Apple service prices silently increase year by year: each amount is small, but the cumulative amount is huge

Last weekend, there was news that Apple increased the prices of some services. Thinking about it for a while, I realized that each amount is small, but if you add it up, it's a big deal. During this price increase, there is an interesting detail that besides the US, Apple also increased the price of iCloud+ in a series of countries, including Vietnam, with increases ranging from 11% to 55% depending on the package and market. This is no longer just about American users, but about anyone paying for the Apple ecosystem A price increase, but spread on many fronts at the same time, but Vietnam is only affected with iCloud Looking back at the entire recent price adjustment, I see that Apple did not increase each service individually, but almost "horizontally" across many services in the same short period of time in many markets in July 2026, with a focus on iCloud+ in Vietnam. If looking specifically at the Vietnamese market, the prices of Apple Music packages have remained the same since the increase in October 2022: Individual package at 65,000 VND/month, Family 99,000 VND/month and Student 35,000 VND/month, with no new increase accompanied by iCloud+ mid-2026. Meanwhile in the US, the increase is quite significant with Apple Music service. In contrast, iCloud+ is the service most affected, with the 50 GB package jumping from 19,000 to 25,000 VND/month, 200 GB from 69,000 to 89,000 VND and 2 TB from 249,000 to 299,000 VND, an increase ranging from 20–31% depending on capacity.

AppleCare+ is a different story: in Vietnam, this is a warranty/insurance package purchased with the device, paid once for 2–3 years of use, not a monthly subscription like some packages in the US, so there is no "$0.5 increase per month" to compare for the Vietnamese market. Therefore, if we only talk about Vietnam, the focus of the July 2026 adjustment is iCloud + packages, while Apple Music, Apple One and AppleCare + almost stand still in terms of prices in Vietnam at the same time. The part that caught my attention most this time was Apple adjusting the price of iCloud+ in a series of markets outside the US, including Nigeria, Türkiye, Vietnam, Japan, Egypt, New Zealand, the Philippines and Indonesia, with a very wide increase range, from 11% to 55% depending on the package and country. Such large margins often reflect the fact that Apple is adjusting prices according to actual exchange rates and purchasing power in each market, rather than applying a fixed global increase, meaning that markets whose currencies have depreciated significantly against the US dollar over the past few years often have to bear higher percentage increases to convert to the same level of dollar revenue for Apple. A specific example of this is the Claude Pro package I bought through Apple. has increased from 499 thousand VND to 599 thousand VND. Added up, what is the real number? If you just look at each individual account, like a few tens of thousands of dong added to iCloud+ each month, everyone seems to think it's quite light and not worth worrying about. But for a family using the Apple Music Family package, an Apple One package, several devices with AppleCare+, and a large iCloud+ package to share with the whole family, the cumulative difference each month will be much larger than the feeling of "only a few tens of thousands increase" that each individual announcement creates. This is the type of price increase that I like to call "gnawing": in small pieces no one notices, but cumulatively over the years, the total service bill of a household using many Apple devices and services may have increased significantly compared to three or four years ago, while most users can hardly remember exactly how much they paid at the time of initial registration.

The service segment is currently one of the segments with the highest profit margin and is most closely watched by investors in Apple, in the context that revenue from hardware is increasingly difficult to grow as dramatically as before. Increasing service prices regularly, for acceptable reasons such as infrastructure operating costs, exchange rate fluctuations or content copyright prices, is the least backlash way to raise this revenue segment. But the question I think worth asking is not whether Apple has the "right" to increase prices, but whether the actual experience and value of these services: music recommendation quality, iCloud+ capacity and speed, AppleCare warranty coverage, will increase commensurate with the price increase, or whether most of the added value is simply the inertia of an ecosystem in which users are too deeply invested to leave.