Apple plans to raise the prices of its products due to the surge in memory chip costs, outgoing chief executive Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal in an interview.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook told the Journal.

“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.”

Cook, who is to hand over the chief executive role to John Ternus in September, did not indicate how much prices might rise nor which products may be affected.

The company is reportedly planning to launch the first foldable iPhone in September, along with the iPhone 18 range.

Memory-chip prices have been rising sharply amid unprecedented demand for high-end memory used in AI chips from Nvidia and others.

Those chips are being produced in huge volumes for data centres to power AI services.

The result has been a capacity crunch for memory types used in consumer electronics, forcing smartphone makers and others to raise prices in recent months.

“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook said.

“We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”

Research firm Omdia has predicted that smartphone prices this year would rise 20 percent to an all-time high, with no let-up in sight for memory shortages.

Similarly, in March IDC predicted the smartphone market would see its biggest-ever contraction this year, largely due to severe memory shortages.

The analyst firm projected shipments of smartphones would decline 12.9 percent compared to 2025, to 1.12 billion units.

This “crisis like no other” was a major revision downward from previous estimates, and reverses years of gradual gains by smartphone makers, IDC said.