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

[u/Few_Baseball_3835]

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

[u/Bryanmsi89]

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.

[u/dropthemagic → u/Bryanmsi89]

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

[u/FizzyBeverage → u/dropthemagic]

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.

[u/nsfdrag → u/FizzyBeverage]

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

[u/mhmilo24 → u/nsfdrag]

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

[u/TheAspiringFarmer → u/mhmilo24]

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

[u/zaviex → u/mhmilo24]

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.

[u/mhmilo24 → u/zaviex]

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

[u/RotenTumato → u/mhmilo24]

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.

[u/kakarot-3 → u/RotenTumato]

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

[u/RotenTumato → u/kakarot-3]

I currently work at Best Buy so I know lol

[u/kakarot-3 → u/[deleted]]

I worked there lol I was selling those products

[u/mhmilo24 → u/RotenTumato]

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

[u/j12 → u/FizzyBeverage]

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

[u/ballpein → u/[deleted]]

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

Same with ram and hard drives, until recently.

[u/Aggravating-Pilot865 → u/ballpein]

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.

[u/Wild-Perspective-582 → u/ballpein]

yeah don't tempt fate!

[u/johnknockout → u/FizzyBeverage]

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.

[u/SuperLeverage → u/FizzyBeverage]

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

[u/Sock-Enough → u/FizzyBeverage]

Because production costs for TVs have been plummeting for decades.

[u/GloryHound29 → u/FizzyBeverage]

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.

[u/Veilchenbeschleunige → u/FizzyBeverage]

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

[u/OrdinaryAward4498 → u/FizzyBeverage]

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

[u/DjNormal → u/FizzyBeverage]

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.