56
votes
Apple announces significant price increases for MacBooks, iPads, more
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- Authors
- Chance Miller, Justin Kahn, Ryan Christoffel, Ben Lovejoy
- Published
- Jun 25 2026
- Word count
- 505 words
From Apple:
Memory prices finally hit Apple products, and the price increases are quite steep--much more than I assumed they would be. Was looking to upgrade my M1 Pro 14" to a 16" M5 Pro last night, and in less than 24 hours it's gone up $300 (even with education discount). Makes me a little worried about how much more they could raise it given their open-ended statement about increases down the line...
To some extent it feels like we're experiencing the downside of companies trying to shield consumers from the increased cost of components. As we now see the bigger "shock" increase for the end product, compared to smaller more frequent increases.
Sadly I think may mean in future that companies will be faster to pass these increases on again in future, compared to absorbing short term ones like they have in the past.
The alternative is, in many ways, just as bad. If prices are adjusting on things like computers every quarter you wind up with all sorts of supply/demand shock issues as well. It's a screwy situation all around.
I don't think this is the norm. It might be for select companies and high end products that already have a larger than average margin, but I believe that most consumer goods pass through costs very quickly. For instance, the estimates I've seen put tarrif pass through at 100 percent. When I worked in construction, major supply companies like Grainger implimented a tarrif aurchage immediately thsy were not absorbing costs. My particular company would only raise prises yearly, but they would review for the past year and the finance bros made sure that they increased enough to target the companies revenue plan for the forthcoming year.
More to the point, how are these companies all reporting record profits year after year if they're eating these costs in their margin? Is it all made up by mass layoffs? If that's the case, then we could just as easily blame the AI cost increase for this.
I really hope on the bright side of this price increase, we start to see more efficient, less memory-hungry apps.
It’s not gonna happen. I’m sorry. We just don’t have the technology to render text and images without uploading 500MB of JavaScript on the side. The people who knew how to do this retired long ago, it’s like trying to find a COBOL developer.
identification division.
program-id. hello.
procedure division.
a-main section.
move 'trim' to WS-DEVELOPER-NAME
display 'hello from ' WS-DEVELOPER-NAME upon syserr
stop run.
COBOL developer since 1994.
Do you guys stop writing it in all caps because your keyboard gets sore?
Wrote COBOL in caps since doing it in college at the end of the 80s on ICL DRS20 equipment.
Actually we had to write our programs in pencil on code sheets and send them to the punch room, where the typists would type in the code, for better or worse, and we'd get an 8" floppy back with our code on.
We were allowed only 2 compiles before losing mandatory marks. The first compile should surface any logic errors, and the second would correct those and run clean. This was the only way to get a 100% mark, so the wise student checked /the heck/ out of the code on screen, then submitted any changes back on coding sheets again, and wait for the floppy disk to come back. Repeat until you're nailed on sure that the code in the file on disk is what you wrote.
Good times, man. Good times.
After that, upper case was mandatory for our work on IBM MVS/TSO with IBM COBOL2 and COBOL for MVS. Once the multi platform cobols became good enough on OS/2, Solaris, HP-UX, Dynix/ptx and AIX (and eventually GNU/Linux), the ability to have the much more readable mixed case was much appreciated by me at least.
I find it easier to read when the keywords are lower, and the identifiers are upper.
move 'Hello world' to WS-DISPLAY
vs.
MOVE 'Hello world' TO WS-DISPLAY
It's just easier for me to read. It's funny because in our shop some developers do, indeed, insist on upper case code. Sadly these developers sometimes pathologically uppercase everything except the literals, returning us to the 1970s and making an utter mess of the git diffs :( I'm not in a position to tell them not to do that though.
I like your funny words magic man
It's not that we don't exist, it's that tech companies prioritize software quantity over software quality. It's why AI coding is actually a disaster for the industry as a whole, because it is almost exclusively being used to further prioritize quantity.
When is the last time a tech company put out a new piece of software that people actually love? It's all just crap users toloerate. I remember back when Adobe would launch a new version of Photoshop and people would actually get excited about dropping $500 on an upgrade, rather than feel resentful that their Creative Cloud subscription just go more expensive to justify some half-baked new feature nobody cares about.
On the other hand, coding agents seem pretty good at optimizing code. I'll tell it that a web page seems slow and it figures it out. So it could be used that way if people make it a priority.
