Topline
Apple’s stock plunged on Thursday after the tech giant announced price hikes for laptops and tablets, following a warning from CEO Tim Cook that the increases were “unavoidable” as an AI surge fueled higher memory and storage costs.
Customers try out Apple’s MacBook Neo laptops.
VCG via Getty Images
Key Facts
Shares of Apple dropped by 5.3% to around $277 as of Thursday afternoon, paring back earlier losses of up to 6%, lowering its market value by roughly $275 billion to just over $4 trillion.
The slide moves Apple below Alphabet ($4.1 trillion) as the third-largest company in the world by market capitalization, with the Google parent ranked behind Nvidia ($4.7 trillion).
The price changes spiked the starting cost of the MacBook Pro 1T, the cheapest MacBook Pro, to $1,999 from $1,699—the largest increase of any single product.
The MacBook Neo—the company’s cheapest laptop—went up in price from $599 to $699 and the cheapest MacBook Air, the 512GB, went from $1099 to $1,299.
The cost of some iPads also spiked significantly—the iPad Air 128GB now starts at $749 (up from $599) and the iPad Pro Wifi 256GB increased from $999 to $1,199.
Cook earlier this month warned that soaring costs of memory and storage chips would be passed along to the consumer and, on Thursday, the company called the surge in demand unprecedented: “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“This is a hundred-year flood,” Cook told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
How much the next iPhone costs. Apple’s next run of phones—the iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max and the rumored foldable iPhone Fold/Ultra—are expected to be unveiled in September. Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC he estimates the higher chip costs will mean price increases for iPhones of about $150 to $200 per phone, and the company on Thursday left the door open for more hikes when it said the chip crisis has “reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products.”
TANGENT
Apple isn’t the only company raising its tech prices. Nintendo told customers its flagship console will cost $50 more come September, and Sony and Microsoft also recently hiked the cost of their PlayStation and Xbox consoles. Lenovo has upped its PC and server pricing, and Dell and HP have also raised their laptop prices.
Key background
The surge in demand for memory chips for AI data centers has put a strain on the supply left for consumer products. Sassine Ghazi, CEO of Synopsys, a semiconductor company, told CNBC much of the world’s memory chip supply is “going directly to AI infrastructure, but many other products need memory,” which has left other industries “starved.” Memory contract prices surged 80% to 90% in the first quarter of 2026 alone, according to Counterpoint Research, after shooting up 50% in the last quarter of 2025. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley predict the undersupply of chips will persist and keep memory prices heavily inflated through at least 2027.