Apple faces memory crunch, testing Tim Cook’s supply chain skills

Tim Cook built his legend on supply chain mastery. Now the thing that made him CEO is the thing keeping him up at night. Apple is grappling with a memory chip shortage that has already forced the company to raise prices on Macs by roughly 15-20% and iPads by 15-25% as of June 2026. The culprit: skyrocketing costs for DRAM and NAND memory, driven largely by an insatiable appetite for AI workloads across the tech industry. Cook himself acknowledged during earnings discussions that memory costs will have an “increasing impact” on business. In English: the components inside your devices are getting dramatically more expensive, and Apple can’t eat all of that cost forever. The AI tax on everything Every large language model, every on-device AI feature, every generative tool running locally on a phone or laptop requires substantial DRAM and NAND flash storage. When every major tech company is simultaneously racing to cram more AI into more products, demand for memory chips doesn’t just increase. It explodes. This isn’t an Apple-only problem. Samsung flagged tightening memory supplies in its own recent earnings updates. When the two largest consumer electronics companies on the planet are...