But they won't make it a priority because software quality is way harder to measure and quantify than the number of features shipped or lines of code produced. And if the tools get good enough for someone with no expertise to shove out crap that is barely "good enough", these companies won't want to pay for that expertise at all anymore.
And the users won't care because they lack the technical literacy to understand how the software they use everyday could be so much better than it is. Just look at how hopelessly addicted people are to software that is actively hostile to the wellbeing of its userbase (Facebook, Instagram). The market forces simply no longer exist to promote the success of good software.
I don't think it's that bad. You don't have to use Facebook or Instagram if you don't want to. There will be other companies that write better software, and this will be easier than ever.
Yep, until there's money to be made from optimizing software, it'll remain something that only gets prioritized when enough people actually complain about it or during a rare moment of leadership listening to principal engineers/software architects. It's the same reason why buggy software is so common nowadays, businesses see that they aren't losing enough money and their data still show positive trends in usage.
I assume there would most likely be more efficiency gains in software in backend systems, since the cost of upgrading servers with more RAM to store more complex systems in memory would become too expensive.
JOKES ON YOU I REFUSE TO LEARN!
But seriously coming from the business programming/mostly backend side, I have done damn near everything to avoid JS as it so often seems like a wild amount of overhead (in my case, in obnoxious JS rules) for little gain.
I'm hopeful libraries like HTMX/Datastar can gain more popularity and the throttling of basically every part of the computer finally hitting will lead to better frontend development all around, because it's such a frustration if you aren't a JS programmer and then hit that point and people say "well just use react/whatever"
JS (assuming you are using tsc for static analysis) is a pretty nice language. The issues crop up when people see npm as a candy store and install packages without any consideration to how much data they're sending to the client or how many extra cycles are getting wasted.
I don't think JavaScript itself is the problem so much as bloated React apps. They're often wildly inefficient, with no real structure to ease optimization.
TypeScript is pretty good. When web pages bog down it's due to things like loading too much data, autoplaying video everywhere or some other bad design.
I do like HTMX and island architecture though.
I like TS. I use it for building infrastructure orchestration rather than web pages, but I appreciate its improvements over JS.
I do long for JS2. Mostly the same but remove exceptions and inheritance, no more null+undefined (only undefined but call it null).
Even worse than that sadly. There's plenty of engineers who can optimize such apps. But they are getting cut off in lieu of whoever can make it fastest and cheapest. It's simply not a parameter to consider on the sales end.
I think that's why there's hope this is a silver lining, because it might be.
AAA games for example can't just buy a $4k GPU at the start of development and expect it to be available and affordable in 2-10 years when they finish. There's a small chance we see RAM sizes shrink due to costs and we're down to 8 and 4 as standards again, although hilariously one of the major bottlenecks there for consumers is windows.
Entry level ones though? It’s bleak, bootcamp programs are very “Do this by typing these glyphs in the window” and people have no idea what any of it actually does conceptually.
The problem is that for anything that runs on people's devices, developpers have almost no incentive to optimize anything beyond the absolute bare minimum of making it work on most low end devices under favorable circumstances.
because of this, the only way for apps and websites to be well optimized is to have the devs working on them to be sufficiently knowledge, interrested and to have enough choice about what this can work on to be able to pick optimisation work insted of working on the next feature/app.
It’s absurd to me that “optimization” is even a serious consideration when most of what needs to be done is display static text and images, at most people are inputting text into forms. These are long-solved problems. There’s nothing to “optimize” just stop doing unnecessary shit.
There's no money in that. We might see some great value cloud subscriptions though.
Realistically I think the worst offenders have too much network effect to care. But maybe we'll see more migration to the smaller alternatives.
Well, it looks like I won’t be looking to upgrade my 2024 Mac anytime soon. Although to be completely honest, I really wasn’t looking to upgrade my Mac anytime soon anyway. These things are pretty bulletproof. They run for decades if you take care of them.
I’ve actually been getting into the hobby of retro computing with 8 bit, 16 bit, and even 32 bit systems. If you count the Athlon as the first widely available consumer-grade 64 bit system, those are already vintage. If you count the 64 bit systems used by Sun Microsystems and some of the others in the 1990s they’re even older than that.
We used to get a lot more mileage out of our computers before manufacturers started touting huge ram chips, giant GPUs and more storage as the solutions, instead of better programming techniques and more thoughtful architecture and design of software.
