Apple raises external storage prices as AI consumes everything
How Artificial Intelligence Is Driving the Soaring Cost of External Drives
Imagine walking into an Apple Store to pick up a standard external drive for your Mac—only to discover it now costs more than a brand-new MacBook Air. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. Over the past few weeks, the price of external storage has skyrocketed, leaving consumers and creative professionals reeling.
AppleSecrets delivers smart, visual, and subscriber-first insights on iOS news, tips, deals, and data—built for Apple users who want more than just headlines. Today, we’re breaking down the recent, aggressive price hikes for external drives at Apple retail stores and online.
The culprit isn’t ordinary inflation or typical supply chain hiccups. Instead, the relentless growth of artificial intelligence infrastructure is quietly consuming the world’s memory and storage chip supply. Here’s what’s driving the price surge, why Apple prices keep rising, and how you can adapt to this ongoing hardware squeeze.
The Staggering Reality of Apple Retail Prices
For Mac users, external storage is essential. Photographers, video editors, and developers depend on fast external SSDs for handling large files without slowing down their workflow. But lately, outfitting a workstation has become noticeably more expensive.
Retail data shows that Apple has sharply increased prices on several third-party external drives—both online and in physical stores. These aren’t minor price changes, but significant jumps.
Consider the SanDisk Professional PRO-G40 SSD. Not long ago, the 4-terabyte model sold for about $500. Now, that exact drive is selling for nearly $1,200. The increase isn’t limited to larger drives, either. A 1-terabyte version from the same brand has leaped from around $120 to over $350.
Why Apple Passes the Cost to Consumers
While it’s easy to criticize Apple for these markups, the situation is more complex. Apple controls the final retail price but has limited influence over the base cost of third-party products.
Vendors set wholesale prices based on production expenses. When suppliers such as SanDisk experience soaring component costs, they pass these costs on to retailers—and Apple, in turn, passes them on to customers. The issue isn’t only about price; availability is also shrinking. Even if you are prepared to pay $1,200 for a 4TB drive, finding it in stock for immediate pickup is increasingly difficult.
Why AI Is Consuming Global Storage
Understanding the sharp rise in SSD prices requires a broader view of today’s tech landscape. The industry is facing a severe supply and demand crisis, mainly driven by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence.
AI infrastructure requires massive amounts of hardware. Training large language models and powering complex neural networks takes extraordinary computational muscle—but it also demands the capacity to ingest, process, and store petabytes of data at lightning speed.
The Memory and NAND Chip Bottleneck
This extraordinary data appetite has created a black hole for high-performance memory (RAM) and NAND flash storage chips. Enterprise server farms and AI data centers are purchasing storage components by the millions.
Manufacturers simply can’t build new chip fabrication plants fast enough to meet this historic enterprise demand. Enterprise contracts are far more lucrative than consumer electronics, so suppliers prioritize big data centers over retail brands. As a result, consumer companies compete for a shrinking pool of available chips, pushing raw material costs ever higher.
Beyond Apple: A Broader Industry Crisis
Although Apple’s price surge is eye-catching, this problem is industry-wide. The AI storage crunch is affecting nearly every major hardware manufacturer and retailer.
A quick look at large online retailers like Amazon shows the same trend. Searches for basic memory components, high-speed NVMe drives, and even traditional mechanical hard drives turn up limited stock and higher prices.
Component Scarcity: PC builders are struggling to source affordable RAM and SSDs.
Mechanical Drive Impact: Even slower, older spinning-disk hard drives now have higher price tags as data centers buy them for bulk storage.
Long-Term Constriction: Industry analysts agree that AI’s hunger for memory chips shows no sign of slowing down.
For consumers, this means living with higher storage costs for the foreseeable future. Bringing new silicon fabrication plants online will take years, not months.
Strategic Purchasing in a Constrained Market
If you rely on Apple products for your work, this storage crunch demands a shift in strategy. Upgrading your storage will require more planning to avoid unnecessary overspending.
Maximize Your Internal Storage
If you’re shopping for a new Mac, rethink the usual configuration. In the past, users would buy base-model Macs with minimal internal storage, planning to supplement with cheap external drives. With external SSD prices soaring, it can actually be more cost-effective to pay Apple’s premium for higher internal storage at purchase.
Audit and Offload
Before splurging on overpriced external storage, audit your current data. Many users keep hundreds of gigabytes of duplicates, abandoned projects, or bloated app caches. Use macOS tools to clean up.
Move older, inactive files to slower, less expensive mechanical drives instead of storing everything on high-speed SSDs. Save your fastest storage for active, high-priority projects.
Leverage Cloud Solutions Strategically
For now, cloud storage remains comparatively stable in pricing. If you have reliable internet, consider upgrading your iCloud plan or using specialized cloud services for large media files. Moving less-accessed data to the cloud can free up enough local storage to delay major hardware purchases until prices stabilize.
Navigating the Hardware Squeeze
The spike in external storage prices highlights how interconnected the global tech supply chain truly is. The relentless growth of artificial intelligence is now driving up costs for everyday creative professionals and consumers. Until the global stock of NAND chips can catch up with AI’s appetite, storage scarcity and premium pricing are here to stay.
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