On August 10, 2026, longtime Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo confirmed what component buyers and PC builders had suspected for months: the memory shortage rattling the AI industry has reached Cupertino’s own shipment planning. Kuo said Apple is scaling back its 2026 hardware shipment plans because of a DRAM shortage, a claim first reported by MacRumors and picked up quickly across the tech press.
The news lands just eleven days after Apple posted record fiscal third-quarter revenue of $109.4 billion, proof that even the world’s most valuable hardware company cannot fully dodge a memory crunch now reshaping prices on Macs, iPads, and soon, iPhones. This is the story of how an AI-driven DRAM shortage moved from spreadsheets in Boise and Icheon to the shelves of the Apple Store, and what it means for anyone weighing a new Mac, iPad, or iPhone before the holidays.
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What Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo Actually Said
Kuo’s note, cited by MacRumors reporter Juli Clover, was actually a rebuttal. A separate report had claimed TSMC was sitting on $1 billion worth of unpackaged Apple processors, chips stuck in limbo while Apple hunted for enough memory to pair with them. Kuo pushed back on that specific framing. He said Apple typically plans processor production at least three months ahead, based on how much memory it expects to have on hand, so TSMC would not be left holding a billion dollars of idle work-in-progress.
“Tight memory supply is real. But my understanding is that there has been no dramatic scenario in which TSMC first built up US$1 billion of WIP and then had to wait for memory to arrive before packaging could proceed,” Kuo wrote, adding that “TSMC and Apple are both known for world-class execution, and such a dramatic development would be unusual given how closely the two companies coordinate their supply chains.” (MacRumors)
In other words, Kuo is not disputing that Apple faces a real DRAM shortage. He is disputing how dramatic one specific supply chain story made it sound. Notably, a separate report from Tom’s Hardware, published August 6, 2026, had already narrowed that picture: it pegged the stuck inventory specifically at roughly $1 billion worth of A20 Pro processor wafers, the chip destined for the iPhone 18 Pro, awaiting packaging, a more targeted figure than the broad Apple-processors framing Kuo was pushing back on. That distinction matters for anyone trying to gauge how serious Apple’s hardware shipments problem actually is heading into the holiday quarter.
Which Apple Products Are Already Feeling the Squeeze
Three Mac models have already run into the memory shortage head-on: the Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Air, according to Kuo’s reporting. This is not the first warning sign for the Mac Studio specifically: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported on April 19, 2026 that DRAM shortages had already pushed the M5 Ultra Mac Studio’s launch from its planned June 2026 window to October 2026. The strain showed up at the configuration level even before that: MacRumors reported in May 2026 that Apple had quietly capped the M3 Ultra Mac Studio at a maximum of 96GB of unified memory, while the remaining in-stock configurations slipped to 9-to-10-week delivery estimates. Apple has not detailed exactly how output was adjusted on those lines, but the acknowledgment alone is notable coming from a company that rarely discusses production planning in public.
The bigger question is what happens next, and Kuo has already put a number on it. In a note covered by Yahoo Finance in June 2026, he forecast that Apple will receive 10% to 20% fewer A20 chips than planned between the second half of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027, a shortfall he traced directly to tight LPDDR memory supply. That forecast has already started showing up in hard numbers: Fortune reported in October 2026 that iPhone 18 Pro component orders were running at least 15% below Apple’s original plan, the clearest confirmation yet that Kuo’s mid-year warning is translating into real order cuts rather than remaining a risk on paper. That forecast lines up with Kuo’s broader warning that the same memory constraints are likely to reach upcoming iPhone models too. Specifically at risk are the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and Apple’s rumored foldable device, widely referred to in supply chain reports as the iPhone Ultra. MacRumors expects those models could sell out during preorders simply because Apple cannot build enough of them, not because demand outstrips a normal, healthy supply.
Why Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Air Got Hit First
The three models Kuo named share something that sets them apart from the rest of Apple’s Mac lineup: each is the highest-volume, thinnest-margin entry point into its category. Mac Studio anchors Apple’s professional desktop tier, Mac mini is the cheapest way into the Mac ecosystem, and MacBook Air is widely considered Apple’s best-selling laptop. All three are built around Apple Silicon’s unified memory architecture, which pools memory for the CPU and GPU into a single package soldered in at the factory rather than letting a buyer add commodity RAM later the way most Windows PC makers can. That design has been a performance selling point for years. It becomes a liability the moment DRAM itself runs short, because every unit Apple ships needs its full memory allocation locked in before it ever reaches a store shelf, with no lower-memory configuration to fall back on.
