Apple raises prices, and it's gonna hurt

Stephen Nellis and Aditya Soni quoting a statement they got from Apple: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads as memory costs skyrocket

"We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly," Apple ​said in a statement. "We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin ⁠raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac."

9to5Mac has a good summery of the price changes, and they’re not pretty. The notables to me are:

• MacBook Neo models both go up $100, hurting the budget price point that made it so appealing. Given the other changes to MacBook Airs (+$200), it’s still significantly cheaper, at least.
• The Mac Studios got the worst hits, raising 20-30% from their already high starting prices.
• Vision Pro only bumped up $200. This is the smallest update in terms of percentage, and probably speaks to demand as well as what goes into the cost of that device. RAM and storage are in there, but they’re not as much of the overall cost compared to Macs and iPads.
• The base iPad starting at $449 is brutal. That device is already super paltry in terms of literally every spec, but at $100 more than before…oof.

I also can’t help but see that “we need to begin ⁠raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac,” statement as implying more increases are coming. The iPhone price increase seems inevitable, and my money is on it starting with the new models in September. We’ll see what they manage there, but if prices go up $200 or so on those models, I’d expect this past year’s boom cycle in iPhone sales will come to an end.