Tim Cook: Apple Price Hikes ‘Unavoidable’
Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke exclusively with The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler about the tech industry’s RAM crisis and how it affects Apple. The effect is, Cook told Winkler, the company indeed will be raising prices on its products to compensate.
“Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal,” Winkler reported on Wednesday. ‘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.’”
Winkler continued: “Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products would be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone… Cook said Apple wouldn’t use its cash and silicon expertise to build its own memory and storage factories.”
Cook was forthright in describing the severity of the RAM situation, saying it’s “a hundred-year flood” and he’s “never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”
From an accessibility perspective—in the literal sense—Apple’s looming price hikes will have a profound negative effect on the disability community. I’ve written in the past about how people with disabilities by and large are a low-income lot, so spending big bucks on top-tier devices like iPhones and iPads and MacBooks isn’t easily doable, if at all, for the majority in the community. The economic tension is made worse if, say, you’re someone who likes Apple products especially for the accessibility features. If an iPhone is harder to come by because you can’t afford one, then obviously you’re denied access to the technologies which help you work, play, and socialize in everyday life. In other words, Apple is doing what it has to, business-wise, but the ripple effects will be felt deeply—even if the company raises prices by, say, $200, that’s a substantial increase; it potentially makes a product out of reach for many disabled people.
I’m appreciative of John Gruber’s take on the situation. “Credit to Tim Cook for taking this one personally, months ahead of the iPhone 18 launch, rather than leaving it to John Ternus to serve up a surprise shit sandwich in his first keynote as CEO,” he said.
