Price hikes, new betas, and the iPhone Fold, on the AppleInsider Podcast

**Wesley Hilliard** (0:05)
Hello, and welcome to the Apple Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Wesley Hilliard speaking, and I'm joined once again by William Gallagher. Our sponsors this week are Masterclass and Nordsteller, and we got a lot to talk about. William's off location, so that should be fun for this week.
We're gonna get into these price increases first. We'll talk a little bit more about Siri AI, and then in Apple Insider Plus, which is an ad-free show, we're gonna be talking about what other accessories Apple should be making. I'm bringing this up because, well, with iPhone Fold, I think the elimination of a good camera on the most expensive iPhone might warrant other accessories to be built. So we'll get into that then. But William, how are you today?

**William Gallagher** (0:50)
I'm actually in Limbo, otherwise known as the Beckinsfield Service Station on the M40 in the UK. I've just spent the afternoon with Apple at their Battersea headquarters, thought I could make it back to my office, was wrong, and I'm super-heated as the result. Better than that.
On the fly, I have a Frappuccino, and I'm just crazy enough to use it. How are you?

**Wesley Hilliard** (1:13)
Fine here.
Busy week, weirdly enough, just focusing on all these things with Apple. I mean, the price increases, I think, are interesting. Now, this was coming, Tim Cook did announce that they were unable to continue to bear the price changes that were occurring with RAM and memory shortage, so storage shortages. So funny enough, it did not touch the Apple Watch, AirPods or iPhone.

**William Gallagher** (1:43)
I took it for granted the iPhone would be more, but that's safe for the moment.

**Wesley Hilliard** (1:49)
So we could see iPhone price increases at the event in September, just because that's where it would make the most sense for that to be announced. But as we've discussed before, the iPhone price is very much a feature of that device, and Apple's very rarely touching it in the US anyway. Every Mac basically got hit, the Apple Vision Pro, the HomePods, everything got a price increase. So mostly-

**William Gallagher** (2:18)
Is that including the MacBook Neo? Yes.

**Wesley Hilliard** (2:22)
So that's the big one.

**William Gallagher** (2:23)
Okay.

**Wesley Hilliard** (2:24)
It went up from $599 to $699. So not horrible, but it is not that magical low price anymore.
Obviously, as we're talking and recording, the prices changes haven't rippled through everything. So other places like Best Buy or B&H might still have the lower price. Amazon's Prime Day is still going as we record. So there's still a chance. If you wanted to buy a Mac or one of these devices, it's probably the last time you're going to get that price for a while. Because while the rest of the industry might raise prices and never lower them again, I expect Apple will lower their prices again at some point to match cost.

**William Gallagher** (3:13)
Can I ask how bad the prices are, the increases?

**Wesley Hilliard** (3:17)
Across the board, there are 10-20% increases around $200 or more for each product. So MacBook Neo got the lowest price change, but it was still a big percentage wise because of the already low price.
We have MacBook Pro from 1699 to 1999, right? So $300. The iMac jumped from 1299 to 1499, so $200. The Mac Studio is the biggest one. The M3 Ultra went from $4,000 to $5,300, so a $1,300 price increase. But that's because it comes with 96 gigs of RAM, and RAM is insane right now. So if you were in that market, honestly, you probably would still spend that amount of money for that device because the work you're doing with it would pay for it instantly.

**William Gallagher** (4:16)
That's true.

**Wesley Hilliard** (4:16)
But still very unfortunate to see that. HomePod Mini went from $99 to $129, so it's a $30 price increase. We have the HomePod, it went back to its original price, $350.
Apple Vision Pro, $200 higher, so it went from $34 to $36.99.
There's a lot here, we don't have to name every single one, but generally speaking, $100 to $300, depending on the device. And it's all iPads, Macs. iPad Mini went up to $599. A lot of this, I'm gonna... Oh, the Apple TV went from $129 to $199. That's an impressive jump. Yeah. So, my guess here is the reason why we're seeing these price increases now and not in the fall is, first off, Apple needs to start offsetting costs immediately. But a lot of these products will be updated throughout the year. And Apple doesn't want to announce a price increase alongside the new product, because whatever comes out will have these prices. They're not going to come out with the iPad Mini 9, I guess, 8 or 9, and announce a price increase at the same time. They don't want to do that. So, these will already be baked in by the fall, and they'll just announce the new device at the prices that they are. And that will be mostly fine until this RAM apocalypse is over.