Kuo’s report did not name the Mac Pro or the higher-memory MacBook Pro configurations as affected, and that gap lines up with a pattern already visible in Apple’s own pricing. The entry-level iPad absorbed a 29% price increase in June, roughly nine percentage points steeper than the next-largest jump in Apple’s price table, the iPad Pro’s 20.0%. Apple’s most expensive, highest-margin hardware has enough cushion to absorb higher component costs without touching shipment volume. Its cheapest, highest-volume hardware does not, which is the most direct explanation available for why Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Air, and not the Mac Pro, are the three models Kuo flagged first.
That distinction matters beyond Mac shoppers, because it is also the clearest lens for reading Kuo’s warning about the iPhone 18 lineup. The models he flagged as most exposed, the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the rumored foldable iPhone Ultra, are higher-volume, higher-demand configurations within Apple’s most profitable product line, not the base iPhone 18. If the Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Air pattern holds, the constraint shows up first as tighter allocation on the models Apple sells the most of and can least afford to under-supply, well before it shows up as a blanket price increase across the entire lineup.
The Apple Price Hikes, By the Numbers
Apple already made its first move on June 25, 2026, raising Mac, iPad, and Vision Pro prices by $100 to $300 apiece, along with increases on Apple TV and HomePod, citing higher memory and storage costs, CNBC reported. Investors reacted immediately: Apple shares fell roughly 6% in the aftermath of the announcement, according to Wikipedia’s account of the price hike. CEO Tim Cook had gone further than a general warning, telling the Wall Street Journal in comments cited by CNBC in June 2026, and echoed in Reuters’ own reporting that same month, that Apple planned product price increases specifically because rising memory and storage costs were squeezing the company. That decision tracked what Apple had already been paying to secure supply: AppleInsider reported that by February 2026, Apple was already paying roughly double what it had paid for RAM just a year earlier, and a Morgan Stanley note cited by DigiTimes in January 2026 found Apple had accepted sequential DRAM price hikes of more than 50% just to lock in chips through the first quarter of 2026, even then securing NAND contracts covering all of 2026 while its DRAM commitments ran out at the end of that first quarter.
| Product | Price Before June 2026 | Price After June 2026 | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| MacBook Air | $1,099 | $1,299 | +18.2% |
| MacBook Pro | $1,699 | $1,999 | +17.7% |
| iPad (entry-level) | $349 | $449 | +29% |
| iPad Pro | $999 | $1,199 | +20.0% |
| iPhone (as of August 2026) | No increase yet | Change expected September 2026 | TBD |
The steepest jump landed on Apple’s cheapest iPad, which rose 29%, more than any other product in the lineup. That is a telling detail: entry-level hardware, the products with the thinnest margins to begin with, absorbs shortage-driven cost increases the hardest. So far, the iPhone lineup has avoided a price increase, though that could change once Apple prices the iPhone 18 series in September.
What the Price Hikes Actually Add Up To
Viewed individually, each price increase in the table above reads like a routine adjustment. Viewed together, they describe one coordinated repricing of Apple’s entire non-phone hardware lineup inside a single quarter. A household replacing one of each product listed here, an entry iPad, an iPad Pro, a MacBook Air, and a MacBook Pro, would pay $800 more combined today than it would have before June 25, 2026, a gap wider than the price of the cheapest iPad Apple currently sells.
That $800 is not spread evenly. The entry iPad’s 29% increase is the steepest of the four, well ahead of the MacBook Air’s 18.2%, the MacBook Pro’s 17.7%, and the iPad Pro’s 20.0%. In dollar terms, the MacBook Pro’s $300 increase is the largest single jump, but in percentage terms Apple’s cheapest product absorbed by far the hardest hit. That $300 also layered on top of an earlier repricing: when Apple launched the redesigned 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips on March 4, 2026, some configurations already carried price tags up to $800 higher than the prior generation, according to Seoul Economic Daily, meaning the June increase compounded a hike that had begun months earlier. Both readings point to the same conclusion: the shortage is not taxing Apple’s lineup evenly, it is taxing the products Apple sells in the highest volume the hardest, the same dynamic Kuo’s Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Air reporting already describes on the shipment side.
