Apple faces price hikes for iPhone 18 Pro amid global memory chip shortage

Source Domain: cryptobriefing.com

The iPhone just got a lot more expensive to build. Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal on June 17, 2026, that price increases for the company’s upcoming iPhone 18 Pro are “unavoidable,” pointing to a global memory chip shortage that has driven component costs to levels the company can no longer quietly eat.

Analysts now expect the base iPhone 18 Pro to land somewhere between $1,299 and $1,399 in the US.

What’s actually happening with memory chips

DRAM and NAND flash memory have seen prices surge between 63% and 75% year-over-year. The culprit isn’t another pandemic-era logistics meltdown. This time, artificial intelligence is the bottleneck.

AI data centers are vacuuming up memory chips at an extraordinary rate. Training and running large language models requires massive amounts of high-bandwidth memory, and the companies building AI infrastructure are willing to pay a premium to secure supply. That leaves consumer electronics manufacturers like Apple competing for what’s left.

According to reporting from TechInsights and the WSJ, a 12 GB DRAM module that previously cost roughly $39 now runs approximately $145. Across the entire bill of materials for memory and storage, costs have climbed around 25%.

Cook had actually been telegraphing this problem for weeks. Back in May 2026, he noted that supply constraints were already affecting products like the Mac mini and Mac Studio, linking those issues to the same AI-driven memory demands now hitting the iPhone pipeline.

Why this shortage is different

Memory manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have been prioritizing high-margin AI server chips over consumer-grade components. The result is a supply chain where Apple is effectively competing against Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta for the same raw materials, except those companies are buying memory for AI clusters that generate revenue per query, while Apple needs it for phones that generate revenue once at…

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