Odd Lots · Thursday, July 23, 2026
Apple has announced its first-ever price increases on a variety of products, a significant shift from the decades-long trend of decreasing tech prices. Mark Gurman explains that these hikes are directly linked to increased memory and component costs, particularly memory, which have risen in line with inflation. This change marks a "sea change" in consumer tech pricing.
“So I think the story in consumer tech for decades now has been deflation. Ye, right, things get cheaper to buy and at the same time, you know, it becomes more expensive to live because food prices go up, in healthcare or whatever. But the story in tech is that prices have been going down and suddenly we have this sea change announced by Apple I guess a few weeks ago or a couple of weeks ago now saying that the actually they're going to raise prices pretty much for the first time ever.”
“It's really wild, Like we think that there should just be some like mechanical law that if it's like a gadget, it goes down in price and for years and years, I mean, it's just the thing. And so it's extraordinary to see like this actually reversing.”
“I think that the other component of this, uh, speaking of components, is that inflation real thing will last you know, five seven years. Apple product prices really have not increased over that time as other components got expensive, and as you know, inflation has gone up. And so I'm not one of those people who think this is a conspiracy theory to finally, you know, raise prices in blame memory. Memory is a real thing. If you look at the price adjustments that they've made, it is entirely in line with how much more they're paying for memory on a product by product basis.”