by Jason Snell

June 18, 2026 5:05 PM PT

Outgoing Apple CEO delivers the bad news: Prices are going up

In an exclusive with the Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook announced that Apple will be raising the prices on its products¹ as a result of high prices for memory and storage worldwide:

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “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.”….

“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” said Cook. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”

Cook called the current supply situation, driven by wild buying in the AI industry, “a hundred-year flood,” and that he had “never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”

I do wonder how Apple will raise prices. An informal guess is that a lot of cheaper base configurations will vanish, that new models will start at higher prices, that Apple’s rumored OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro models will set all-time high starting prices, and that Apple will do everything it can to keep a lid on the prices of its base models across the board. The big question is, will the MacBook Neo jump up in price, and if so, by how much?