Microsoft and Apple announced price hikes for many of their products this past week, meaning you’ll be paying a lot more for Xbox consoles, iPads, and Mac computers in the coming months. Unfortunately, comments from many Big Tech companies suggest that the problem is only getting worse, not better.
Our first indication of this was in the messaging both Xbox and Apple gave alongside their respective price hikes. Microsoft stated that “console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027.” Meanwhile, Apple told MacRumors the following: “The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”
Essentially, there is a wild increase in demand for the components that game consoles, tablets, and computers share with the data centers that companies use to power AI. Because companies like Microsoft and Apple are paying more to make each unit of their product, those cost increases have, in turn, made their way into retail pricing. And sadly, many companies don’t think this is a temporary, 2026-specific issue.
Computerbase and VGC reported that Lenovo executive director Martin Hiegl said that prices will “never” come back down to where they were just a year or two ago while speaking at a German ISC conference. Micron, a company at the epicenter of this current memory crisis facing the tech industry, had harsh words about the situation and toward Apple while speaking to The Wall Street Journal. “We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” Micron CGO Sumit Sadana explained. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”
Micron has also locked in high memory prices for the next five years, per The Register. With them adamant about sticking to that higher price point and even going so far as to blame companies like Apple for the shortage, even Big Tech companies have accepted that they won’t be bringing prices back down for a while.
Obviously, hearing that things will get worse before they get better isn’t great for gamers. The Steam Machine has already faced backlash for its high price, and now Microsoft and potentially Sony will launch next-gen consoles at a time when component prices are at all-time highs. Expect to pay much more than has historically been the case for new gaming hardware in the coming years because most tech is about to get even more expensive.
