Apple's June Price Rises: Every Mac and iPad That Just Got Dearer
On Thursday, with no event and no announcement, Apple raised UK list prices across almost the entire Mac and iPad range — anywhere from £100 to £1,300, for exactly the same machine you could have bought on Wednesday. Here's what changed, why it happened now, and what it means if you're about to buy.
Apple's UK prices changed overnight on Thursday 25 June, and most of the lineup is now dearer than it was on Wednesday. Here's what happened:
- Apple quietly raised UK list prices across nearly the whole Mac line and most of the iPad range. The online store briefly went dark and came back with the new numbers already in place.
- The Mac increases run from £100 on the MacBook Neo to £1,300 on the M3 Ultra Mac Studio. iPads went up £100 to £200. Same chips, same memory, same storage — Apple added nothing in return.
- The driver is the memory shortage we set out in the 2026 Mac Squeeze. For three quarters Apple absorbed the cost. On Thursday it stopped absorbing and started charging.
- The iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods and Studio Display were left alone for now. Analysts widely expect the iPhone to follow in the autumn.
- Forecasters expect the squeeze to run for years, and Apple rarely walks a price back once it has moved. Treat these as the new floor, not a blip.
- For a refurbished buyer the sum just tilted further: the new machine you were comparing against is £100–£1,300 dearer this morning.
Section 01What actually happened on Thursday
There was no keynote, no new product to soften it, and no email to customers. Apple's online store simply dropped offline on Thursday morning and returned a short while later with higher prices already loaded across the Mac and iPad ranges. By the time most people in the UK had finished their coffee, the entry MacBook Neo had gone from £599 to £699, and almost everything above it had moved too.
Apple did confirm what was going on. In a statement to Bloomberg it pointed to the surge in demand for memory and storage created by AI data-centre build-outs, and admitted it had "never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly." The company said it had shielded customers from those costs as long as it could, and had now reached the point where it had to begin passing them on.
The increases are not subtle. The cheapest Mac went up 16.7%. The most expensive desktop went up 32.5%. The iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods and Studio Display were spared this round — but Apple's own wording, that it is "beginning" to raise prices, did not read like a company that considers this finished.
Section 02Every Mac, and what it costs now
Here is the part that matters if you're holding a basket. The chart below plots each Mac's UK starting price before Thursday (the pale dot) against where it lands now (the navy dot), with the increase shown as the peach band between them. We've sorted it by the size of the rise rather than the headline price which is why the desktops, not the laptops, sit at the top.
A few things stand out. The two Mac Studios take the heaviest blows in both cash and percentage terms the M3 Ultra alone is £1,300 dearer, having already had its high-memory configurations withdrawn earlier this year. The MacBook Neo's £100 looks small next to that, but it's the one that stings most in practice: the Neo exists to be Apple's answer to a cheap Windows laptop, and £699 is a very different proposition to £599 for the buyer it was built for.
And in every single case, the spec sheet is identical to Wednesday's. No extra memory, no extra storage, no new chip. You're paying more for the machine that was already on sale.
The gap between new and refurbished just got wider on every Mac
We're not making this point because we sell refurbished Macs, though we do. We're making it because the numbers moved on Thursday and they moved one way. The same tested, Hoxton-approved M1, M2 and M3 Macs we had in stock on Wednesday are now sitting against new machines that cost meaningfully more for hardware that, in most real-world use, does the same job.
A refurbished MacBook Air beats a £699 Neo on capability
At £599 the Neo was a genuinely clever entry point. At £699 the case is thinner. A refurbished M2 MacBook Air at a comparable price gives you double the memory, plus the Thunderbolt, MagSafe and backlit keyboard the Neo leaves out, a better first Mac for most people, at the price the Neo used to be.
Section 03The iPads went up too
It wasn't only the Mac. The iPad Pro, iPad Air, iPad mini and the entry iPad all rose on the same day, by £100 to £200 each. As with the Mac, nothing about the hardware changed these are the same tablets, at higher prices.
