AppleCare+ prices are going up for new Mac and iPad customers


Apple has raised the price of AppleCare+ subscriptions for new Mac and iPad customers, adding another expense to hardware that already became considerably more expensive last month. AppleCare+ provides technical support and repair coverage for accidental damage and other eligible issues.

Monthly AppleCare+ plans for Macs and iPads now cost $0.50 more, while annual plans have increased by $5. Existing subscribers will continue paying their current rates, as the change only applies to new sign-ups.

How much more will AppleCare+ cost?

For the 13-inch MacBook Air, AppleCare+ now costs $7.99 per month instead of $7.49, while the annual plan has risen from $74.99 to $79.99. Similar price increases apply to the Mac mini, Mac Studio, iMac, MacBook Pro, the standard iPad, M4 and M5 iPad Pro models, and the iPad mini. The increase looks small on its own, but it arrives shortly after Apple raised prices across its Mac, iPad, Vision Pro, HomePod, and Apple TV lineups. The current iPhone 17 lineup was the notable exception.

To soften the sticker shock after raising iPad prices, the Cupertino giant recently began offering three-year carrier financing on cellular models. The longer payment period lets buyers spread the cost over 36 months instead of relying on Apple Card’s 12-month financing plan.

Apple’s higher costs are spreading beyond hardware

Bloomberg links the latest increase to the global memory shortage and other challenges facing Apple. Demand for DRAM and NAND from AI companies has sent component costs climbing, forcing Apple to raise the prices across its mainline products after shielding customers for months.

The AppleCare+ adjustment may be another way for Apple to ease some of that pressure across its wider hardware business. It does not prove that memory costs directly caused the subscription increase, but the timing makes the connection difficult to overlook.

The iPhone may be next. Multiple supply chain reports suggest the iPhone 18 Pro lineup will cost significantly more than the current generation. The 1TB iPhone 18 Pro Max could reportedly rise by as much as $300, potentially pushing its price to $1,899.



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Recent Reviews


YouTube has an AI slop problem, and its crackdown is catching legitimate creators in the crossfire. Faceless channels, where no human host ever appears on screen, have existed for years and are not inherently AI-generated.

Many are run by solo creators who simply prefer to stay anonymous. The problem is that AI tools made it easy to flood the platform with low-effort faceless content at scale, and YouTube’s algorithm is now penalizing the format as a whole.

How bad is the AI slop problem on YouTube?

A Kapwing study found that roughly 21% of the first 500 videos recommended to a new YouTube account were classified as AI slop, while 33% fell into a broader brainrot category. The problem extends to children, too, as more than 40% of YouTube Shorts recommended to kids in a 15-minute session contained low-quality AI content.

YouTube’s response has been to tweak its algorithm to favor videos with real human faces on camera, which is hitting faceless creators even when their content is entirely human-made.

How is YouTube tackling its AI slop problem?

YouTube is now testing a new pop-up on mobile that asks viewers to rate whether a video feels like AI slop, on a scale from “not at all” to “extremely.” The idea sounds reasonable, but crowdsourcing AI detection has real problems. People are bad at spotting AI content, and they are getting worse at it as AI capabilities continue to improve.

There are also legitimate concerns that YouTube could use this viewer feedback as training data for its own AI models, potentially making future AI-generated content even harder to spot.

🚨 Did you just see what YouTube did?

YouTube isn’t banning AI slop.. They’re making you label it so they can train their next model to not look like slop.

Read that again…

You flag the bad AI content. YouTube collects it. Google feeds it into Veo 4… Then next year their… https://t.co/8UC2J3mjjv pic.twitter.com/mIrTChqC1b

— Tuki (@TukiFromKL) March 17, 2026

Meanwhile, faceless creators are scrambling to adapt. According to The Hollywood Reporter, some are hiring cheap on-camera hosts through platforms like Fiverr and Upwork. Others are doubling down on niche educational content, which has held up better than broad content farms.

The AI text-to-video space is still valued at enormous sums, with Higgsfield AI alone sitting at $1 billion, but on YouTube, the math for faceless creators is getting harder to work out every month.



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