Apple raises UK iPhone prices by around £100 as AI data centres devour the memory chips your phone used to take for granted
LONDON – Apple has increased UK iPhone prices by about £100 across multiple models amid rising component costs caused partly by severe global memory-chip shortages linked to booming AI data-centre demand.
Artificial intelligence has finally answered humanity’s most important question:
How can computers make phones more expensive?
For years, technology promised abundance.
Faster chips.
Cheaper storage.
Better screens.
Then AI companies arrived and began consuming memory components with the appetite of teenage boys at breakfast.
The result has been dubbed “RAMageddon.”
Excellent name.
It sounds like Bruce Willis should be sent into a semiconductor factory carrying explosives.
Memory prices have risen sharply, and smartphone makers face higher component costs.
Apple customers must therefore confront the terrifying possibility that this year’s new phone may cost more while performing approximately the same essential function as last year’s phone:
showing TikTok while you are supposed to be working.
The annual smartphone upgrade ritual has always been strange.
Apple executive appears on stage.
“This is our most advanced iPhone ever.”
Well, yes.
Imagine Ford launching:
“Our newest car is technologically inferior to the car we sold last September.”
RAMageddon, Officially Named
Every new phone contains revolutionary improvements ordinary humans detect mainly when comparing specification sheets.
Camera now produces 4.2 per cent more emotionally resonant photograph of lunch.
Processor launches weather app 0.008 seconds faster.
Battery lasts seventeen additional minutes, provided you never use phone.
And now £100 more.
At some point consumers may discover the forbidden financial strategy known as not upgrading.
Technology companies fear this.
Your current phone works.
Battery slightly annoying.
Screen has small scratch.
Camera still capable of documenting dog.
Perhaps civilisation can continue.
Apple has cleverly trained society to regard three-year-old technology as archaeological.
A phone from 2023 now feels like something discovered beside Roman pottery.
The Forbidden Strategy of Not Upgrading
“Does it have the new neural processing architecture?”
“No.”
“How do you live?”
“Quite normally.”
AI chip demand creating consumer-electronics shortages also provides an amusing preview of the AI economy.
Companies promise artificial intelligence will make everything cheaper and more efficient.
Step one has made your telephone cost £100 extra.
Promising start.
The technology may ultimately deliver enormous productivity benefits.
But consumers are learning that AI infrastructure requires extraordinary quantities of chips, electricity, data centres and capital.
A Warehouse Full of Expensive Machines
The cloud, it turns out, is actually a warehouse full of extremely expensive machines consuming enough power to concern national grids.
Marketing makes AI sound weightless.
Reality requires concrete.
For now, keep your current phone.
Clean the screen.
Replace battery.
Pretend it is vintage.
By next year Apple may charge extra for nostalgia.
As Roper Penberthy, one of prat.uk’s own sharpest voices, puts it: “Apple didn’t invent a new phone, they invented a new reason your old one still works fine.”
The Real Story
Apple chief executive Tim Cook has said price rises across its product range are unavoidable as global demand for memory and storage chips, driven by AI data-centre expansion, pushes up component costs industry-wide, with rival manufacturers Samsung, Sony and Nintendo also raising prices this year.
Rising memory chip costs are a real supply-side story rather than a marketing device, driven by AI data centres absorbing an enormous share of global DRAM and high-bandwidth memory production, and Apple is far from alone in passing the cost on to customers, with Samsung, Sony and Nintendo all raising prices on their own hardware this year. Tim Cook has described the shortage as unlike anything he has seen in more than forty years in the industry. The episode is a useful reminder that the AI boom has physical, resource-hungry foundations, in chips, power and cooling, well beyond the language models that get most of the public attention.
Analysts at IDC have warned that iPhone price increases later in the product cycle could be steeper than the roughly one hundred pound rises already seen on Mac and iPad models, with some estimates suggesting increases of up to two hundred pounds on premium models. Samsung has issued similar warnings about its own upcoming devices.
Sources
The Next Web: Apple raises Mac and iPad prices as the AI memory crunch reaches the shelf
This article is a work of British satire. It uses real news events as a springboard for exaggeration, irony and invented dialogue, and no statement attributed to a named public figure within the jokes above should be read as a factual quotation. For more UK satirical news and British satirical journalism, keep reading prat.uk.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
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Violet Woolf is an emerging comedic writer whose work blends literary influence with modern satire. Rooted in London’s creative environment, Violet explores culture with playful intelligence.
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