Apple Imposes 15-25% Price Jumps on Macs & iPads Amid AI-Fueled Memory Crunch

Mass hardware mark-ups by a supply-chain titan recall the 2011 Thai-flood hard-drive crisis, when disk prices doubled overnight and stayed elevated for nearly two years, yet this time demand, not disaster, is the driver. AI build-outs are crowding out consumer electronics the way the U.S. military’s 1980s DRAM buys once squeezed PC makers, underscoring a long trend: each new computing paradigm (mainframes in the 1960s, PCs in the 1980s, smartphones in the 2010s, generative-AI now) re-orders component bargaining power. Apple’s surrender on pricing signals that even best-in-class vertical integration cannot fully hedge commodity cycles; over a 100-year arc it foreshadows a world where memory, not logic, becomes the strategic choke-point—much as oil was for 20th-century industry—shaping who can build the next wave of intelligent devices.