Tim Cook said that Apple has a low supply of memory chips following the increased demand for the latest iPhones. Cook said in his response to a question about the memory shortage’s impact on the company during its 1Q26 earnings call that Apple does not keep these chips in stock, and that it’s currently scrambling to find sources because of the iPhone’s strong sales in December.
“We were thrilled with the customer response on the latest iPhone lineup. It exceeded our expectations, to say the least, and you know, iPhone grow 23%,” Cook said. “What the result of the was that we exited the December quarter with very lean channel inventory due to that staggering level of demand. And based off that, we’re in a supply chase mode to meet the very high levels of customer demand.” He also added later, “We do continue to see market pricing for memory increasing significantly. As always, we’ll look at a range of options to deal with that.”
Apple is known for the egregious pricing it puts on memory and storage upgrades on its devices. For example, the 13-inch MacBook Air with a 10-core GPU costs $1,199 for the basic 16GB Unified Memory and 256GB SSD storage configuration. But if you want to get an extra 16GB of RAM to bump its capacity to 32GB, you have to pay Apple an extra $400. By comparison, the pricing trend for 64GB (2x16GB) of DDR5-6000 RAM kits used sit under $150 before the memory apocalypse. While the best RAM kits with 32GB of capacity now exceed $400, you can still get a decent 16GB kit for less than $250 — this is by no means an affordable price, but it’s still way less than what Apple charges you just to get the privilege of more memory.
Nevertheless, it is still one of the remaining few companies that have not increased pricing because of the memory chip shortage, possibly as a result of the prices being so high to begin with. Mini PC maker Minisforum was one of the first to announce a price hike, and it was soon followed by Dell, Asus, and even Framework desktops — because of this, industry experts predict PC prices to jump by 8% in 2026.
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