Apple may increase the price of iPhone 17 at the end of June

Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook told the WSJ about the pressure of rising costs of components such as memory chips and hard drives, leaving the company no longer able to compensate for itself, so price increases were "inevitable." He compared the memory shortage to a once-in-a-hundred-year cataclysm. "In more than 40 years of work, I have never seen anything similar in any field," he said.

Bloomberg expert Mark Gurman commented that Tim Cook chose this time to "fence" to show that a price increase is actually near. The adjustment will likely be conducted to coincide with Apple's annual Back to School promotion for students and teachers at the end of June.

Sharing the same opinion, famous "rumor expert" Ice Universe also said that the price increase "is not a story of autumn". Meaning, users may have to buy iPhone 17 models at higher prices in the coming weeks, instead of waiting until the iPhone 18 is released in mid-September.

Besides iPhone, other product lines such as iPad and Mac computers are also expected to soon enter a new adjustment period.

Before Apple, a series of technology giants such as Samsung, Microsoft, Sony, and Dell all raised product prices. The adjustment stems from the global shortage of DRAM memory chips and NAND flash memory - components found in most mobile devices.

According to Tom's Hardware, the cause of the prolonged crisis is the huge demand from AI data centers. Modern systems require large amounts of high bandwidth memory (HBM) to continuously feed data to the GPU. HBM has very high profit margins, so manufacturers are devoting production, investment and technical resources to this segment. This means they are reducing their focus on conventional DRAM memory, leading to a shortage in supply for computers, servers, and mobile devices.

In the first quarter 2026 financial report dated April 30, Mr. Kim Jaejune, leader of Samsung's memory chip segment, said that the memory crisis will not end in 2027. The gap between supply and demand next year may even widen even more than in 2026. Similarly, Mr. Chey Tae Won, President of SK Hynix, said that the pressure on memory demand related to AI will last until 2030.

Huy Duc compiled