Apple Price Increase Leads to Storage Plunge? Market Shifts from "Embracing Price Hike" to "Concerns about Disrupted Demand"

BlockBeats News, June 26th — Today's market sell-off of AI and storage stocks is being explained by a new narrative: the true driver of the sentiment reversal was not Micron's poor earnings report, but the price hikes initiated by Apple, Microsoft, and other end-device companies.

Reportedly, on June 25th, Apple raised prices for multiple Mac and iPad models by around 15%-25%, citing the significant increase in memory and storage chip prices such as DRAM and NAND due to the soaring demand from AI data centers. Microsoft also announced price increases for Xbox starting from August 1st, with the 512GB and 1TB models seeing price hikes of $100 and $150, respectively, attributing the reasons likewise to the surge in storage and memory costs.

This viewpoint has emerged in discussions among overseas media and some market participants. Business Insider referred to Apple's price hikes as "erasing the rebound of tech stocks brought by Micron's financial report," and Futurum CEO Daniel Newman also noted that Apple's price increase has made the market realize that the rising storage prices have shifted from upstream profits to consumer costs.

If only Micron's financial report were considered, the market should have been more optimistic. Micron's revenue and profit far exceeded expectations, indicating that the demand for storage in AI is still strong, and HBM, DRAM, and NAND have not entered a demand collapse phase. In other words, Micron's financial report proves that the AI hardware cycle is still ongoing, even hotter than the market expected. However, Apple and Microsoft's price hikes altered the market's interpretation.

In the past, storage price increases were mainly seen as a boon for upstream companies. The fact that Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix could raise prices indicated supply shortages, AI data centers' continued expansion, and profits continuing to concentrate on the hardware side. But when end-device giants like Apple and Microsoft also start passing on costs to consumers, what the market sees is not just "upstream profit-taking," but rather "downstream starting to feel the pressure."

The viewpoint holds that storage manufacturers earning high profits per se is not an issue. Still, if this profit comes from continually squeezing downstream, then application developers, end-device hardware manufacturers, and consumers will eventually bear the costs. Apple's price hike signifies that high storage costs are no longer just an internal financial issue within the supply chain but are starting to reflect in product prices. Microsoft's price hike also indicates that this pressure is not a problem confined to individual companies but is a challenge faced by the entire consumer electronics and AI hardware ecosystem.

What the market is concerned about is not the price hike itself but the demand disruption after the price increase. Can consumers accept pricier computers, tablets, consoles, and AI services? Can application companies continue to expand under higher computing costs? Can cloud providers translate their capital expenditures into a sufficiently high income? Once these questions become a reality, the logic for storage stocks will shift from "benefiting from price hikes" to "price hikes backfiring."