Few memes better encapsulate the modern era’s perpetual ability to be grimly surprising than the Star Wars “For the Better, Right?” format. It’s roughly five years old now (as a meme, that is, not the film it’s from), and with each passing year, I’ve felt its knowing smirk cut ever more acutely. The memory-holing of the pandemic. The encore of evil stupidity that is Trump 2.0. And now the tech race to ride an AI bubble that’s fueling unprecedented supply shocks to parts of the economy people actually like and find useful.
Each time, I keep thinking that the power of inertia and countervailing forces will pull things back to some sense of normalcy. That groups operating with rationality, decency, and the simple logic of self-preservation and self-interest will pull things back from the brink. Instead, states are rolling back the clock on decades of sound medicine, the president has declared martial law around an algae pond, and the prices of computers keep going up, up, and up. Even Apple, the king of gadget supply chains, is now feeling the crunch from the ongoing RAM shortage.
The MacBook maker announced some truly startling price hikes today. The MacBook Air is now $1,300, up from $1,100. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is now $2,000, up from $1,700. Even the MacBook Neo, which debuted earlier this year as Apple’s hit premium-designed budget laptop, is getting more expensive. It launched at $600. Now it’s $700. Outgoing CEO Tim Cook warned about these price hikes just last week.
“We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”
Cook is renowned for turning Apple into a global hardware juggernaut through the sorts of operations and supply chain min-maxing that would bring even a Path of Exile 2 buildcrafting sicko to tears. This includes ambitious logistical maneuvers like basically building an entire city in China in order to make cheaper iPhones. If Apple’s profit margins can’t hold against the sustained onslaught of AI data center hyper-scaling, what chance do the ‘lil guys have?
Not much, as clearly evidenced by the fact that the new Steam Machine costs $1,050 even without a controller, roughly $300 more than the price at which the company originally hoped to launch the paradigm-shifting PC gaming device. And also good luck even buying one, because Valve clearly hasn’t been able to manufacture as many as it would like. The component-sourcing is so bad that some Steam Machines are shipping with two sticks of 8GB RAM while others have a single 16GB stick. This is like me carving up Dino Nuggets in half to stretch them for my kids’ dinner because I forgot to go grocery shopping, but also if people were lined up outside the supermarket to buy bags of frozen meat pucks for $25 a pound.
Even Microsoft, which purports to run a video game console business, is apparently so vulnerable to the supply shocks caused in part by its own AI business that it can now no longer sell its nearly six-year-old, 10GB RAM Xbox Series S for less than $500. “The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles,” the company wrote on June 25.
The urgency behind the language was a stark departure from the usual vague “economic conditions” boilerplate these announcements come laced with. Microsoft expects storage and memory prices to double again by the fall. No one seems to think that will be the end of this circus by any stretch.
“We expect tight conditions to persist beyond calendar 2027 as a result of AI-driven demand across all segments coupled with structural supply constraints,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in its latest earnings report.
And yet every price hike still feels intuitively, to me, like the last. Surely the Xbox Series X can’t go past $800? Sony can’t jump the PS5 Pro to $1,000 by the time Christmas rolls around? Grand Theft Auto 6 is finally coming out. People who want to play it will be able to get their consoles, right? The Covid-era gaming hardware shortage was a once-in-a-lifetime blip, right? Hardware companies will simply start mass-producing more RAM to meet demand, right?
The markets are dumb, but they will eventually stabilize. Capitalism is cruel, but it is self-perpetuating. If the system cannot hold, someone or something will step in to prevent its completely collapse. Right? I know I can no longer take any of those things on faith, even if my imagination has been trained to do little else. And I know the video game console price hikes are just going to keep coming, even if I can’t imagine a future in which they are back to being 1980s-style luxury electronics purchases like the very first consumer PCs and VCRs.
I don’t know how much worse it can get, but I do know that the last time I said “It can’t get even worse, right?” turned out to be the last best time to buy a new Steam Deck, or Switch 2, or PS5. The next best time is probably now.
