Apple pulled its online store offline briefly on June 25, then brought it back with higher prices on almost everything it sells.
The increases are steep and span the entire lineup. The Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) jumped $1,300 — from $3,999 to $5,299. The MacBook Pro rose $300, the iPad Pro $200, and even the $99 HomePod mini is now $129. The Mac mini, which had quietly disappeared from the store earlier this year, returned at $799, a $200 increase over its last listed price. Only the Studio Display and accessories like the Apple Pencil appear untouched.
CEO Tim Cook pointed to a shortage of memory and storage chips as the driver, calling the situation a "hundred-year flood" in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "We've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable," he said. That framing is worth scrutinizing: Apple's gross margins have been among the highest in consumer hardware for years, which means some portion of this pass-through is a choice, not a necessity.
For context, Apple had resisted price hikes even as component costs rose during the post-pandemic supply crunch — so a move this broad signals either genuine margin pressure or a decision that demand is inelastic enough to absorb it. Probably both.