I bought a Microsoft Surface Laptop on 28 June. 3,624 dirhams.
The same one, same listing, same configuration, is 4,991 today.
Six weeks. Nearly forty per cent.
I wasn't even shopping. I went back to look at something else, saw the number, and assumed I'd opened the wrong model.
Nothing about the machine has changed. Same chip, same screen, same 16 gigabytes of memory. What changed is what that memory is worth to somebody else.
It's a 2024 design, and it isn't even the current one any more. The replacement had already landed in the UK and the US when I bought this, just not here yet. A model on its way out is normally how you save money. This one went the other way.
The companies that make it have been moving production toward the high-bandwidth memory that AI accelerators need, and there is only so much fab capacity to go round. Ordinary memory got scarce as a side effect. It now accounts for roughly a third of what it costs to build a laptop, against something closer to a fifth not long ago.
One shop's pricing is one shop's pricing, and retail moves for its own reasons. Except this isn't one shop. Microsoft put its own list prices up across the Surface range earlier this year and said plainly why: recent increases in memory and component costs.
Everyone keeps asking what AI is going to cost them. Most of that conversation is still about licences and headcount, somewhere in a budget cycle that hasn't landed yet.
It already landed. It's on the shelf in front of you, and nobody itemised it.