Apple’s decision to raise Mac and iPad prices this week has set off a chain reaction that retailers and analysts say is going to outlast this one announcement. The advice now circulating among Indian retailers is that if you need a device, buy it now. Waiting for festive season discounts, in particular, may not pay off the way it has in past years. According to retailers tracking the fallout of Apple’s price hike, the company’s decision to leave smartphone prices untouched for now was deliberate, since any iPhone price increase would risk immediately slowing down purchases or pushing buyers to wait for festival discounts instead. But the pressure on memory and chipset prices globally has become significant enough that “no brand can absorb the costs anymore,” as one retailer assessment put it, with Apple’s move being the clearest sign yet of how serious the situation has become.
The practical advice is that buyers who already need a new device should purchase it now while older, pre-hike stock is still available in retail inventory, rather than holding out for typical end-of-year discounting. Once that existing stock sells through, prices on shelves are expected to reflect the new, higher cost structure, with little reason to expect discounts deep enough to offset it.
Counterpoint Research’s Tarun Pathak noted that Apple had “done well to hold prices steady” until now, despite hinting at the change last week and pointed out that Apple has continued to shield iPhone pricing specifically because the device contributes over 50% of its total revenue. He expects the price changes to reshape the PC and tablet market through the rest of 2026, with notebook shipments slowing after a pull-forward in demand seen in 2025, even as advanced, premium notebooks continue to grow.
Tipster and industry watcher Yogesh Brar offered a similar read on why the iPhone was spared this time, while adding that the reprieve is temporary. “It makes perfect sense that Apple left the iPhone out of today’s price hikes. As their biggest seller and main revenue driver, it’s the absolute last product category they want to disrupt mid-year,” he said. “That said, an iPhone price hike is still inevitable.” According to Brar, retail channels are signalling that Apple is likely waiting until September to fold any iPhone increase into the launch of its new lineup, when higher pricing has natural cover alongside new hardware. “Raising prices on their other products today gives them some breathing room in the short term,” he added. “Even though Apple is sitting on enormous profits, this staggered approach lets them manage rising component costs without risking a sales slowdown in their most important product category.”
Neil Shah, Co-Founder and Research VP at Counterpoint, described Apple’s move as reflecting “the biggest change in the cost structure” the consumer and enterprise PC and tablet market has seen, driven by surging semiconductor and memory pricing. According to Shah, Apple held off for at least two quarters to protect its user base before reaching a point where it could no longer absorb the cost increases itself. He does not expect conditions to improve over the next two years, a timeline that is particularly inconvenient for Apple given its plans to push expanded on-device Apple Intelligence features later this year, which themselves demand more memory and compute capability. Shah also expects buyers who cannot delay an upgrade to avoid compromising on lower configurations, potentially shifting overall demand toward pricier, premium configurations even as unit sales soften.
David Naranjo, Associate Director at Counterpoint Research, added that advanced tablets and notebooks are still expected to grow by roughly 8-11% year-on-year, supported by OLED displays and premium AI features, even as overall shipment volumes in the broader tablet market decline due to inventory adjustments and rising memory costs. Both analysts expect other PC and tablet brands to follow Apple’s example by raising prices on select products, cutting discounts on entry-level models, or shifting their lineups to focus more heavily on premium devices.
The scale of the underlying shortage helps explain why retailers are not expecting relief soon. According to The Wall Street Journal, DRAM and NAND chip prices have quadrupled over the past 12 months, driven by surging demand from AI hyperscalers and research firm TechInsights expects prices to keep rising into next year. Apple itself acknowledged this directly in a statement: “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”
Micron, one of the largest global memory and storage chipmakers, reported blowout quarterly earnings the day before Apple’s price hike, with gross profit margins topping 80%. On its earnings call, Micron executives said tight market conditions would persist beyond 2027, a notable extension from guidance just three months earlier that had projected tightness only through this year. Micron’s Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana also pointed to how the company had been burned during the last memory market downturn, when aggressive customer pricing pressure discouraged capital investment industry-wide. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins,” he said, a dynamic Micron appears determined not to repeat as it rides the current upswing.
Apple’s Mac and iPad price increases, which raised prices roughly 15-25% depending on the device, are widely being read as a leading indicator rather than an isolated decision. With Apple itself signalling that further price increases, including on iPhones, remain possible in the coming months and with rival PC and tablet brands expected to follow a similar path, the underlying advice from retailers boils down to this: if a purchase is already on your radar, the math is unlikely to improve by waiting.