Apple Inc. is planning a significant price increase for its flagship devices to offset an unprecedented rise in component costs driven by global shortages and surging demand from AI network operators. The base model of the iPhone 18 Pro could see its price climb to $1,299.
CEO Tim Cook revealed this in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, describing the current supply chain crisis as a “hundred-year flood” with no parallel in the last four decades.
The crisis began after memory chip prices quadrupled due to massive purchases by tech giants Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon for AI servers. The enormous demand from the AI industry has prompted semiconductor manufacturers to shift their factories to produce chips tailored for AI, drastically cutting output of conventional chips for consumer electronics.
According to Morgan Stanley, the shortage for the consumer sector could reach 15% by 2027, already driving up prices for finished products from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Nintendo, and forcing Apple to preemptively raise the price of the Mac Mini between official launches.
The situation is compounded by Apple's need to increase RAM in its devices to support announced AI features and the upgraded Siri assistant. Traditionally, Apple leveraged its status as the world's largest buyer to dictate tough terms to suppliers (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk), whose stocks have surged 800% to 4,600% amid the shortage. However, the company has now lost its leverage and must compete for quotas with AI giants offering long-term contracts with massive prepayments.
To stabilize supply channels, Cook expressed willingness to use Apple's multi-billion-dollar cash reserves to pre-finance expansion of partners' production capacities, while completely ruling out building its own semiconductor fabs. As a radical measure to diversify supply, the Apple chief did not rule out lobbying to ease US export restrictions to attract Chinese chipmakers, stressing that in the current structural crisis, “all options must be on the table” to solve the shortage.
Source: podrobno.uz