Apple Plans to Jack Up Prices & Europeans Love American Cheap Eats

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Neal Fryman** (0:28)
Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Fryman.

**Toby Howell** (0:31)
And I'm Toby Howell.

**Neal Fryman** (0:32)
Today, iPhone $1,800. Apple is raising prices on tablets, computers, and phones.

**Toby Howell** (0:39)
Then, Midjourney is a company that generates AI images. Now, it's moving into full-body medical scans. It's Monday, June 22nd. Let's ride.

**Neal Fryman** (0:57)
Good morning and happy Monday.
Keir Starmer has given his two weeks, or should I say two months. Just a few hours ago, the UK Prime Minister announced he will resign by September after facing a rebellion within his own party. Pressure has been growing on Starmer to step aside after failing to kickstart the economy, and scandals like appointing a friend of Jeffrey Epstein to be the ambassador to the US. The most likely successor to Starmer is Andy Burnham, the left-wing former mayor of Greater Manchester. But even if Burnham gets the position, I would not bank on him staying that long. Toby, this might be the job with the highest turnover in the world.

**Toby Howell** (1:31)
Yeah, sixth leader in the last seven years. To put that in perspective, the Cleveland Browns have also burned through six head coaches in the last seven years.

**Neal Fryman** (1:39)
And how many quarterbacks?

**Toby Howell** (1:40)
Right. So there you go, UK. You got the same organizational stability as the Browns. The average time in office of a UK prime minister since Brexit will be just two years, the shortest being Liz Truss at 49 days long, the longest is Boris Johnson actually at 1,140 days, Keir Starmer lasted 717 As for one of the reasons he stepped down, the New York Times called him one of the least popular prime ministers in modern British history. So that'll do it to you.

**Neal Fryman** (2:10)
And now a word from our sponsor, Service Now. Toby, pop quiz.

**Toby Howell** (2:14)
No, no more quizzes, no more homework. I'm sick of it. The AI was supposed to handle the parts of work I hate, but it just describes the problems back to me generating more work.

**Neal Fryman** (2:24)
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**Toby Howell** (2:37)
When you can truly delegate to AI, you can get back to the work only you can do. The work that requires a person with ideas and judgment and, you know, a pulse.

**Neal Fryman** (2:46)
To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. That's servicenow.com.
Apple is going to raise prices on its computers, tablets, and phones imminently. In a surprise announcement, CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal that upcoming price hikes are unavoidable. Quote, 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. And what situation is this? Memory and storage. Key ingredients in the tech gadgets used every day from phones to video game consoles. The problem is, there are also key ingredients for artificial intelligence, and AI giants have been hoarding all the memory supply to run their models, leaving peanuts to consumer electronics companies. Costs have surged as a result, with prices for memory and storage chips quadrupling. Cook says he has no choice but to start passing on those extra costs to consumers. Shows the scale of the problem. Historically, Apple does not raise prices without adding new features, but then again, we've never experienced this kind of commodity price swing in modern tech history. Tim Cook, who spent decades working in the tech supply chain, called it a 100-year flood. I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years. Toby, my iPhone screen is cracked to pieces, but looks like I'll just have to live with it for now.
This Apple price hike is maybe the first vivid example of us consumers paying for the AI boom.

**Toby Howell** (4:05)
And Apple is not used to this. They are not used to being second or third in line when it comes to their input cost, because they spend tens of billions in dollars on these memory chips, on these storage. And usually they can use the fact that, hey, we're Apple, we have really big orders to push suppliers into giving them better deals. But their hands have been tied at this point, because AI companies are also coming in and saying, hey, we will give you those multi-year contracts. We will give you these huge prepayments upfront to get our hands on these chips. So suddenly Apple is like, gosh, dang it, I'm not like the big fish in the pond anymore. There's a lot of fish in this pond and they all want memory chips. So that is a interesting position for them to be in because even Apple isn't safe from this and usually Apple is the safest when it comes to managing supply chains.