Will Apple reduce its prices when component costs drop?

unprecedented cross-product-line price hikes yesterday, other than how much the iPhone 18 line will cost when it arrives in September, is whether this is a temporary measure or a permanent one.

9to5 Mac's poll on the matter amusingly offers readers the option of responding with absolute or reasonable certainty, as if it's readers fall under either the 'friends and family of leaky-executive-team members' or 'regular Apple followers'. In any case, at the time of writing ~75% of respondents think these prices are the new normal:

Mark Gurman, who often misconstrues his own excellent track record of scoop journalism with a mix of very pedestrian opinions, seems equally convinced that $2,499+ for a Pro chip in a MacBook is now the lowest we'll ever pay for it:

I don't know that I'll be able to find a predictions market that offers me a 1million year resolution window for proving this wrong, but I'd be very surprised if Apple locks these new price tiers in for good if, and it's a fucking big if, RAM and storage prices ever return to something close to their previous rates.

For one, the Apple of recent years has been very doggedly perusing lower price points:
- The $599 Mac mini, introduced in 2020 and received a 16gb RAM spec bump in 2024
- The Apple Watch SE3, whist not a price reduction, brought enough higher-end features down to the $349 price point to make it the de-facto Watch option for most people
- The $599 ($499 edu) MacBook Neo was at the bottom end of predictions for their new line

None of this is to say that Apple has decided to run itself as a charity. The company famously has very healthy profit margin expectations for each SKU that it sells, and the fact that they've been able to make an iPad for $349 and MacBook-Air-if-you-squint-laptop for $599 is a testament to the advances in their engineering and supply chain prowess that they can do so with these margins intact.

The Neo is an especially useful weathervane for Apple's pricing strategy as it is one of the few areas where Apple is aggressively competing on price, in this case with Chromebooks, rather than being able to use its superior Operating System as leverage. If component prices allow half-decent Chromebooks to return to sub $500 prices again then Apple will surely need to follow suite to tempt educational IT departments away, and consequently will need to bring the MacBook Air price down with it to avoid leaving too big a pricing delta between their 'good' and 'better' products.

Apple's own statement on the matter seems to confirm the fact that they are, at the moment at least, uncomfortable with these prices:

The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. 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. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.

Whether consumers react with similar hostility will surely determine the direction they take should the opportunity of a price-drop ever present itself.