That pattern is also why the predictions later in this piece point toward the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the rumored foldable Ultra, rather than the base iPhone 18, as the configurations most likely to face supply constraints once September pricing arrives. Apple protected its entire phone lineup from any price increase during the June round even as it raised Mac and iPad prices by as much as 29%. Whether that protection holds once iPhone 18 production ramps into a tighter memory market is one of the biggest open questions hanging over Apple’s holiday quarter.
Why AI Data Centers Are Winning the Memory War
The root cause is not unique to Apple, and it was already visible in January 2026, when Apple itself said rising memory prices were pressuring its profit margins while Reuters separately reported that Samsung and SK Hynix, two of the industry’s largest memory makers, were shifting production capacity toward AI-grade DRAM rather than the commodity chips consumer device makers depend on. Memory manufacturers are steering a growing share of DRAM and high-bandwidth memory toward AI data center customers, where contracts pay better than consumer electronics deals. IDC has described the shift as hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon effectively outbidding phone and PC makers for the same wafers, according to TechRepublic’s analysis of the memory shortage. Apple is not simply absorbing that squeeze passively: TechPowerUp reported in July 2026 that Apple sourced the bulk of its DRAM from Micron, with Samsung and SK hynix rounding out the rest of its supplier base, and that Apple was already exploring CXMT’s LPDDR5X memory as an additional source even before the shortage became mainstream news. That exploration became public confirmation a month later: as of August 2026, the company was reportedly testing memory from China’s CXMT for use across iPhones and MacBooks as a way to diversify its supply base and mitigate the AI-driven component shortage, according to a Wall Street Journal report cited by Reuters.
The scale of that shift shows up in industry-wide numbers. The global semiconductor market generated $702 billion in the first half of 2026, up 102% year over year, with memory revenue alone climbing 305% year over year, according to WSTS data cited by SemiEngineering. Analysts tracking the space now expect full-year 2026 semiconductor revenue to approach $1.65 trillion. TrendForce found that conventional DRAM prices had already surged 90% to 95% quarter over quarter in the first quarter of 2026, a spike that fed directly into Apple’s own bill of materials: as far back as December 24, 2025, the 12GB LPDDR5X memory module used in the iPhone 17 Pro had already jumped from roughly $25-$29 to about $70 per unit, a 230% cost surge, according to MSN and Wccftech, squeezing Apple’s margins months before the shortage became a mainstream story. By the third quarter of 2026, TrendForce estimated memory alone accounted for roughly 34% of the bill of materials on an iPhone Pro, a share that would have been unthinkable before the AI memory boom. That single line item was not an outlier: IBTimes reported in June 2026 that Apple’s memory components overall were costing the company roughly four times more year-over-year. Contract pricing tells a similar story: DRAM prices rose 13% to 18% quarter over quarter in the third quarter of 2026, and NAND flash gained 10% to 15% over the same stretch. Gartner’s 2026 outlook goes further, projecting DRAM prices up 125% and NAND up 234% for the full year, and J.P. Morgan’s October 2026 forecast frames the cycle in even starker terms, projecting DRAM prices will have risen more than 400% between early 2024 and the end of 2026.
Micron’s Blowout Quarter Shows Who Is Winning the Memory Squeeze
If Apple is absorbing the cost side of the shortage, Micron is capturing the profit. The Boise-based chipmaker reported fiscal third-quarter 2026 revenue of $41.46 billion, with GAAP net income of $28.24 billion and a non-GAAP gross margin of 84.9%, according to the company’s earnings release. DRAM alone generated $31.3 billion of that revenue, with NAND contributing $9.9 billion.
Micron’s own pricing commentary explains why device makers are under pressure. The company said DRAM average selling prices climbed in the low-60% range quarter over quarter, while NAND pricing jumped in the mid-80% range over the same period. For the fiscal fourth quarter, Micron guided to roughly $50 billion in revenue and an 86% gross margin, a level few chipmakers have ever posted, as Tech Times reported from the earnings call.
