I spent the back half of last year waiting for the tariffs to die so my next peripheral would get cheaper. The tariffs died in February. The peripheral did not get cheaper.
That’s the whole post, really, but it’s worth understanding why. Because the reason isn’t the one everybody’s been yelling about. And it changes what you should do about the gear on your wishlist.
I bought a MacBook Air last December, and I’ve rarely felt smarter about a purchase. Not because of anything I did, just my timing.
This week, Apple’s Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that price increases are now “unavoidable”, and the new M5 MacBook Air that’s so alluring may not have quite the same price luster in a few months.
Same machine tier but one or two hundred bucks more, with the CEO promising the trend will continue. I didn’t beat the market. I just happened to walk out of the store before it caught fire.
At a Glance
Writing gear is climbing in 2026, and the culprit isn’t tariffs (struck down in February, though the hikes stuck) but the AI memory shortage, with DRAM up roughly 50% in a year and no relief expected before 2027. Buy the memory-heavy stuff now, e-ink tablets, noise-cancelling headphones, wireless keyboards, and laptops, because waiting costs you. The analog kit and software subscriptions can wait, since neither has chips driving the price.
This isn’t your imagination
Prices on the stuff writers actually buy are climbing, and it’s not happening gently.
Morningstar projects durable goods, which is where your keyboards, headphones, and e-ink tablets live, will rise about 4.5% in 2026, with non-durables like paper and notebooks up closer to 5.6%. So your Moleskine and your mechanical keyboard are both getting pricier, just for different reasons.
There are two forces at work. One is loud and political and somewhat over (we hope).
The other is not as noisy, is structural, and is the one you should actually be planning around.
Force one: the tariff whiplash
For most of 2025, tariffs were the villain in every price-hike story. Then, in February 2026, the Supreme Court struck them down, ruling that the administration’s emergency-powers tariffs were never legal in the first place. You can read Brookings for the grown-up version.
You’d think that would mean refunds and falling prices. It didn’t, for two reasons.
First, duties didn’t actually disappear. The administration re-imposed a global tariff under a different statute and started fresh investigations under two others, so the levies got relabeled rather than removed.
Second, and more annoyingly, the price increases retailers already took are sticky. As one retail analyst put it, prices that went up are not coming back down. Companies raised them, customers paid, and nobody ever volunteers to give margin back.
For your purposes, the Consumer Technology Association modeled what tariffs do to specific categories, and the numbers aren’t fun: headphones around 22% higher, laptops and tablets around 34%. Even with the legal reversal, that pressure is baked into shelf prices now.
So tariffs raised the floor and then left the building. Which brings us to the thing that’s really pushing the ceiling up.
Force two: the AI memory shortage (the real story)
The world’s memory chips, the DRAM and flash storage inside basically every device with a brain, are being vacuumed up by AI data centers.
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron would rather sell high-margin memory to companies building server farms than sell consumer-grade chips to companies building your laptop, so they’ve redirected capacity accordingly.
Thanks, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and whoever else is eyeing their AI IPO prospects.
The result is brutal. DRAM prices have roughly jumped 50% in a year, with Samsung pushing some module prices up 60% in a single month.
IDC expects PCs, tablets, and phones to climb 10 to 20% by the end of 2026, and calls this less a normal cycle than a possible permanent reallocation of the world’s chip-making capacity. RedShark spelled out what that means for creative folks specifically, which is to say us.
This is why Cook’s “unavoidable” comment matters more than any tariff headline.
Apple is the most ruthless supply-chain operator on earth, the gorilla that locks in component deals years ahead, and even it’s throwing up its hands. When Apple can’t absorb the hit, your favorite mid-size keyboard brand has no chance.
The cruel twist: tariffs were a policy choice that could be reversed, and were. The memory shortage is just supply and demand, and it’s forecast to grind on into 2027.
So, buy now or wait?
Here’s a priority list that’s not too panic-driven. Well, maybe a little.
Not everything on your desk is equally exposed. The rule of thumb is simple: the more memory and silicon inside it, the harder it gets hit.
Most exposed. Anything with real chips and storage. E-ink tablets like the Kindle Scribe and reMarkable 2. Noise-cancelling headphones like the Sony WH-1000XM5 or the Sennheiser HD 450BT. Wireless mechanical keyboards like the Keychron K8 or Logitech MX Keys S. And of course laptops and tablets, where memory can be a third of the bill of materials. These are the products where waiting genuinely costs you.
Moderately exposed. Desk electronics with a lighter silicon footprint, like the BenQ ScreenBar. Some upward drift, less drama.
Barely exposed. Your analog kit. Pilot Varsity pens, HP printer paper, Moleskine notebooks. These are creeping up on plain old inflation and freight, not chips, so the increases are real but slow, and there’s no supply cliff to race.
The goal was never to own the most gear. It’s to own the right gear, and to walk out of the store before the next spike hits.
Where this goes next
Three things to expect, none of them cheerful. The memory shortage runs into 2027 by most forecasts, so relief isn’t a 2026 event.
The tariff picture stays in what one analyst beautifully called “the certainty of uncertainty,” meaning new duties under new legal authorities, arriving without much warning. And manufacturers will keep quietly finding ways to retain margin: holding storage tiers flat instead of upgrading them, trimming a feature here and there, so “same price” increasingly means “less device.” Watch the spec sheet, not just the sticker.
What you should not expect is a clean reset to 2024 pricing. That ship has memory chips in it, and it’s sailed.
FAQ
Will prices drop if these new tariffs get struck down too? Probably not in any way you’ll feel. Tariff reversals haven’t lowered shelf prices because the increases are sticky, and the bigger driver right now is the memory shortage, which has nothing to do with trade policy.
Is the memory shortage really going to last into 2027? That’s the consensus. IDC and others describe it as a structural reallocation of chip-making capacity toward AI, not a short cyclical blip, with elevated pricing expected to persist past 2026.
Should I buy refurbished or last-gen to dodge the increase? For memory-heavy devices, that’s a reasonable hedge. A prior-generation model bought before its refresh often locks in the older price, which is essentially what happened with my MacBook Air. Just weigh the usual refurbished tradeoffs around warranty and battery life.
Does any of this hit software tools like Grammarly? No, and that’s the quiet upside. Subscription writing tools don’t have chips or tariffs in their cost structure, so their pricing is insulated from all of this. If you’ve been weighing a one-time hardware splurge against a software subscription, the math just shifted a little toward software.