In percentage terms the smaller iPads took the sharpest rises, the entry iPad and the iPad mini both jumped by around a fifth. The iPad Air, Apple's volume seller and the sweet spot for most buyers, is now £150 to £200 dearer depending on screen size. The pattern is identical to the Mac: the affordable, sensible configurations are the ones that moved most in proportion.
A refurbished iPad does the same job for less — and the saving just grew
An iPad holds up for years, which is exactly why it makes such sense refurbished. With new prices up across the range, a tested, Hoxton-approved iPad Air or iPad Pro from the previous generation now undercuts the new line by even more than it did last week, for the same everyday experience.
Section 04Why now — and why it won't reverse
None of this is a surprise if you read our 2026 Mac Squeeze piece last month. The mechanism is the same one we set out there: AI infrastructure has pulled the memory industry toward High Bandwidth Memory, conventional DRAM and NAND have been starved of capacity, and the chips inside every Mac and iPad have multiplied in cost. Apple Silicon's unified memory means there's no clever way to engineer around it, every gigabyte is a real cost line.
What changed on Thursday isn't the cost. It's Apple's response to it. For roughly three quarters the company ate the increase, holding headline prices steady while its margin quietly compressed. That was always going to have a limit. Tim Cook had spent the previous week openly warning that increases were unavoidable, describing the shortage as a once-in-a-century event. Thursday was simply the day the absorbing stopped.
Seen across the year, Thursday is one move in a longer sequence:
The harder truth is the timeline beyond that. TrendForce has DRAM prices climbing into at least 2027; Micron expects tight supply beyond 2027; some analysts think the pressure lasts toward the end of the decade. Apple, like most of the industry, doesn't lower a price once it has raised it — UK prices that rose after the 2016 referendum never came back down. The sensible assumption is that Thursday's numbers are the new baseline.
Section 05What it means if you're buying
If you were already weighing a new Mac or iPad against a refurbished one, Thursday did the arithmetic a favour. Every one of those gaps just widened in refurbished's favour, without anyone touching a price tag on our side.
It lands hardest in two places. At the bottom, the MacBook Neo's jump to £699 makes a refurbished M1 or M2 MacBook Air look even stronger than it did when we compared them last month. At the top, the Mac Studio rises stack on configurations Apple has already withdrawn, so for serious memory the used market is increasingly the only sensible route.
Section 06The bigger picture
Step back and Thursday is one move in a pattern we've been tracking all year: the entry Mac mini quietly going from £599 to £799, storage tiers vanishing from the MacBook Pro, high-memory Mac Studios pulled from sale entirely, and now a straight, across-the-board rise on top. Each step has the same root cause and the same effect on buyers, the sensible, mid-spec, fairly-priced configurations keep getting harder to buy new.
This is, once again, a better moment than usual to buy refurbished
We're not making the case for refurbished because we sell it, though we do. We're making it because the maths moved on Thursday. Apple has lifted prices across nearly the whole Mac and iPad range while changing none of the hardware. The same generation of tested, Hoxton-approved Macs and iPads gives you those machines at lower prices.
Glossary of terms
- DRAM Dynamic random-access memory
- A computer's working memory. In a Mac it's the unified memory shared by the CPU, GPU and Neural Engine — and the component whose price has driven these rises.
- NAND NAND flash storage
- The non-volatile storage used for the SSD in every Mac, iPad and iPhone. Its price has risen sharply on the same AI-driven demand.
- HBM High Bandwidth Memory
- A premium, stacked form of DRAM used in AI accelerators. Memory makers have shifted capacity toward it, starving the conventional memory that consumer devices use.
- ASP Average selling price
- The actual revenue Apple collects per unit across the full mix of configurations, as opposed to the advertised list price. Removing a cheap tier raises ASP without changing the headline price.
- Unified memory
- An architecture where the CPU, GPU and Neural Engine share a single physical memory pool packaged tightly against the chip. It's central to Apple Silicon's efficiency — and the reason higher memory prices feed straight through to the sticker.
- Starting price
- The advertised price of a model's base configuration. It's the figure that moved on Thursday; build-to-order upgrades sit on top of it.
