On his final earnings call as Apple's CEO on Thursday, Tim Cook explained why the company raised prices on 14 products last month.
Cook reiterated that Apple raised prices because of the ongoing memory chip shortage, resulting from companies building out data centers with powerful AI servers. The supply-demand imbalance has led to skyrocketing prices for RAM and SSD storage chips used in a wide range of Apple products, and the company has raised prices to account for that.
"We reluctantly raised prices," he said. "And we did it because we're in, what I would characterize as a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing with exponential increases in memory prices, and so that was the rationale for it."
Cook previously described the price increases as "unavoidable."
His comments on the call echo Apple's statement issued last month:
The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. 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, including today's increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.
Apple raised prices on all Macs and iPads, as well as the Apple TV, HomePod, HomePod mini, and Vision Pro. We shared a full list of products affected.
