If you need new phone or laptop, buy it today. Not tomorrow, not next week. Today
After Tim Cook made it official last week, a price hike from Apple was just a matter of time. Only the scope of it wasn’t
After Tim Cook made it official last week, a price hike from Apple was just a matter of time. Only the scope of it wasn’t clear. On Thursday the company bumped up prices across several categories and the scope became clear. It’s substantial, the kind that makes even the well-heeled tighten their belts. At least in India, the price increase in Apple products ranges from low of 14 per cent for the MacBook Neo to nearly 90 per cent for the Apple TV with ethernet port. Read Full Story Of late, we have become accustomed to price hikes in phones and laptops, and in gadgets in general. Yet, the Apple hike on Thursday night was like a punch in the gut. On the morning of Friday when I woke up I was still thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I recalled a quip made by British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey in August 2014 as he looked at Europe, which was primed for the big war. “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time,” he had famously said. The price hike that Apple has announced is not temporary. In fact, it might just be the beginning of a period where all gadgets are going to be expensive, month after month and year after year, breaking the pattern from the past when technology used to get cheaper. The prices are not going to come down anytime soon, even though Apple is “working tirelessly to find solutions.” That is because demand for RAM and storage (read SSDs) is right now crazy due to AI data centres that big tech companies are building.
Apple has increased the prices of multiple products across different categories. Fuelled by billions of dollars in investment, Big Tech is burning money on AI hardware. Consumer tech companies cannot do it. Not even Apple, that has historically managed its supply chain with the finesse of an orchestra conductor. "This is a hundred-year flood," Cook recently told The WSJ as he talked of demand and supply mismatch for components. "I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.” If Cook, a supply chain wizard, cannot manage it, what hope mere mortals have. So, where does that leave us, the consumers, the people who purchase and use phones, laptops, and other gadgets? In a quandary for sure. To navigate, we may have to change the way we buy devices. Buy it today. If you want. And if you can. A few days ago someone in my office asked me for a buying recommendation. The person is using an old iPhone, which is now running on fumes because the battery is depleted. The battery health is below 80 per cent. I asked, “Can you continue with your phone until September? Because if you can then you should get the iPhone 18 Pro when it launches.” Now, I am not certain about that suggestion. Although iPhone prices have not been increased for now — though they may happen anytime — it is almost certain that the new iPhones in September will come at significantly higher prices. The iPhone 18 Pro in itself may end up having a starting price of Rs 1.6 lakh.
The BriefWire