Amazon devices have become much more expensive thanks to the memory crisis

If you look at Amazon this week, you may notice that much of Amazon’s hardware has become noticeably more expensive. The company has quietly raised prices across the board, including on devices like its Echo, Kindle, Fire TV and eero lines. While not all price increases are huge, there are some pretty substantial increases.

The Echo Dot went from $49.99 to $79.99, while Amazon’s 16GB Kindle went from $109.99 to $149.99. The 16GB Kindle Paperwhite also went from $159.99 to $199.99, and even the Fire TV Stick 4K Max saw a bump, going to $84.99 from $59.99 previously. However, Ring products were not included in the increases at the moment, but a number of the company’s eero devices also saw their prices increase.

Amazon says rising component costs are the big problem to blame, with the company telling Fortune that the consumer electronics industry is facing “significant increases in memory and storage component costs.” Much like other companies that have followed this trend in recent months, Amazon says it absorbed these costs for as long as it could before raising its prices.

Amazon may be the latest to raise hardware prices, but it has plenty of company. Roku raised the prices of its streaming devices in July, with the company also blaming rising memory prices as the main driver. Along with Roku, these changes raise questions about the company’s future as an affordable streaming platform, but Amazon doesn’t face the same scrutiny. Indeed, its larger devices – like Kindles – face some competition, but largely occupy a strong position in their respective markets.

Other major tech companies such as Apple also increased their prices, with Macs, iPads, Apple TVs, HomePods and several other products seeing increases in June. The base iPad went from $349 to $449, while the MacBook Neo went from $599 to $699. The iPhone hasn’t seen a price increase this time around, but it’s probably only a matter of time before it does.

Samsung also increased prices on a number of Galaxy phones, tablets and laptops. On phones, the increases mainly hit higher storage configurations, with several 512GB and 1TB models increasing by $80. Tablets were hit much harder, however, with the 512GB Galaxy Tab S11 dropping from $979.99 to $1,199.99. Meanwhile, the 1TB Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra has dropped from $1,619.99 to $1,899.99. Samsung’s laptops weren’t spared either, with the 1TB Galaxy Book 6 Ultra increasing by $450, from $2,449.99 to $2,899.99.

Unfortunately, the price rise is unlikely to stop there. TrendForce currently expects DRAM prices to increase another 13-18% quarter-over-quarter in Q3 2026, while NAND Flash prices are expected to increase 10-15% from their current listings. As these prices rise on the manufacturer side, TrendForce expects this to trickle down even more to consumers, especially when it comes to more expensive devices like laptops. In fact, we’ve already seen some companies discussing returning to 8GB of RAM as the standard for newer laptops in 2026 and beyond.

Of course, the heart of the problem remains AI. As data centers continue to expand and memory manufacturers shift more of their capacity toward creating server-based DRAM and high-bandwidth memory, the space for consumer PC components is shrinking. And AI-driven manufacturing fields are expected to grow nearly 31% year-over-year, according to the most recent forecasts.

Increasing supply isn’t something manufacturers can do overnight, either. Samsung, SK Hynix and other suppliers are already increasing production, but it takes time to scale up and ramp up. The new DRAM capacities aren’t really expected to make a significant difference until the second half of 2027, or the following year, while it’s possible that NAND will be relieved sooner.