A few weeks ago I made a video about how Apple is not expensive.

Well…I could have seen this coming.

By now you have heard that Apple has raised prices on pretty much every product in the lineup, except for iPhone, for now.

I didn’t have a problem when they dropped the lowest tier of storage in the MacBook Air and as a result the starting price was higher than prior years.

I was one of the few who held back and didn’t write some bogus click bait headline about “Apple is jacking up prices” because if you were to buy the 512GB model previously you would have paid the same price and its 2026, idk who the hell is even buying a base model storage MacBook in the first place.

This time is different.

Everything actually is more expensive. Overnight.

Macs, iPads, Apple TVs and more are now all more expensive. You can see the full list here.

AI is the main culprit. For those of us(probably everyone reading this) who follow tech news and industry trends, we understand that data centers are gobbling up the memory like it is going out of style.

I can’t imagine what the average person’s response is going to be when you tell them their MacBook just got $200 more expensive because of AI.

People hate AI. Sometimes I hate AI.

The demand has far outpaced the supply, so much so that some companies chose to stop producing and selling certain products in order to take advantage of the gold rush.

Memory companies are effectively selling shovels to the miners.

AI is very clearly on an unsustainable growth trajectory, with the large labs still unprofitable, user costs in excessive of what mass adoption would ever allow and relying on enterprise adoption, with growing numbers of studies that say AI adoption in the workplace is rapidly failing.

The worst part is we are all just along for the ride.

To quote Nilay Patel at The Verge, these AI companies are trying to create digital god or something. They just want the power to control the future no matter the cost.

AI is just asking for your land to build data centers, your electricity to power said data centers, your money, in the form of subscriptions and now price increases to devices that have nothing to do with AI.

All we have to show for it is the enshitification of all things that we love, with AI being pushed into each and every one of them, alongside growing rates of unfavorability towards any and everything AI.

AI fear mongering may have stalled a bit in recent months though.

Who would have thought that “we are creating tech to take all of your jobs and you don’t get a say in it” is a bad marketing strategy?

This seems like a David vs. Goliath situation. With Big Tech hell bent on shoveling more AI into the system at some point there has to be a payoff.

Investors aren’t going to keep shoveling billions or trillions of dollars into this industry without a return on that money.

If AI can’t figure out how to turn around the public perception and drive a profit at the same time then this bubble will pop.

Honestly the sooner it pops the better in my opinion.

As groundbreaking as this technology has become the limited upsides that I’ve seen certainly don’t outweigh the concerns at this point.

Anyways, enjoy a now historic documentary about the long lost era of the affordable Apple Ecosystem.

Talk next week, later!