Apple's price hikes are the clearest sign yet that AI infrastructure is eating the consumer electronics industry

Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed price increases across Mac and iPad lines are unavoidable, after the company quietly raised the Mac mini's entry price from $599 to $799. The root cause is structural: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have shifted the majority of their DRAM wafer capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators, leaving consumer device makers competing for a shrinking slice of global supply and facing a 90% surge in memory costs in Q1 2026 alone.