Rising tech prices | Finance with Dan Roccato

Get ready to pay more for your next laptop, cell phone and other electronics. Memory chips are skyrocketing. The prices are now tech giants like Apple are already raising prices for this stuff. Finance professor Dan Mercado joins us live with some ways you can save. Dan, great to see you. Why the price hike now? Just in time for back to school shopping. Hi Katie, good morning to you. Listen, every time there's a new data center going up and there's lots of them here in Texas, well, guess what? They're using those memory chips along with everything else. And there's just not enough supply for all the demand for those chips. And that means prices are going up. In fact, almost double, Kate, since this time last year, when you look at the price of these memory chips that are manufactured across the world. And really, Kate, what's driving it is AI. Every time you and I use chat GPT or another AI tool, we are using capacity. We're using space and computing power tokens, they're called, based on or used, you know, supplied by these memory chips. And a lot of people are using AI a whole lot. Just personally, I use it all the time for different things. So how much are we talking? How much more will we pay for electronics? Yeah, well, Apple's announced, for example, $100 up to about, what, $300, I think, price increases on their popular MacBook Pro lines and computers. And you're also going to see the iPhone's going to become more expensive. Game systems, that Aura ring that you have, Kate, the next version of that's probably going to be more expensive. I don't know if you have one or not, but they're pretty cool. Yeah, they're pretty cool. So running pretty much across the board, if it has any kind of chip, if it depends on any processor, expect to pay more, Katie. Wow. And something I saw recently, there was a laptop that I had that was kind of running out of space, I needed to upgrade it. You can actually trade in your Apple devices, right? So that would probably be a good way for people to save some money, right? Yeah, daughter number three just traded in her Apple iPhone. Come to think of it, she's still on our family plan, daughter number three. Thank you, Kate, for that remark. No, I'm so sorry to her. She's a physician, by the way, so she's got to come off. Anyway, daughter number three traded in her old iPhone for a new one. She got a couple hundred bucks, I think, credit for that. That's one of the strategies I recommend. Sell your old device, trade it in, you'll get some discount there. If you're a student, hey, how about those student discounts? Apple offers an education discount. Let's take advantage of that. And you know, dirty little secret in the tech business I learned a long time ago. There's really not that much of a difference between models, between versions. Last year's iPhone versus this year's iPhone. The difference is, in my opinion, pretty slight. Yeah, no, I agree with you for sure. Great ways to save, Dan. Thanks for joining us this morning. Yeah, maybe time to get your daughter off that plan. My parents kicked me off years ago. Thanks, Kate. Sad day.