Looking to upgrade your Mac? You might want to do it soon

Apple's CEO has warned that "price increases are unavoidable" for its products

That means more expensive Macs, iPhones and iPads for starters

Price hikes will likely be substantial, and there are concerns that product lines could be adjusted as seen recently with the Mac mini – is the entry-level MacBook Neo to suffer the same fate?

CEO Tim Cook has warned that Apple is going to substantially hike prices on its products due to the RAM crisis.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (as spotted by Wccftech), Cook said: "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable. We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."

The spiralling costs of both memory and storage (SSDs) means that Apple needs to put up prices, and the hikes will be "substantial" the report suggests (as did Cook's previous comments whereby the CEO said that from June, Apple will be facing "significant" cost increases for memory and this will "drive an increasing impact" on Apple's products).

So, this wasn't unexpected, but now it's crystal clear that these price increases are coming due to the "unsustainable" situation around memory chip supply (which is being eaten by AI and data centers to the detriment of consumer products).

What we don't know is the magnitude of these price increases, or what products they might apply to, as Cook didn't furnish us with any specific info along those lines.

It's a safe enough bet that Apple's core products are going to get pricier, though, meaning the iPhone, iPad and Macs. The WSJ even theorizes that the iPhone Pro 18 might cost from $1,299 in the US based on some rough maths.

Analysis: time to buy a Mac?

How soon these price hikes might happen is another key question, of course, but given Cook's previous comments about June, Mac rises could be imminent, as the WSJ indicates – particularly given that we've already seen the Mac mini get pricier at its baseline level. If you recall, Apple discontinued the most affordable entry-level model with 256GB of storage, effectively making the cheapest Mac mini a third more expensive.

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The upshot is that if you're thinking of buying a Mac, now seems to be the time to pull the trigger, before these devices get pricier. Any deals that pop up on MacBooks for Prime Day could well be worth pouncing on, and there's already been a discount applied to the MacBook Neo (in the UK).

Grabbing that deal might be a particularly smart move to make, actually, because if the Mac mini is anything to go by, the current base version of the MacBook Neo may not survive the coming quarter. As one of a few such comments on this Reddit thread puts it: "The $599 MacBook Neo was fun while it lasted."

As to what all this means more broadly for Apple pricing moving forward, another interesting point that Cook brings up in the interview with the WSJ is that he says Apple is willing to use its "balance sheet to help be a part of the solution."

By that, the CEO doesn't mean Apple is about to fund the building of its own chip production facilities, and Cook explicitly states that. What it indicates is that the company is going to invest in this side of the tech industry, but exactly how is up for debate.

Some (like Jukan on X) theorize that what Cook is referring to is Apple prepaying to secure more memory supply – and that'll require a serious amount of upfront cash to compete with the major AI players. Others believe this could mean that Apple might help fund expansion plans for memory chip makers as part of some kind of deal to lock in more favorable longer-term pricing for iPhone, iPad and Mac memory supply.

Meanwhile, Jukan also highlighted a message from President Trump on Truth Social which states that "Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its chips in America", as has been previously rumored as a way of diversifying away from Apple's reliance on TSMC.

Tim Cook said before that Apple is exploring a "range of options" in terms of dealing with the RAM crisis, and it seems there's a lot going on behind the scenes right now. Hopefully we'll learn more about the details soon enough, but for now, I'm nervously watching what happens with the MacBook Neo and other Apple laptops.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).