Ah, SanDisk external SSDs with those big keychain loops. If you are an average consumer, they are amazing and convenient. Whether you are a seasoned professional or a data hoarder, They are too unreliable, I‘they told me. In any case, they look great and historically are a relatively cheap place to store a few terabytes.
But not anymore, at least not if you buy yours from Apple (and I’ll give you an idea why).
Thanks to the hardware-consuming needs of AI data centers, Apple already raised the prices of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models by one hundred dollars each last week. But as Bloomberg says Apple keeps the guy, says Mark GurmanApple stores, both online and physical, have also sent external drive prices into the stratosphere. “For example,” Gurman writes, “a 4-terabyte SanDisk external solid-state drive that previously cost about $500 now costs $1,200, while a 1-terabyte version has gone from $120 to $360.”
That second is a 200% price increase. I haven’t seen a price increase this severe since, well, today, when 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 increases, and that suppliers set prices, not Apple. However, it is worth noting that the Apple Store legal page says“Apple reserves the right to change product prices in the Apple Store at any time and to correct inadvertent pricing errors.” So it doesn’t seem like SanDisk has a gun to Apple’s head.
The demand for storage and RAM is a latent crisis that threatens to overflow. Like my colleague, Kyle Barr, wrote last week:
The blame for the memory shortage lies with the rise of AI. The largest AI data center projects, such as OpenAI’s multi-state Stargate projectThey have such a huge demand for high bandwidth memory (HBM). Semiconductor companies are making so much profit on these high-end memory chips that they have reduced DRAM and SSD storage capacity at the consumer level. Even major companies like Valve are struggling to get affordable RAM for your Steam Machine. One of the company’s employees. he supposedly joked to industry experts at GDC 2026: “If you have a line with a lot of RAM, we are in the market and we 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 at the moment, but As this situation continues to worsen, price increases are also coming to the hard drive market.. And in January, hard drive prices were 46% higher than in September of last year.
