MacBooks And iPads Just Got A Lot More Expensive—And AI Is To Blame

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Apple on Thursday announced price hikes for laptops and tablets ranging from $100 to $300 per item after CEO Tim Cook warned higher memory and storage costs fueled by the AI surge would make the increases "unavoidable.”

The price changes spiked the starting cost of the MacBook Pro 1T, the cheapest MacBook Pro, to $1,999 from $1,699—the largest increase of any single product.

The MacBook Neo—the company's cheapest laptop—went up in price from $599 to $699 and the cheapest MacBook Air, the 512GB, went from $1099 to $1,299.

The cost of some iPads also spiked significantly—the iPad Air 128GB now starts at $749 (up from $599) and the iPad Pro Wifi 256GB increased from $999 to $1,199.

Cook earlier this month warned that soaring costs of memory and storage chips would be passed along to the consumer and, on Thursday, the company called the surge in demand unprecedented: "We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.