The hidden cost of AI reaches the living room: why your next laptop or console will cost more

For years, the cost of artificial intelligence was an abstraction for consumers: investment rounds, data-center spending, astronomical figures that happened far from everyday wallets. That time is over. When Apple announces increases approaching 20% on MacBooks and iPads, and Xbox raises the price of its consoles for the second time in less than a year, the AI bill finally lands at the corner store. The 1 TB MacBook Pro goes from $1,699 to $1,999; the basic Xbox console rises $100 to $499. These are not routine adjustments: they are symptoms.

The cause both companies point to is the same, and it is worth understanding well, because it explains almost everything else. Generative AI has sent demand soaring for RAM and high-speed storage, components essential to training and running large models. The result is that makers of laptops, tablets and consoles now compete for the same chips as the hyperscalers —Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta— building out infrastructure at an unprecedented pace. When a handful of giants with nearly unlimited budgets soak up the world's supply of a component, the price rises for everyone else. It is elementary economics applied at an extraordinary scale.

What is telling is who is feeling the blow. For years Apple had managed to absorb supply-chain turbulence without passing it on to the customer; it now acknowledges, according to its statement, that it has reached a point where it can no longer sustain that position. Analyst Paolo Pescatore sums it up precisely: the fact that not even Apple, with its scale and purchasing power, is immune marks 'a significant moment.' When the most powerful buyer in the market cannot dodge a price hike, the conclusion is that this is not an isolated business decision but a structural constraint on the sector.

There are, to be sure, reasons not to fall into doom-mongering. Various analysts consulted by the BBC agree that the impact will be unevenly spread: David Naranjo, of Counterpoint, anticipates that other brands will follow Apple by raising selective prices or pivoting to the premium segment; Dipanjan Chatterjee, of Forrester, recalls that Apple's loyal base is 'the best positioned' to absorb the increase with minimal pushback. In other words: margin pressure and catalog reshuffling, rather than a collapse in consumption. Tim Cook himself had already warned the Wall Street Journal that the increases were 'inevitable' until memory supply normalizes.

The question that really matters looks ahead. Xbox has been unusually explicit: memory and storage costs have already more than doubled, and the company expects them to double again by 2027. If that forecast holds, the pressure on prices will continue, and with it a healthy debate the sector would do well to confront: how much of the AI economy should be paid by the home user who may not even use it. The good news is that supply-and-demand imbalances tend to correct themselves once new manufacturing capacity arrives. The realistic part is that this adjustment takes years, not months. In the meantime, it is worth looking at the price tag of any new device through a different lens: part of what we pay finances, indirectly, the largest expansion of technological infrastructure of our era.