Exactly one week ago, Tim Cook broke the news that Apple would be raising the prices of its products due to the rising costs of memory and storage brought on by the AI industry’s insatiable data center demand and growth. Many in the industry thought that these prices would arrive when new iterations of each product shipped - for example, with the new iPhone during its annual September launch. We didn’t have to speculate long, however, as the other shoe dropped today, with Apple announcing price increases for Macs, iPads, Apple TVs, and HomePods.
John Gruber has a nice breakdown of the delta in price for each tier of product, and there are a couple of line items here that stand out. First, the Apple TV has the biggest jump, which feels unusual for a product so in need of a refresh. But the Macbook Pro is the one I want to focus on because for nearly two decades, that has felt like Apple’s bread and butter. The cheapest Macbook Pro now comes in at $2000 for the 14”, and upgrading from the base M5 chip to an M5 Pro or increasing the memory and storage defaults up from 16 GB and 1 TB, respectively, will add several hundred dollars to that price tag.
I’m still using my 14” M1 Pro MBP from 2021, and it remains my favorite laptop to date. But this fall it will be five years old, and that’s around when I start thinking about succession planning. These prices will make me look elsewhere; for example, a prebuilt Framework 13 Pro with the new Intel Core Ultra X7 358H (roughly analagous to an Apple M4 ) would run $2100, but it comes with 32 GB of memory and has the neat little feature of being completely user serviceable and upgradeable over time, which would prevent me from being in this situation again.
Apple wasn’t the only tech company making waves with its price increases today. The poor beleaguered XBox division of Microsoft announced that their 512 GB “models” would increase by $100, with 1 TB “models” increasing by $150. This announcement did a lot of gymnastics to disguise what the new prices will be for their systems, so to be clear - the only 512 GB model of an XBox nowadays is the Xbox Series S, and the 1 TB model they refer to is primarily the XBox Series X, although some 1 TB variants of the Series S were made.
At launch way back in 2020, the Series S cost $299 and the Series X went for $499 - but both had already received multiple price increases last year. This latest round of price increases means that the Series X will now go for $800, an awe inspiring $300 increase from launch. This is the first time that game consoles have gained value over time, and not just by a small amount - $300 is more than half its original price!
It seems like announcements of price increases are becoming more frequent as existing contracts run out and new procurement deals are made. While some found the Steam Machine’s price a tough pill to swallow earlier this week, it’s quite possible that it will also be the cheapest price the Steam Machine ever retails for at this rate.
If you think you may need to replace a piece of consumer technology over the next two or three years, it’s probably a good idea to be a little early than a little late - unless you’re comfortable with overpaying even more than you are now.