Growing Backlash Against AI Expected to Intensify After Apple, Microsoft Blame AI for Steep Consumer Price Hikes

It’s impossible to deny: everyday consumers are increasingly turning against artificial intelligence. Already, large swathes of the public worry AI will eliminate their jobs, harm the environment, and even lead to the unnecessary deaths of innocent people. Now that two of the world’s largest corporations have openly pinned steep price increases for popular consumer tech on AI-driven supply shortages, public resentment of the technology is almost certain to grow even stronger.

Just yesterday, tech giants Apple and Microsoft dropped two major pricing announcements that shocked consumers, confirming significant price hikes for some of their best-selling electronics. Neither company shied away from naming artificial intelligence as the core cause of these increases.

Apple was first to unveil its changes, announcing sweeping price increases across its Mac, iPad, and connected home product lines. As Fast Company previously reported, the average price jump for these affected devices clocks in at $246.67. To illustrate the scale of the adjustments: the starting price of the wildly popular iPad Pro jumped $200, climbing from $999 to $1,199. The entry-level MacBook Pro saw its starting price surge by $300, rising from $1,699 to $1,999, while the Mac Studio powered by the M3 Ultra chip received a staggering $1,300 price increase, bringing its new starting cost to $5,299, up from $3,999. Even Apple’s lower-priced devices were not spared: the Apple TV’s price jumped nearly 55% to $199, a $70 increase from its original $129 price tag.

Speaking to Reuters, Apple attributed the price hikes to skyrocketing component costs driven by AI-related demand. The global boom in building AI data centers has caused widespread shortages of memory and storage components, the company explained. “We have never seen component prices rise this much, this quickly,” Apple told the outlet. “We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac.”

Shortly after Apple’s announcement, Microsoft followed with its own pricing news, confirming that it would also raise prices on one of its most popular consumer products. The company announced that, effective August 1, it will discontinue the 2-terabyte (TB) version of its Xbox consoles, while the 512-gigabyte (GB) model will increase in price by $100, and the 1 TB model will rise by $150. This latest round of increases comes just one year after Microsoft raised all Xbox prices by $20, pushing the standard starting price to $70.

“We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers to explore all possible alternatives,” the company said in a statement. “Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5 times, and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027.”