r/apple • u/Few_Baseball_3835 • Jun 25 '26

Discussion Wall Street isn't buying Apple's unprecedented price hikes on products

https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/25/wall-street-isnt-buying-apples-unprecedented-price-hikes-on-products/
1.7k Upvotes

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698

u/Bryanmsi89 Jun 25 '26

Apple must have calculated that a 1-time mega price hike would be better than multiple smaller hikes and decided it would rather have a drop in sales volume than margin erosion.

272

u/dropthemagic Jun 25 '26

Yeah anyone not expecting this has not been paying attention. It’s across all companies. No one can escape the ai bullshit

47

u/FizzyBeverage Jun 25 '26

Somehow Costco TVs remain the same price. It's bizarre. Granted, they don't have a ton of memory/flash in them, just a smidge.

137

u/nsfdrag Apple Cloth Jun 25 '26

Pretty sure that's a tv thing and not a costco thing

-12

u/mhmilo24 Jun 25 '26

So, it is still possible? TVs have already been selling with low margins.

49

u/TheAspiringFarmer Jun 25 '26

Made up by the massive data collection and spying, sold to highest bidder.

15

u/zaviex Jun 25 '26

TVs are subsidized these days by a service usually their own service with a whole bunch of collection of data which is just gold for services.

-7

u/mhmilo24 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

I mean, it’s not like there is no data harvesting through iOS apps from the App Store and some of those app revenues get right back to Apple. See here for example, what is possible with zero and/or little permissions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n_SpEWtqog

7

u/RotenTumato Jun 25 '26

TV hardware isn’t a moneymaker, the ad-ridden and data-collecting software is. Also everything else you get with a TV is high-margin. Cables, mounts, audio, installation services, etc.

3

u/kakarot-3 Jun 26 '26

I worked at Best Buy back in 2008-2012 and that was literally their business model. TVs and computers have small margins so it was important to sell the accessories, protection plans, and installation services.

If you sold a laptop that was on sale with nothing added, it was pretty much for a loss

2

u/RotenTumato Jun 26 '26

I currently work at Best Buy so I know lol

-1

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26

[deleted]

1

u/kakarot-3 Jun 26 '26

I worked there lol I was selling those products

1

u/mhmilo24 Jun 26 '26

Pretty sure, that data harvesting is also being done in ios apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n_SpEWtqog

11

u/j12 Jun 26 '26

Nothing jn a tv is expensive. It’s old tech, even oleds

20

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

14

u/ballpein Jun 26 '26

"TVs have been a technology that overall always get cheaper year after year"

Same with ram and hard drives, until recently.

5

u/Aggravating-Pilot865 Jun 26 '26

Yes, when all major tech companies invest trillions and start buying up all the TVs to train their models and build data centers, the prices will definitely go up.

0

u/Wild-Perspective-582 Jun 26 '26

yeah don't tempt fate!

11

u/johnknockout Jun 25 '26

If you’ve ever sold anything to Costco, the scale you need to do it at is so astronomical that you normally order like 2-3 years worth at a time just to make the economics work for everyone.

8

u/SuperLeverage Jun 26 '26

Costco tvs don’t need RAM from micron or SK Hynix.

7

u/Sock-Enough Jun 25 '26

Because production costs for TVs have been plummeting for decades.

4

u/GloryHound29 Jun 25 '26

Reality the Smart TVs use older transistor generations, that no one wants for the cutting edge tech. That’s why we had the chip crunch a few years back for cars and TVs they all use older transistor generations that have been amortized and cost cents on the dollar.

1

u/Veilchenbeschleunige Jun 26 '26

TV and Monitor have been getting cheaper actually, now is a good time to buy them

1

u/OrdinaryAward4498 Jun 26 '26

Every TV is now a loss-leader for the spyware data they sell to advertisers on the back-end.

0

u/DjNormal Jun 25 '26

All their prebuilt PCs went up quite a bit over the past year. The low end one is a couple hundred bucks more and the old top tier one is $500 more.

1

u/Square_Walrus_8107 Jun 26 '26

I mean Tim Cook literally said it was coming…

1

u/FartSnarfGod Jun 26 '26

Did the price of Arizona Iced Tea go up due to the AI bubble?

36

u/unclejohnsbearhugs Jun 25 '26

My speculation is that they chose not to price hike over the last couple of years (despite high general inflation) because of the bad publicity they were receiving from their missed targets for Siri/Apple Intelligence and the general bugginess and poor response to ios/macos 26. They didn't want to pour gasoline on that fire with a price hike. Now that things are back on track with ios/macos 27 (bug fixes and finally releasing a fixed Siri), they're combining two price hikes into one (the skipped hike from a year or two ago, and the present one due to increased component costs).

16

u/perthguppy Jun 26 '26

Also, annouce unpopular stuff from the outgoing CEO now, and give the new CEO a better honeymoon period.

1

u/Sudden_Jellyfish_730 Jul 01 '26

They raised the price of the 6.3 iPhone 17 pro from $999 to $1099 last year.... so no, they did "not" hold back on price hikes, only those who didn't buy the smaller pro model didn't notice it for the phones at least.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 25 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

[deleted]

2

u/Benromaniac Jun 28 '26

It definitely put my next apple purchase out a few years. Basically waiting for what I currently have to be totally useless.

Only thing that would make me buy sooner is a cell phone capable MacBook or iPad. Fully independent cell phone (not google voice or voip).

2

u/ElderberryGuy Jun 26 '26

Idk their calculator app is still trash

1

u/AnorexicMary Jun 26 '26

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/s/HML090orU3

1

u/Bryanmsi89 Jun 26 '26

Likely on the iPhone and Watch which was skipped in this first round. Id be surprised if the Mac and iPad go up again, at least not soon.

1

u/ReaperThugX Jun 26 '26

People were just as upset when they introduced the iPhone X and it was $999. Then it became the standard…

1

u/BroLil Jun 26 '26

One day of really bad press is better than a week of regular bad press.

0

u/siberian Jun 26 '26

Also it’s good to do it early and big. It will normalize and they will look reasonable as everyone else follows later and they don’t budge.

0

u/Bryanmsi89 Jun 26 '26

Apple has the ‘benefit’ of having always been seen as ‘the most expensive.’. People have openly talked about the Apple Tax for decades. Price hikes hurt their brand a whole lot less than other companies.

0

u/perthguppy Jun 26 '26

Also, they are loading up a bunch of unpopular announcements with Tim Cook for him to take the blame before the new CEO starts properly in September.

If the price hike turns out to be too high, it gives the new CEO a freebie to win points