Microsoft's already pricey Surface laptops have suddenly got a whole lot pricier and you know exactly what to blame for this

If you mosey on over to Microsoft's Surface store, you might spot something a little alarming, but not in the least bit surprising. Yes, that's right: the prices for every model have increased, with some variants now starting at $500 more than they did at launch. And if you want to point the finger of blame at something, you can join Microsoft in gesticulating wildly at the global memory supply crisis.

The hefty price hikes were spotted by our chums over at Windows Central, and if you're a fan of Microsoft's laptops and tablets, it won't make for pleasant viewing. How about a starting price of $1,500 bar a cent for the base 13-inch Surface Pro, with 16 GB of memory and a 512 GB SSD? Err, no thank you.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with my 11-inch Surface, which I use exclusively for work trips. It's very compact and lightweight, making it perfect for stuffing into a carry-on bag when flying. It's also rather slow, a tad prone to overheating, and has a battery life that's underwhelming, if I'm being generous.

The closest current-generation Surface laptop that I could replace it with, should I feel the urge, is a 12-inch model, powered by an eight-core Snapdragon X processor. It has 16 GB of memory and a 256 GB, which is better than what I have to use at the moment, but Microsoft wants me to hand over $1,150. That's around $250 more than at launch.

It's also nearly double the price of the base Apple MacBook Neo. Sure, that only has 8 GB of memory, and it's basically an iPhone stuffed inside a laptop shell, but for doing simple work on the go, I know where my money would be going.

Now, we all know why this has happened, because tech news is pretty much all directly related to it: the global supply shortage of DRAM and flash memory, caused by the insatiable appetite (and copious wallet) of the AI industry. There are relatively few sectors unaffected by this in the PC market right now, and while it has taken a few months for computer vendors to ramp up their prices, we've only just started to see the hikes take hold.

Give it another six to eight months, and it's likely to be even worse. Some vendors may well find themselves priced right out of the market. Even Microsoft, with all its money and gravitas, can't escape the fact that there simply aren't enough memory and storage chips going around, and they're being priced accordingly.

It is perhaps rather ironic that Microsoft itself has played a role in all of this, because it's been at the forefront of the rise in generative AI, and has banged that drum hard for well over a year. It's also spent billions of dollars on data centers and AI accelerators, to push Copilot into every nook and crevice of Microsoft's portfolio.

Under different circumstances, I could be pushed to smile wryly if all of this resulted in the collapse of the Surface. But instead, I'm just feeling an ever-increasing sense of gloom that the entire PC industry seems hell-bent on self-destruction, all because a handful of tech giants can see nothing but the dollar signs that AI is waving in front of them.