Apple has raised prices across its Mac, iPad and other hardware lineups in India without any formal announcement and the increases are substantial. The revised prices are visible directly on Apple’s website. The Mac mini with the M4 chip and 256GB storage now costs Rs 82,900, up from Rs 59,900, a jump of Rs 23,000. The Mac mini M4 Pro has gone from Rs 1,49,900 to Rs 1,99,900. The MacBook Air M5 has risen from Rs 1,20,900 to Rs 1,49,900 and even the upcoming MacBook Neo’s projected price has reportedly moved from around Rs 69,900 to Rs 79,900.
The increases extend well beyond laptops. The Apple TV 4K 64GB model has jumped from Rs 14,900 to Rs 25,900 and the 128GB version from Rs 16,900 to Rs 31,900. The HomePod now costs Rs 44,900, up from its Rs 32,900 launch price, while the HomePod mini has risen from Rs 10,900 to Rs 15,900. Notably, the iPhone lineup has been left untouched in this round, which tipster Yogesh Brar has suggested is deliberate, since Apple is unlikely to want to disrupt pricing on its biggest revenue driver outside of its usual September launch cycle.
The reason behind this goes back to comments Apple CEO Tim Cook made directly to The Wall Street Journal, where he described the scale of the current memory chip shortage in stark terms. “This is a hundred-year flood. I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years,” he said. Cook also acknowledged the company’s options are limited: “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases.”
The underlying cause is a global supply crunch in memory chips, the components that power everything from laptops and smartphones to servers. AI companies including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have been securing massive quantities of memory chips to power their data centres and model training, creating intense demand pressure that is pushing up prices for everyone else buying the same components for consumer devices.
It isn’t just demand driving this either. Suppliers are actively shifting their own production priorities. Micron, one of the three major global memory suppliers, has reportedly decided to shut down its consumer memory division entirely in order to focus on AI-driven demand instead. When a supplier of that scale deprioritises consumer-facing chips like NAND and RAM, the squeeze on companies like Apple, which rely on a steady supply of those components for everyday devices, becomes even tighter.
One option reportedly being explored is sourcing more memory from Chinese suppliers, though this comes with its own complications. Apple would likely need a license from US officials to do so, given the broader geopolitical tension between the US and China that touches nearly every domain of the tech industry, AI development very much included. Whether Apple pursues this route and how quickly US regulators would respond to such a request, remains to be seen.
For now, Apple has not officially commented on the reasoning behind its India price increases, though the timing and scale line up directly with what Cook has already described as an unprecedented supply crunch with no clear end date.