Artificial intelligence, which was supposed to make everyone's life easier, may soon make their phone more expensive. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is soon stepping down, openly warned that the next iPhone, Mac or iPad could go up in price - and that's because of something that sounds abstract but hits the wallet very concretely.

He named the cause "RAMageddon." AI's insatiable hunger for hardware is causing a global shortage of memory chips, and the prices of those chips have, according to Cook, risen fourfold compared to last year. In an interview, Cook said the price increases are "inevitable" and that the situation is "unsustainable" - a vocabulary that, from the mouth of one of the world's wealthiest tech executives, sounds almost like a justification in advance.

How concretely? Research firm TechInsights calculated that Apple would have to add another 270 dollars to the next iPhone Pro just to keep its profit margin untouched. The current iPhone 17 Pro starts at 1,099 dollars. In other words, the company isn't bearing the risk - the buyer is, who will pay more so that someone else's earnings aren't reduced.

The irony is complete. So far, AI has brought Apple no benefit at all - the company is already under pressure to figure out what its AI strategy even is, and this year it paid a 250 million dollar settlement to close a false-advertising lawsuit after it failed to deliver the AI features it promised two years ago. Now that same AI, through the chips it demands, is driving up its costs.

The new iPhone is expected in September, the ideal moment to announce a higher price under the cover of a "new model." And here at home, where an iPhone already costs as much as several monthly salaries, every price hike from Cupertino arrives with a delay, but never passes us by. The question is as old as technology itself: when the industry promises a revolution, why does the bill regularly land on those who profited from it the least?