence. Specifically, the global semiconductor shortage that the tech has prompted. It’s not like the Fruit Company isn’t alone on this — Huawei recently took a similar step.
Poisoned Apple?
According to Cook, “price increases are unavoidable.” He continued, “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.”
Unfortunately, the Apple head didn’t provide a) a timeline for the increases, b) the size of said pricing changes, or c) which devices are likely to be affected. Given that the problem covers both RAM and storage pricing, it’s likely that nothing in the catalogue will be unscathed.
“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases. We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line,” added Cook during the WSJ interview.
Apple’s current priciest iPhone costs South Africans R51,000 (admittedly with 2TB of storage). The base model 15in MacBook Air M4 starts at R20,000. Pretty much everything in between (plus the frankly affordable MacBook Neo) is set to go up. It’s now just a question of ‘when?’
