The thing about technology is that, over time, it usually offers better value.
You might spend roughly the same amount on your next laptop, tablet or phone, but it will probably come with a faster processor, more storage, a better display and longer battery life. That’s been the pattern for decades. Technology has continued to improve, while the value we’ve received for our money has generally improved with it.
Lately, though, I wonder whether we’re witnessing the beginning of something different.
Over the past year, we’ve seen computer manufacturers warning that prices were likely to rise, memory costs have been climbing, and just in this last week, Apple has significantly increased the prices of several Macs and iPads. If you didn’t know any better, it might just look like another price rise. Companies do that all the time.
But that’s not the full story.
I think Apple has simply become the latest company to acknowledge a much bigger shift taking place across the technology industry. It’s being driven by the enormous demand for AI infrastructure, and it could change what we all expect to pay for our technology over the next few years.
The question I’ve been asking myself this week is this: have ordinary consumers become the ones helping to fund the AI race, whether we want to use AI or not?
So this week, Apple raised the prices of several Macs and iPads, and it didn’t try to hide the reason why. The company says it’s reached the point where it can no longer absorb the rising cost of memory and storage components, costs that have been driven up by the huge demand for hardware powering artificial intelligence. It’s not Apple Intelligence that’s making these devices more expensive; it’s the wider AI boom that’s affecting the entire supply chain.
The companies building AI data centres are buying vast quantities of high-performance memory. And the free market being what it is, manufacturers are understandably prioritising those larger, higher-margin orders.
We’re even seeing companies reshape their businesses around that demand. Micron, one of the world’s biggest memory manufacturers, decided to wind down its Crucial consumer memory brand so it could concentrate on supplying the AI and enterprise markets. That’s a clear indication of where the industry believes the biggest opportunities now lie.
Artificial Intelligence is creating demand on a scale we’ve not really seen before.
Every time a company announces a new AI model, it’s backed by thousands of servers filled with specialised chips and huge amounts of high-performance memory. Building those data centres has become one of the biggest technology races in the world, with companies spending billions of dollars to keep up.
Like any market, when demand rises faster than supply, prices tend to follow.
For memory manufacturers, this makes perfect business sense. They aren’t doing anything wrong; they’re responding to where the demand is. The problem is that the consequences don’t stay neatly inside the AI industry.
And Apple isn’t alone here. Other PC manufacturers have already warned that higher component costs would eventually feed through into retail prices. Apple’s announcement has grabbed the headlines because, well, it’s Apple, but the underlying pressures have been building across the industry for quite some time.
I think the best example of all this is the MacBook Neo.
When Apple released it earlier this year, I remember thinking they’d finally done something people had been asking for for years. Here was a MacBook that felt genuinely accessible. It wasn’t trying to be the thinnest, the fastest or the most powerful. It was simply a very well-priced Mac that opened the door to people who’d previously looked at Apple’s laptops and thought, “I’d love one, but I can’t justify the cost.”
At $599 - or even $499 at education prices - it completely changed the conversation. Suddenly, people weren’t asking, “Can I afford a Mac?” They were asking, “Why wouldn’t I buy one?”
A few months later, that conversation looks very different.
The MacBook Neo is still, in my opinion, a very good computer. I’d still recommend it to a lot of people. But it’s no longer the disruptive, aggressively priced laptop it was when it launched. In fact, if you want the 512GB model with Touch ID, which I suspect is the version many people would naturally look at, you’re now talking $799.
That’s still cheaper than the MacBook Air, which has also increased in price and now starts at $1,299. But psychologically, it might make people do a bit of a double-take. At $599, the MacBook Neo felt like a completely different kind of Apple laptop. At $799, people are much more likely to pause and ask whether they should save money or stretch further towards a MacBook Air, or even buy refurbished.
The hardware hasn’t changed. The experience hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the economic reality surrounding it.
It’s not about whether Apple should have put its prices up. If the company believes it can no longer absorb those costs, then perhaps it has little choice.
Well… perhaps Apple could absorb them. It just couldn’t absorb them while making the kind of profits its investors have come to expect.
The bigger question is this: if one of the world’s biggest technology companies can’t keep prices where they were, what does that tell us about where the industry is heading?
At what point does the cost of an industry-wide bet become part of the price ordinary people are expected to pay?
When most people buy a laptop, they’re not thinking about AI infrastructure. They simply want a machine to write on, edit on, browse the web on, manage photos on, and, yes, probably watch far too much YouTube on. For a lot of people, a laptop, tablet or phone is just a useful tool.
And that’s where this starts to feel uncomfortable.
The technology industry deciding that AI is the future is one thing. Companies are free to make that bet. That’s how the tech industry has always worked to some extent. Early adopters pay more, new technology starts out expensive, and over time, it usually gets cheaper.
But AI is not just another feature in a laptop. It depends on an enormous layer of infrastructure most of us never see: data centres, servers, specialist chips, high-performance memory and a huge amount of electricity. That makes this less like a normal upgrade cycle and more like a cost being baked into the whole industry.
AI is useful. I use it myself a lot. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But usefulness is not the same as universal benefit. If AI becomes a permanent cost built into everyday technology, consumers are entitled to ask whether they are paying for something they actually need, or simply subsidising what the industry wants to build next.
Of course, this might only be temporary. We’ve seen similar patterns before: a new technology creates a supply crunch, prices rise, manufacturers invest in more capacity, and eventually the market catches up. There’s no reason, in principle, why memory could not follow the same pattern.
But AI may not behave like a normal upgrade cycle. A better display or faster processor eventually becomes standard. AI, by contrast, depends on vast infrastructure running behind the scenes every day. Those infrastructure costs do not disappear once the product launches. They become part of the ongoing economics of the industry.
So yes, prices may settle. I hope they do. But if AI demand keeps growing at anything like the pace we’re seeing now, this may not be a brief spike. It may be the beginning of a new baseline for what technology costs.
At the end of the day, this isn’t really about Apple putting its prices up. Apple is simply the company that makes the issue impossible to ignore. When Apple changes prices, people notice. And when a machine like the MacBook Neo goes from feeling genuinely disruptive to feeling much more like a usually priced Apple purchase, it tells us something about where the wider market may be heading.
The issue is not that technology companies are investing in AI. The issue is the cost of that investment spread across products bought by people who were not looking for AI in the first place.
If AI makes our devices better, more useful and better value over time, then people may accept the cost. That has always been the bargain with technology: we pay, but we get something meaningful back. But if prices keep rising while the benefits feel distant, optional or unevenly distributed, then that bargain starts to look much less convincing.
Because innovation should not only be measured by what companies can build. It should also be measured by whether ordinary people can still afford to take part.
So what do you think? Is this just a temporary blip while the market catches up, or are we entering an era where AI makes everyday technology more expensive, whether we use it much or not?
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