I’ve never agreed with the concept of needing to improve over previous generations for minor iterations of speed. I’ve always been more of a proponent of doing more with what you have, learning the architecture that’s already in place and how to use much more thoroughly and efficiently. I’ve always called it using the entire buffalo.
If you want to upgrade, do so now! I just snagged a new Pro for $450 less than Apple’s new price on their website. I’ll probably leave it in the box for the next several months; I wasn’t planning to upgrade until early next year, but I don’t think memory prices will fall anytime soon.
I’m so torn on upgrading too. There’s an M4 on sale on this German site. I feel like it could be a cool dev device. I’m using my iPad quite frequently but did notice it getting a bit slower after 5 years.
I‘m on refurbished Macs and stick with them for many years. Feeling pretty good about upgrading to a 64GB/4TB M1 Max recently. I need the 4TB for work everything else is icing on the cake. That config would cost like 7000€ new, now, it’s absurd.
The M1 chip is fortunately the last chip I’d ever need from a laptop.
My M1 MBA barring something getting broken will have still a long life ahead of it.
I’ve contemplated getting a Mac Mini a couple of times but had no reason to tbf, it would’ve been just a neat thing to have.
This RAM and storage situation makes it hard to determine if you’re getting FOMO’d, or if buying anything that is “normally priced” you may not need is a good investment.
Oh yeah.
M1 MBA is also expected to be my forever laptop. I got a 16gb one second hand and it does absolutely everything I could hope for (and more), and it does it in style (and quiet)!
And I find the wedge design looks thinner than the redesign (even if it isn't). This is going to be a classic!
I've got this >10 year plan for it, where I get a new batterie installed right before they stop providing that service for this model, and I allready donate monthly to the Asahi linux project for when mac drops support.
I got mine with the plan of getting Asahi or a Linux distro on it down the line too. But I have been enjoying most of the MacOS experience, even 26’s liquid glass though I think it’s overdone and I’m the kind of people that miss Frutiger Aero.
Upgrading to 16/512 stung, and it still does, but it’s almost something you forget while using the thing.
My take on Apple price hike is simple, greed! Don't let a tragedy go to waste. The markup that Apple has on equipment is high in comparison to what other manufacturers have on similar items. This is just another money grab by Apple and I, at least, when possible go out of my way to buy stuff from other manufacturers.
Damn. I was going to upgrade from a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro to a Mac Studio M6 Max when it eventually arrived but I can only imagine how expensive they will be by then.
For anyone that keeps up with this sector -- is there an end in sight (even if it's many years)?
Price increases should reach their apex in about 2 years and supply should ease up in about 5 years. I would expect RAM prices to double again before 2029 and leveling out before dropping.
oh boy... that's sad but thanks for the information.
Can I ask how you reached that conclusion? I just saw this article, and I assume Micron can't be the only company that will make similar agreements:
Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years
I couldn’t even afford the baseline MacBook on my research budget as a university lecturer BEFORE the price rises. After being a Mac user for over 15 years, I dropped them last year.
The MacBook Neo was released this year for $500 if you work in education. The MacBook Air had been at the $1000 price for a base model for a long time, so with inflation it had become cheaper than any MacBook you could have bought 15 years ago. They also frequently go on sale these days in the US. MacBooks aren't the cheapest option, but they're not expensive either. Before the price increased, that is.
In Japan, even the Neo is very expensive, and underpowered for the money, even with edu discounts. Stuff basically doesn't go on sale here.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world is not the same as the US when it comes to tech prices.
Ah yeah, it's rough in some countries. Apple likes to base their prices in USD and then set their foreign prices accordingly and the yen has gotten very weak. Sadly the best way to buy Apple products these days is to have an American friend visit.
I remember back in the day when they used to have completely separate regional pricing. Got a fully specced out 17inch MBP with HD screen in Malaysia for well over $1000 less than back home. Ahhh, the good old days.
What laptop are you using instead?
I am using a Lenovo Loq with a 5070 in it. I forget the CPU. It’s okay and now our uni is mainly on sharepoint stuff, it plays well with windows obviously.
However, the MacBook Pro really is a different beast for every day laptop use. It’s just sooooo much nicer to use.
To be honest, nowadays I mainly use my laptop in clamshell mode with external everything in my office and then basic stuff in the classroom. The keyboard, screen, and track pad are pretty pants on the LOQ.
When I was doing assistant work and doing my Masters, I was using my MBP everyday as my laptop and it was great. Yet to find a Windows machine that comes close, and if it does, they’re about the same price.