Ah, SanDisk external SSDs with those big keychain loops. If you’re an average consumer, they’re awesome and convenient. If you’re a seasoned professional or data hoarder, they’re too unreliable, I’m told. At any rate, they look cool and they’re historically a relatively cheap place to stash some terabytes.
But not anymore—at least not if you buy yours from Apple (and I’ll give you one guess as to why).
Thanks to the hardware-devouring needs of AI data centers, Apple already hiked the prices of MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models by a hundred dollars each last week. But as Bloomberg’s Apple scoops guy Mark Gurman points out, Apple stores—both online and brick-and-mortar—have also sent the prices on external drives into the stratosphere. “For instance,” Gurman writes, “a SanDisk 4-terabyte solid-state external drive that once cost roughly $500 is now $1,200, while a 1-terabyte version has gone from $120 to $360.”
That second one is a 200% price hike. I haven’t seen a price increase so punishing since, uh, well, earlier today, when I put gas in my tank in Los Angeles.
Gurman is quick to point out that it’s not just SanDisk products that are seeing price spikes, and that vendors set prices, not Apple. It’s worth noting, however, that The Apple Store legal page says, “Apple reserves the right to change prices for products at the Apple Store at any time, and to correct 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 crisis threatening to boil over. As my colleague, Kyle Barr, wrote last week:
The blame for the memory shortage falls at the feet of the AI boom. The largest AI datacenter projects, like OpenAI’s multi-state Stargate project, have such a massive demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Semiconductor companies are making such a profit from these high-end memory chips that they have reduced capacity for consumer-level DRAM and SSD storage. Even major companies like Valve are struggling to source affordable RAM for its Steam Machine. One of the company’s staff reportedly joked to industry insiders at GDC 2026, “If you have a line on a bunch of RAM, we are in the market and would like to buy it.”
And storage is starting to be affected across the board, not just SSDs. Hard drives are clearly cheaper than SSDs for the time being, but as this situation continues to worsen price hikes are bleeding into the hard drive market too. And in January, the prices of hard drives were 46% higher than they were in September of last year.
Read the full article here
