Apple has already jacked up its Irish prices after announcing global increases last night

APPLE IS RAISING prices for its MacBook computers, iPad tablets and other products, citing spiralling memory and storage costs sparked by the rise of AI.

Microsoft has announced a similar hike for the Xbox, although they won’t come into effect until August.

On Apple’s Ireland website, the 14-inch MacBook Pro, which had sold for €1,949, now retails for €2,249, while the iPad Air increased from €679to €839.

The Apple TV streaming device with Ethernet rose from €189 to €299.

For now, the price of the iPhone – the company’s main source of revenue – remained unchanged.

The price hikes are the first concrete change stemming from outgoing chief executive Tim Cook’s repeated warnings about rising costs.

They sent Apple shares plummeting more than 4.7% this morning.

“The rapid expansion of AI data centres has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement sent to multiple media outlets.

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“We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”

The California-based tech giant — which notched an all-time revenue record of $416 billion (€366.78 billion) in the last fiscal year — insisted it had “shielded our customers from these increases so far” but could no longer do so.

Microsoft raises Xbox prices

Microsoft said on Thursday it will raise the price of its Xbox video game consoles worldwide by $100 (€87) to $150 (€131) starting 1 August, blaming a component-cost surge fuelled by artificial intelligence.

The company has not yet released prices for Europe, where the Series X currently sells for around 600 euros.

This is the third price increase for Xbox after a worldwide hike in May 2025 and a second, limited to the United States, in October.

Last week, outgoing Apple boss Cook set the stage for further price hikes when he told The Wall Street Journal that price increases were “unavoidable.”

“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook said, deeming the spike in prices a “hundred-year flood.”

The rapid build out of AI data centres has sent the cost of memory chips and RAM skyrocketing — as the components are found in nearly all electronic devices — with the chips undergoing quarterly price increases of at least 50% since late 2025.

It will fall to John Ternus to handle the fallout at Apple — he will succeed Cook as CEO on 1 September, just days before the new generation of iPhones is unveiled.

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