| Micron Metric (Fiscal Q3 2026) | Value | Trend |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue | $41.46 billion | Guided to ~$50B in FQ4 |
| GAAP net income | $28.24 billion | Record quarter |
| Non-GAAP gross margin | 84.9% | Guided to ~86% in FQ4 |
| DRAM revenue | $31.3 billion | ASPs up low-60s% QoQ |
| NAND revenue | $9.9 billion | ASPs up mid-80s% QoQ |
Inside Apple’s Own Earnings: Record Revenue, Rising Cracks
Apple’s fiscal third-quarter 2026 results, released July 30, arrived just eleven days before Kuo’s shipment note and painted a company still performing at a high level on paper. Revenue hit $109.4 billion, up 16% year over year, with diluted earnings per share of $2.02, up 29%. Tim Cook called it the company’s strongest June quarter ever, though the cost pressure behind the scenes was not new: Cook had already flagged rising DRAM costs as significant enough to weigh on quarterly profitability as far back as January 2026, Reuters reported. Apple made that trajectory explicit the following month: MacRumors reported in July 2026 that the company had paid more for memory components in the June quarter than it had in March, and that it expected the September quarter to cost more still. On the earnings call the next day, July 31, executives confirmed those memory costs had risen every quarter since December 2025 and were expected to keep climbing through the September quarter, a detail relayed via Yahoo Finance’s coverage of the call. CFO Kevan Parekh said he was very pleased with results that included record operating cash flow, according to Apple’s own newsroom release.
Mac revenue was the standout line at $10.35 billion, up 28.7% year over year and well past Wall Street’s estimate of $8.74 billion. iPad told a different story: revenue fell 5.9% to $6.19 billion over the same quarter, even after the entry-level model’s 29% price increase in June, a split examined in detail below. Apple credited double-digit growth in every geographic segment, but added a caveat that matters more in hindsight: that growth came despite supply constraints. Guidance for the September quarter called for gross margin of 47% to 48%, including roughly one point of benefit from tariff refunds, alongside operating expenses of $19.1 billion to $19.4 billion, a forecast some coverage read as cautious given the memory backdrop.
iPad Sales Fall Even as Prices Climb: What the Split Reveals
Apple’s July 30, 2026 earnings report contains a data point that complicates the simplest read of the DRAM shortage story: not every 2026 price increase translated into revenue growth. Mac revenue climbed to $10.35 billion, up 28.7% year over year, comfortably ahead of Wall Street’s $8.74 billion estimate. iPad revenue moved in the opposite direction, falling 5.9% to $6.19 billion over the same three months, according to Reuters’ coverage of the results.
That split is worth sitting with, because iPad absorbed the steepest of Apple’s June price increases. The entry-level model jumped 29%, from $349 to $449, nearly ten percentage points above the next-largest hike, the iPad Pro’s 20.0%. Mac’s increases were comparatively modest: MacBook Air rose 18.2% and MacBook Pro rose 17.7%. Yet the product line with the smaller percentage price increase grew revenue by 28.7%, while the product line with the largest percentage price increase saw revenue shrink by 5.9%.
Several explanations fit the available numbers, and Apple’s earnings release does not break out unit sales by product, so none can be confirmed outright.
- Price sensitivity at the entry tier: a $100 increase on a $349 tablet is a proportionally bigger ask than a $200 increase on a $1,099 laptop already positioned as the larger purchase, even though the Mac increase is larger in dollar terms.
- A tougher year-over-year comparison: iPad quarterly revenue swings more than Mac’s from one year to the next depending on when Apple last refreshed the lineup, a factor that can move the growth rate independent of pricing.
- Supply working against sell-through: Kuo’s August 10 note ties the DRAM shortage specifically to Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Air, not iPad. But if memory allocation is tight enough to reshape Mac production, it is a fair question whether iPad sell-through was constrained by available inventory as much as by buyer demand, something Apple’s call did not address by product line.
What the report does confirm is the headline split: Mac revenue up, iPad revenue down, in the same quarter both product lines raised prices. For the DRAM-shortage narrative running through the rest of Apple’s 2026, that split is a useful check on the assumption that shortage-driven price increases pass straight through to buyers without cost. Mac’s growth suggests Apple’s most memory-constrained hardware line, the one Kuo says is already feeling the shortage, kept growing anyway. iPad’s decline suggests the single steepest price increase in Apple’s 2026 lineup came with a measurable revenue cost, not just margin protection.
The comparison also sharpens the stakes behind Apple’s September-quarter guidance. Apple guided to a gross margin of 47% to 48%, including roughly one point of benefit from tariff refunds, a forecast built in a quarter where Mac was still growing and iPad was already shrinking. If iPad’s decline deepens, or if Mac’s growth cools as the DRAM shortage Kuo flagged for Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Air works its way fully into production, the margin math behind that guidance gets harder to hit, not easier, just as Apple heads into its most important quarter of the year with the iPhone 18 launch.
