Your Electronics Are About to Get Way More Expensive By Nitish Pahwa

[justaprogressive]

The never-ending inflation spiral has come for your favorite, most necessary everyday gadgets.

Last Thursday, Apple announced price hikes on various MacBook and iPad models, while hinting in a statement that more are coming across its product suite. On the very same day, Microsoft’s Xbox declared that it would stop producing consoles that can store up to 2 terabytes of memory, while raising the costs on its 1 terabyte and 512 gigabyte models—following another round of price increases last October. Supplies of smaller memory processors, like solid-state drives, are drying up on the market, fueling a crunch that’s hitting smartphones and laptops of all brands.

Most electronics—laptops, tablets, gaming devices, phones, your next car, your next smart TV—are getting way more expensive, thanks to a simple supply-and-demand conundrum. Memory chips, the components that provide such devices with storage capacity, have faced global shortages over the past few months and are nearing a crisis point. Yes, as these companies’ statements uniformly note, those chips are being taken up by the A.I. data center rush, with Google and OpenAI leading the way in hoarding these processors. But that construction boom isn’t the only factor—and the fallout from this supply squeeze is roiling every corner of the global economy, from stock markets to manufacturing capacity to trade relations. All of it, unfortunately, has been passed down to your pocketbook in one form or another.

The artificial intelligence boom has been roaring for a few years now, but a few key factors have made this summer a particular inflection point. For one: the Strait of Hormuz. The East Asian economies that collectively dominate the world’s semiconductor and consumer-tech sectors—South Korea, Taiwan, Japan—have been wracked especially hard by the wartime closure of the strait, as they not only receive energy supplies through the waterway but also import the valuable metals, minerals, and gases they need to make chips.

Compound that with domestic crises like a narrowly averted Samsung factory strike and an overall slowdown in non-tech industries, and things have become rather volatile on the peninsula. A massive tech selloff roiled Korean stock indices over the past month, as the severity of wartime shortages became clear. Those stock dips then crossed the Pacific and fueled a stateside panic, causing even highly capitalized players like SpaceX and Oracle to plunge in value. As of this writing, neither company has fully rebounded from those market losses. The message from those stock tickers is clear: Even A.I.-bullish investors are nervous about how the biggest companies in the space will fare without jacking up costs on all their products going forward.

https://slate.com/business/2026/07/ai-car-phone-expensive-iran.html]