Apple Retailer Costs for SanDisk SSDs Are Immediately Astronomical

Ah, SanDisk exterior SSDs with these huge keychain loops. In the event you’re a mean shopper, they’re superior and handy. In the event you’re a seasoned skilled or information hoarder, they’re too unreliable, I’m told. At any fee, they appear cool they usually’re traditionally a comparatively low-cost place to stash some terabytes.

However not anymore—at the very least not for those who purchase yours from Apple (and I’ll provide you with one guess as to why).

Because of the hardware-devouring wants of AI information facilities, Apple already hiked the prices of MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models by a hundred dollars each last week. However as Bloomberg’s Apple scoops guy Mark Gurman points out, Apple shops—each on-line and brick-and-mortar—have additionally despatched the costs on exterior drives into the stratosphere. “As an illustration,” Gurman writes, “a SanDisk 4-terabyte solid-state exterior drive that after price roughly $500 is now $1,200, whereas a 1-terabyte model has gone from $120 to $360.”

That second one is a 200% worth hike. I haven’t seen a worth improve so punishing since, uh, properly, earlier as we speak, once I put gas in my tank in Los Angeles.

Gurman is fast to level out that it’s not simply SanDisk merchandise which are seeing worth spikes, and that distributors set costs, not Apple. It’s value noting, nevertheless, that The Apple Retailer authorized web page says, “Apple reserves the best to alter costs for merchandise on the Apple Retailer at any time, and to appropriate inadvertent pricing errors.” So it doesn’t sound like SanDisk has a gun to Apple’s head.

Demand for storage and RAM is a simmering disaster threatening to boil over. As my colleague, Kyle Barr, wrote last week:

The blame for the reminiscence scarcity falls on the ft of the AI growth. The most important AI datacenter initiatives, like OpenAI’s multi-state Stargate project, have such an enormous demand for high-bandwidth reminiscence (HBM). Semiconductor firms are making such a revenue from these high-end reminiscence chips that they’ve decreased capability for consumer-level DRAM and SSD storage. Even main firms like Valve are struggling to source affordable RAM for its Steam Machine. One of many firm’s employees reportedly joked to trade insiders at GDC 2026, “When you’ve got a line on a bunch of RAM, we’re out there and want to purchase it.”

And storage is beginning to be affected throughout the board, not simply SSDs. Laborious drives are clearly cheaper than SSDs in the intervening time, however as this situation continues to worsen price hikes are bleeding into the hard drive market too. And in January, the costs of arduous drives have been 46% higher than they have been in September of final yr.