Whether iPad’s softness proves temporary or becomes a preview of how buyers respond to iPhone 18 pricing in September is one of the more concrete data points available heading into the holiday quarter. Unlike Kuo’s shipment-cut note, which is sourced from supply chain checks, the Mac-iPad split comes directly from Apple’s own reported numbers, making it one of the few pieces of hard evidence, rather than analyst inference, currently available on how buyers are actually responding to Apple’s 2026 price increases.
What Wall Street Is Watching Next
Coverage of the late-July results flagged supply constraints as a factor clouding Apple’s outlook even as the headline numbers beat expectations, a dynamic that shows up when a stock reacts less to a strong quarter than to what management says about the next one. Tech Times described the September-quarter outlook as coming in below consensus, tied directly to worsening Mac supply. For investors, the real signal to watch is not this quarter’s Mac beat. It is whether Apple’s gross margin guidance holds up once iPhone 18 production ramps into a tighter memory market than the one the Mac line just pushed through.
The memory makers tell the opposite story. Micron’s numbers, an 84.9% gross margin and guidance for roughly 86% next quarter, reflect a supplier market that finally has pricing power after years of oversupply and weak margins. Device makers absorbing costs while memory suppliers post record margins looks likely to stay the defining tension in hardware markets through the rest of 2026.
How This Compares to the 2021 Chip Shortage
Apple has navigated a hardware supply crunch before. The 2021 chip shortage, triggered by pandemic-era demand swings and shuttered fabs, delayed everything from cars to game consoles to laptops for the better part of two years. That crisis was fundamentally about fabrication capacity, meaning too few wafers for too much demand across every category at once.
This shortage looks different. Fab capacity is not really the bottleneck. Allocation is. Memory makers can produce DRAM and NAND, but they are choosing to route an outsized share of it toward AI accelerators and data center servers, where margins run higher. That makes the 2026 memory shortage less a capacity problem and more a pricing and prioritization problem, one that could persist far longer than the 2021 crunch did: Deutsche Bank’s June 2026 outlook, reported by Fortune, expects DRAM supply to stay tight beyond 2028, since most AI-driven capacity expansion from memory makers is not projected to come online until 2027 at the earliest. Computerworld reported in August 2026 that the industry’s three dominant suppliers, Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix, had already sold out their DRAM capacity through 2027, leaving device makers with little near-term lever to pull beyond paying higher prices for whatever allocation they can still secure.
What It Means for the iPhone 18 Launch
The iPhone has largely dodged Apple’s price increases so far, and that makes September a real test. Apple has not announced pricing for the iPhone 18 lineup, and a memory shortage does not automatically force a price hike. But Kuo’s reporting suggests the more likely outcome is constrained supply rather than a blanket price jump, at least at launch.
That distinction matters for shoppers. A price increase is annoying but predictable. A supply constraint means popular configurations, particularly the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the rumored foldable iPhone Ultra, could sell out during preorders and stay hard to find for weeks afterward. Anyone set on a specific storage tier or finish should plan to order the moment preorders open rather than waiting.
Competitive Landscape: How Apple Stacks Up Against Rivals
Apple’s scale gives it leverage that smaller device makers do not have. IDC data cited by TechRepublic shows Apple’s smartphone shipments grew 4.4% year over year in the first quarter of 2026 even as the broader smartphone market shrank 2.9%. That is not immunity from the memory shortage, but it does suggest Apple can negotiate better allocation than most competitors.
The pressure is not limited to phones and laptops. Nvidia and AMD have already raised prices on graphics card kits sold through Chinese retail channels by 22.5%, part of the same memory-driven cost spiral now hitting Apple. Even Nvidia’s own workstation-class hardware is feeling it: a fully configured Nvidia DGX Spark now competes directly with a memory-constrained Mac Studio for the same category of AI developer, and both product lines depend on the same tight DRAM supply Apple is now navigating.
IDC forecasts total 2026 smartphone shipments will fall 13.9% year over year to 1.09 billion units globally, while average selling prices climb to a record $550, as manufacturers cut production and lean into pricier, higher-margin models instead of chasing volume.
Market Impact: What Buyers Should Expect Through the Holidays
Every signal points toward tighter, pricier hardware through the end of 2026. Our own coverage found DRAM prices have already hit record levels for PC builders, and Apple’s guidance suggests it does not expect relief before the holiday quarter. Consumers who need a new Mac or iPad soon should treat current pricing as close to the floor rather than a temporary peak. Gaming PC builders are seeing a parallel squeeze, with SSD prices roughly doubling as NAND shortages ripple beyond Apple’s supply chain and into components most PC gamers buy directly.
