At the end of June this year, Apple temporarily shut down its website. After it reopened, the prices of Mac and iPad products both increased. The price increase for notebook products exceeded 15%, and the higher-priced models saw even larger price hikes. The increase for the tablet product line was around 25%. Globally, the trend of this price increase was basically consistent. Currently, the price of iPhone has not changed, but many market experts believe that the next round of price increase is likely to involve the iPhone series.
Why did this price increase come so suddenly?
Apple officials attributed the price increase to the rapid development of their AI business. As a result, the demand for memory and storage chips has soared significantly, and the purchase cost of chips has risen rapidly over the past period. Apple CEO Cook described the current supply chain tension as “once-in-a-century”. He said that after working for 40 years, he had never witnessed such a drastic fluctuation.
In the past, Apple was able to maintain stable prices mainly because it had signed long-term contracts with suppliers in advance. These contracts fixed the low purchase prices, allowing Apple to stockpile a large number of low-cost chips. However, by the middle of this year, most of these low-priced stocks had been used up. Once the purchasing costs increased, Apple hiked all new MacBook Air and Pro prices​.
Global prices are not uniform. You need to have a “local” identity.
Although this price increase is global in scope, the actual selling prices in different markets may not be exactly the same. Exchange rate fluctuations, local tax rates, and local marketing strategies all affect the final selling price. If you want to systematically compare the actual selling prices in each market, you will need to use a tool called “Residential IP”.
What is a residential IP? In simple terms, it is the network address allocated by broadband operators to ordinary household users. Each residential IP corresponds to a resident broadband line, and is exactly the same as the resources used for internet access at home. In contrast, there are data center IPs. These IPs are located in server rooms and have a more concentrated address range, with distinct characteristics. The security systems of shopping websites can easily identify these IPs and then impose restrictions on them.
So, why is price monitoring inseparable from residential IP? Because nowadays, shopping websites display different content based on the visitor’s IP address. Prices, currency units, and promotional activities may all change depending on the location of the IP. If you access an American website using a Chinese IP address, the page you see is likely not the actual page that local users in the United States would see. If you frequently view a certain product page using the same IP address, the website will quickly identify you as an automated program. In the mild case, it may require you to enter a verification code; in the severe case, it may directly block your access.
The residential IP can precisely solve these problems. By switching different residential IPs, you can make each visit appear as if it comes from an ordinary user from a different region. In this way, the website will display the price information for each market.
Residential IP vs. Data Center IP: Which one is more suitable for long-term monitoring?
There are significant differences in cost and effectiveness between residential IP and data center IP. Data center IP is cheaper and easier to obtain, but it is easily identifiable. Residential IP comes from home broadband and appears more natural, making it less likely to be intercepted. However, residential IP has fewer resources and is relatively more expensive. For tasks such as price monitoring that require long-term stable operation, although residential IP is more costly, the success rate of data collection is also more guaranteed. According to some practical cases, after using a residential IP address​, the success rate of data collection can increase from around 50% to over 90%.
Practical Operation: Three Steps to Build Your Price Monitoring Process
If you want to conduct a global price comparison analysis, you can follow the steps below to do so.
Step 1: Choose a service provider that offers a static residential IP
These service providers have family IP resources from various countries and regions. Good service providers have a wide coverage area, stable connections, and low latency.
Step 2: Select a product as the analysis sample
Taking the iPad Air as an example is quite appropriate. This product has seen a significant price increase and is sold in major markets around the world. You can choose markets such as the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom as the observation points.
Step 3: Start collecting data
Before visiting the official website of each country, make sure to switch your IP to the corresponding country. Only in this way will the page you see be exactly the same as what ordinary consumers in that country would see. You can write a simple program to complete the data collection. This program will automatically switch the IP, access the target webpage, and then extract the price information from the webpage.
When operating, two points need to be noted: For each request, a different IP address should be used; do not reuse the same one consecutively. There should be a random interval of several seconds to several tens of seconds between each visit, so as to conform to the normal browsing rhythm of ordinary users when accessing web pages. The collected data should be saved separately by product and region.
After obtaining the data, what questions can be answered?
Once a sufficient amount of data has been accumulated, you can try to analyze the following questions.
Are the price increases in each market the same?
Apple claims it’s a global price increase, but factors such as exchange rates may cause the actual increase to vary. You can compare which market has the largest increase and which has the smallest increase.
Will the third-party channels also increase their prices?
After the official price increase, will large-scale e-commerce platforms immediately follow suit or wait a few days before making adjustments? The response speed of different platforms may vary.
How long can the price of iPhone remain stable?
This time, Apple did not adjust the price of the iPhone. However, industry experts generally believe that this is only a temporary situation. By continuously monitoring the changes in iPhone inventory and promotional activities, you might be able to predict the timing of the next price increase in advance.
What kind of chain reaction will the second-hand market cause?
The price increase of new models often affects the market situation in the second-hand market. Will there be people hoarding large quantities of goods? Will the prices of second-hand transactions also rise accordingly? These pieces of information can also be obtained through the residential IP on the second-hand trading platform.
How much will it cost to set up this system? Is it worth it?
The establishment of such a price monitoring system involves two main expenditures.
The first item is the usage fee for the residential IP.
Such services are generally charged based on IP. If you fix the target area for collection, the duration of the static IP session will be quite long, and there is no limit on the data traffic. Therefore, the consumption will not be too high, and the overall cost is within an acceptable range.
The second item is the cost for technology development and daily maintenance.
You need someone to write the collection program, set up the database, and create the analysis reports. For a small team, one person can handle all these tasks.
As for the returns, if you are involved in e-commerce procurement or market research, precise price information can help you make more reasonable decisions. Sometimes the money saved from a single purchasing decision is enough to cover the entire cost of the entire monitoring system.
How to Choose the Right Residential IP
Rather than spending time on self-checking and trial and error, it is better to directly choose a high-purity residential IP to avoid risks at the source. Novproxy offers highly pure IP for price collection, precisely addressing core issues such as IP contamination, high sharing rate, and unreliable types.
Independent fixed IP, exclusively for a single user
During the period, the IP remains unchanged. Only you are using it, eliminating the risk of mutual accountability; the login information remains consistent for a long time, and it will not trigger the remote alert.
Domestic civilian ISP, with friendly risk control measures
The IP address is identified as a local home broadband connection, not a data center label. The verification code and interception frequency have significantly decreased.
Unlimited data, stable connection
All-weather connectivity, no data limit, applicable to all types of services; supports 7/30/90-day subscription, bulk purchase offers up to 25% discount, and special terms can be negotiated for major clients.
Precise city-level matching, compatible with multiple protocols
Support allocation of different cities/operators’ IPs based on accounts to avoid clustering identification; compatible with HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5, supports account password and whitelist verification, and is compatible with fingerprint browsers.
Conclusion
The direct cause of Apple’s price increase this time is the rise in chip costs. The underlying background is that AI technology is reshaping the supply and demand pattern of the entire supply chain. Storage chip manufacturers have made a lot of money in this environment, while end consumers ultimately bear most of the costs. In this situation, if you can grasp the prices and change trends of various global markets in advance, you can gain more initiative. The residential IP, as a tool for obtaining price information, is becoming increasingly important. Especially when you need to browse local websites as a local user, you should choose a more stable and secure native static IP.