Everyone Expected Apple to Raise Prices on Its New Macs. What It Did Instead Was Much Smarter |
Everyone Expected Apple to Raise Prices on Its New Macs. What It Did Instead Was Much Smarter
With AI chips consuming the current supply of memory, everyone was watching what Apple would do.
EXPERT OPINION BY JASON ATEN, TECH COLUMNIST @JASONATEN
Numerous MacBook Pro laptops are on display in the Apple store
For the most part, the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro that Apple just announced were exactly what we expected. Both now feature the latest versions of Apple Silicon, the M5 system on a chip for the MacBook Air, and the M5 Pro and Max for the MacBook Pro. We’ve already seen the M5 in the iPad Pro and base model MacBook Pro, so it’s pretty easy to guess what the MacBook Air will be like. As for the Pro, it’s not hard to imagine that they will be the best laptops Apple ever made.
In fact, the only surprise with either model is what Apple didn’t do: memory upgrade costs stayed exactly the same. The storage upgrade prices on the MacBook Pro actually got less expensive in some cases.
The current RAM situation
To understand why that’s a big deal, a little context is helpful. Memory (and SSD storage) prices have been climbing as chip makers have bought up supply to feed the tech industry’s appetite for graphics chips used for AI. At the same time, tariffs are squeezing supply chains.
The expectation was that Apple would certainly raise prices on storage and memory to maintain its high margins. Sure, it would have been painful, but no one would have been surprised.
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Apple has always charged a high premium for upgrading memory or storage. Even when the price of RAM was far lower, Apple would charge you $200 to go from 16GB to 24GB of memory. For context, you could buy 8GB of DDR5 RAM for like $30. Of course, if you did, there was no way to use it in a Mac—you had to pay Apple for the upgrade since it’s soldered on the chip.
Storage upgrades have followed the same playbook. Apple charges aggressive markups to go from the base model to anything more.
Why Apple Silicon matters
For most of the Apple Silicon era, customers paid it–partly because they had no choice–but partly because the performance justified the machine, and the ecosystem justified the platform. But it remained the sharpest and most legitimate line of attack for anyone arguing that Apple nickel-and-dimes its most loyal customers.