On the enterprise side, the same dynamics play out at a much larger scale. Nvidia’s $500 billion memory supply agreement with SK Hynix and South Korea’s broader push to expand chip production, detailed in our coverage of the country’s $880 billion chip plan, both show how much of the world’s memory output is now spoken for well before it ever reaches a laptop or phone.
5 Predictions for the Rest of 2026 and Into 2027
- iPhone 18 Pro Max and the rumored foldable iPhone Ultra sell out during preorder weekend, driven by limited allocation rather than unprecedented demand.
- Apple raises pricing on select iPhone 18 configurations in September, likely concentrated in Pro and foldable tiers rather than the base model.
- DRAM and NAND contract prices stay elevated through Q4 2026, with Micron’s own guidance suggesting no meaningful relief before 2027.
- More PC and Android device makers announce their own price increases or delayed launches, following the pattern Apple, Nvidia, and AMD have already set this year.
- Memory makers post record profits through the rest of 2026 while device margins across the industry compress, widening the gap between chipmakers and the companies that buy from them.
What Apple Buyers Should Actually Do Right Now
Kuo’s report is useful as an early warning, not a reason to panic-buy. Apple has not confirmed pricing or shortage details for the iPhone 18 series, and a supply constraint is not the same as a certainty. Buyers who do not need the newest model right away have room to wait, compare trade-in offers, or consider a refurbished Mac or iPad while prices settle.
Anyone committed to a specific configuration, color, or storage tier for a fall launch should plan differently. Ordering the moment preorders open is the only real hedge against a device selling out during a supply-constrained launch window, a pattern Apple has already shown with the Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Air this year.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Apple cutting hardware shipments in 2026?
Apple is scaling back its 2026 shipment plans because of a DRAM shortage, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Memory makers are prioritizing AI data center customers over consumer device makers, leaving less DRAM available for Macs, iPads, and iPhones.
Which Apple products have already been affected by the DRAM shortage?
The Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Air have already felt the memory shortage, according to Kuo’s reporting. Apple also raised prices on Macs, iPads, Apple TV, HomePod, and Vision Pro on June 25, 2026, citing higher memory and storage costs.
Will iPhone 18 prices go up because of the memory shortage?
Apple has not confirmed iPhone 18 pricing. Kuo’s reporting suggests the bigger risk is limited supply, particularly for the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the rumored foldable iPhone Ultra, rather than an automatic price increase at launch.
What did Ming-Chi Kuo actually dispute in his August 2026 report?
Kuo disputed a separate claim that TSMC was sitting on $1 billion worth of unpackaged Apple processors waiting for memory. He said Apple plans chip production months in advance based on expected memory supply, making that specific scenario unlikely, even though the underlying DRAM shortage is real.
How much have Mac and iPad prices increased in 2026?
On June 25, 2026, Apple raised the MacBook Air from $1,099 to $1,299 (+18.2%), the MacBook Pro from $1,699 to $1,999 (+17.7%), the entry-level iPad from $349 to $449 (+29%), and the iPad Pro from $999 to $1,199 (+20.0%). The entry-level iPad took the steepest percentage increase of the group.
Did Mac and iPad sales rise or fall after the 2026 price increases?
The results were mixed. In the fiscal third-quarter results reported July 30, 2026, Mac revenue rose 28.7% year over year to $10.35 billion even after Apple’s June price increases, while iPad revenue fell 5.9% to $6.19 billion over the same quarter despite the entry-level model’s 29% price hike, according to Reuters.
Why are memory chip makers favoring AI data centers over phone and PC makers?
AI data center contracts pay more per chip than consumer electronics deals, so manufacturers like Micron are allocating a larger share of DRAM and NAND production to hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon.
How long is the memory shortage expected to last?
Micron’s own guidance points to continued tight supply through at least its fiscal fourth quarter of 2026, and Gartner’s 2026 outlook projects DRAM and NAND prices remaining elevated for the full year, with no confirmed relief date yet.
Is Apple more exposed to the memory shortage than its competitors?
Apple’s scale gives it more negotiating leverage than most rivals. IDC data shows Apple grew shipments 4.4% year over year in the first quarter of 2026 even as the overall smartphone market declined, though the whole industry, including Android and PC makers, faces the same underlying memory math.
