Apple sez iPhone price hikes are inevitable. Due to AI data centers using up all the memory chips on earth. Apple also built 22 data centers recently.

Photo above - NOT a screen-shot from "Yellowstone". A Mongolian woman astride her Bactrian camel, contemplating whether the 8 ounces of fresh water AI requires to compose an email is a good tradeoff.

This morning I was going to lead with the tech news tidbit that “AI uses 8 ounces of water to produce a 100 word email". I’m not linking to this, because immediately pundits began ranting this estimate was either way too low or too high. You can google it for yourself.

Instead, today’s link is to Apple’s CEO warning us that the next gen of iPhones - and probably future deliveries of current gen phones – will be astonishingly more expensive. This is because nobody can make memory chips quickly enough to keep phones and tablets affordable. Those chips are all being bought up by data centers. Which are now building their own electric power plants and will possibly need their own sea water desalinization plants, which could require MORE electricity.

The next gen iPhones will be “optimized” to run AI. Presumably because current gen phones and tablets were crappy already? For several update cycles the only thing that changed on phones was the number of cameras, number of pixels, and zoom. Voice calls, text messages, and mobile gaming haven’t advanced in any way. Presumably AI is going to enrich our smartphone lives by making gaming more fun, or writing cleverer emails?

I am completely OK with Tim Cook jacking up iPhone prices every year. I have a Samsung S25 which apparently has an unbreakable screen and a battery that lasts as long as an EV. No upgrade needed. I’m okay with just 4 cameras (1 front, 3 rear).

I’m probably not OK with every tech company on earth building dozens and dozens of AI data centers, in hopes of achieving supremacy through sheer size. Inevitably there will be only a couple of survivors, just like there are only a couple of smart phone survivors. Those smart phone survivors did not achieve pre-eminence because of the number of assembly lines which were built in Mongolia, Guangdong province, or Bengaluru India. Foxconn – a leading component assembler of both Android and iPhones walked away from its half-finished factory in Wisconsin after pocketing $1 billion in free government money. Now Microsoft claims it will build its next data center there. Stop laughing – this is really true.

I have a friend (between jobs) who has a tablet, smartphone, and laptop - Hat Trick! And each is running some sort of agentic AI job. Her total subscription costs are only $20 per month across several platforms. But since these agents aren’t making her any money in the stock market, or saving time composing business documents, I regard her use of agentic AI as a sort of videogame. When you program something that works, you win. When it underwhelms, then you have to start over, like playing Final Fantasy VI . . .

In the meantime The People’s Republic of Chinese billionaires buys up all the rare earth mines in places like Botsawa and Tanzania. This in addition to controlling expensive minerals only found in China's own deserts. Stuff like neodymium and dystopian-sum. China is also planning to “reunify” itself with Taiwan, to commandeer the world's most valuable chip factory.

I wonder if Tim Cook is looking far enough ahead on pricing, when it comes to chips and the rare earths they need? The current round of iPhone price increases could be a cakewalk compared to the future.

I’m just sayin’ . . .



Apple CEO Tim Cook warns AI-driven price increases are unavoidable — says company is trying its best but 'the situation has become unsustainable' | Tom's Hardware

https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/apple-ceo-tim-cook-warns-ai-driven-price-increases-are-unavoidable-says-company-is-trying-its-best-but-the-situation-has-become-unsustainable