Apple has raised the price of external hard drives in its stores, as its retail efforts feel the pinch of the increased cost of storage.
The tech industry is dealing with a crisis of supply and demand, with the needs of AI infrastructure buildouts consuming masses of memory and storage. While the main discussion has been about how Apple is faring on the supply chain side of things, it seems retail is being affected at a much faster rate.
Writing in Sunday's "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman was informed that Apple had updated the prices for a number of its external drives. These updates occurred on both the website and in retail outlets.
The updates are considerable, with examples including a SanDisk 4-terabyte SSD rising from about $500 to near $1,200. It's also affecting lower-capacity drives too, with a 1-terabyte alternative from the same supplier rising from $120 to over $350.
$1,200 for 4TB of external SSD storage is very high.
While Apple does dictate the final pricing of products, Gurman points out that it only has a limited amount of influence. Its vendors dictate the price of goods, since Apple has to buy the products from them in the first place.
The problem isn't just one of pricing, but also of availability. Consumers seeking external drives from Apple will have trouble finding available stock in the first place, due to constrained supplies.
A wider storage problem
While Gurman's post is about Apple's retail stock of drives, it's not a problem that it alone is facing. The demand for chips used in RAM and SSDs to fuel AI infrastructure is affecting practically everyone within the industry.
Going to Amazon, searches for memory and storage, even mechanical drives, reveals limited stock and increased costs. It's a problem that is being felt directly by consumers buying components, not just through increases in price for products using the parts.
It's also an issue that won't be fixed in the short term at all. It is doubtful that AI's appetite for chips will die down anytime soon, leaving consumers waiting a long time for more production capacity to spin up before costs start to come down again.
