Apple confirms price increases are coming - how much will it cost you?

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Looking to buy a new iPhone or other Apple device this year? If so, get ready to shell out more money than in the past. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the company aims to raise prices on its products as a result of the shorter supply and higher cost of memory and storage chips.

"Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," Cook told the WSJ. "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."

Cook didn't reveal when this might happen or which products would be affected. Apple is expected to kick off a new product lineup in September, which would introduce new iPhones (including a potential folding iPhone Ultra), a new Apple Watch, and other new devices. The impending price increases could easily surface at that point. But higher costs for Macs and iPads might arrive sooner, said the WSJ.

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Already, one product has been socked with a price increase. Last month, Apple changed the starting price and configuration for its cheapest Mac Mini. Previously, the base Mini sold for $599 and included an M4 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. Now, the least expensive model costs $799 with the same chip and amount of memory but with 512GB of storage.

Blame it on AI demand and the resulting pressures on the memory and storage chip market.

AI companies have been scooping up much of the available supply of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) and NAND flash storage for their power-hungry systems. That's led to a severe shortage of chips for everyone else , thereby triggering cost increases for the remaining stock.

The three dominant memory manufacturers (Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology) have also shifted their limited resources and budgets toward higher-margin, enterprise components, leaving scraps for the consumer market.

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Companies like Apple typically grab enough memory to last a year or two in advance. But as that supply dwindles, they're forced to eventually pass along the increases to customers lest their profit margins start to suffer.