Last week, Apple apologized to the public for what it was about to do. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” the company said in a statement, referring to the rising cost of memory and storage. “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.” Laptop prices are going up — the budget Neo, for example, now starts at $699 instead of $599, while at the higher end, a $1699 MacBook Pro is now $1999 — as are prices for iPads, HomePods, and Apple TVs.

An unprecedented AI data center roll-out is the root cause, here, and has been interfering with electronics supply chains for a while now. The global memory supply runs through a small group of firms, which has diverted much of its manufacturing capacity to meet the needs of the AI boom. Last year, when evidence of the memory crunch started showing up in pockets of the consumer economy, gamers were hardest hit: Building a PC, once a way to get a deal, was becoming prohibitively expensive, as memory and graphics cards shot up; Micron, one of that group of manufacturers, announced it was exiting the consumer memory market entirely. In recent months, they’ve been squeezed even more. The cheapest PlayStation 5 went up by $150. Nintendo’s Switch got a price hike, too, attributed to rising component costs. Valve’s handheld Steam Deck got a significant price adjustment and supply shortages, while the Steam Machine, announced this week, will start above $1000, which is much higher than potential........

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