Jun 30, 2026
On June 25, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) announced sweeping price increases across its MacBook and iPad lineups — along with Apple TV, HomePod and Vision Pro — with CEO Tim Cook laying the blame on the companies that supply the memory chips inside its products.
"There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases," Cook had told The Wall Street Journal the week before, calling the increases "unavoidable" and the situation "unsustainable."
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Apple said the growth of AI data centers had "created an extraordinary surge" in demand for memory and storage, and that it had never seen a component price rise this far this fast.
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But hours earlier, one of those "memory guys" had pointed back at Apple.
Micron's version of events
In a Wall Street Journal interview following a blockbuster earnings report, Micron (NASDAQ:MU) Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana suggested that aggressive buyers, without naming Apple, helped create the very shortage now squeezing consumers. When memory prices collapsed during the last industry downturn in 2023, he argued, big customers used the slump to negotiate rock-bottom prices, gutting suppliers' margins at the exact moment they needed cash to build new capacity.
"We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive," Sadana told the Journal. "A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins." Micron's gross margin had in fact turned sharply negative that year, bottoming at minus 17.8% in its fiscal third quarter.
Sadana never said "Apple." He didn't have to. Apple has a well-known reputation for extracting favorable terms from suppliers through long-term purchasing contracts, and it is one of Micron's customers, buying the working memory and storage chips that go into iPhones, Macs and iPads.
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Micron's stock soared as Apple's fell
Micron's fiscal third-quarter revenue jumped 345.7% to $41.46 billion, with a gross margin of 84.6%, and its shares climbed about 15% in after-hours trading. Apple's stock fell more than 6% to $275.15, its worst day since April 2025.
Memory and storage now cost roughly four times what they did three quarters ago, according to Counterpoint Research. Memory chip prices rose as much as 98% in the first quarter of 2026 and are set to climb another 58% to 63% this quarter, TrendForce estimates. For shoppers, that lands as price increases of up to $300 on the affected MacBooks and iPads; Apple's cheapest laptop, the MacBook Neo, rose $100 to $699.
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Apple added no extra storage or memory to the affected models, so buyers are paying more for the same hardware. The company also guided its June-quarter gross margin down to 47.5% to 48.5%, from 49.3% a year earlier, and its product margin already fell to 38.7% in the March quarter from 40.7% the quarter before, a drop the company tied partly to higher memory costs. Some of the increase is landing on Apple's own books. The supplier is the one whose margins just hit a record.
Why both sides have a point
The shortage is real and largely structural, driven by artificial intelligence. AI accelerators rely on a specialized, capacity-hungry type of memory called high-bandwidth memory, and each gigabyte of it uses about three times the factory capacity of the standard memory in a laptop. That memory is on track to eat about 22% of the major suppliers' total memory production by the end of 2026, up from 18% a year earlier. Every chip that goes to a data center is one that doesn't become a phone.
But Sadana's point also holds. When margins went negative, memory makers couldn't justify building new capacity — so when AI demand arrived, there were no spare factories to absorb it. The AI surge created the shortage; the discipline imposed during the 2023 downturn left the industry without the slack to meet it.
Why this keeps hitting your wallet
For anyone shopping for a phone or laptop, this isn't close to over. JPMorgan analysts cited by the Financial Times estimate memory could climb from roughly 10% to as much as 45% of what it costs Apple to build a flagship iPhone by 2027. Gartner projects a 130% surge in combined memory and storage prices by the end of 2026, lifting PC prices 17% and smartphone prices 13% versus 2025 levels.
New factory capacity is coming, but chip plants take years to build and bring online. Relief won't arrive on the next upgrade cycle. The timing also lands awkwardly for Apple: Cook hands the CEO role to hardware chief John Ternus on Sept. 1, leaving his successor to manage a cost crisis with no end in sight.
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Rudro is an Editor with Moneywise. His work has appeared on Yahoo Finance, MSN, MSN Money, Apple News, Samsung News and the San Diego Union Tribune.
