Apple’s price hike choice almost guarantees more expensive iPhones as the RAM crisis is far from over: ‘We are not at the bottom and will take more time to climb out,’ expert says
Publish Date: 2026-06-25 15:03:00
Source Domain: www.techradar.com
We now know with more certainty than before that your next iPhone, especially if it’s a more affordable model, will probably be more expensive come September.
Allow me to walk you back through my reasoning.
At approximately 8:30AM ET the RAM crisis reached Apple shores in the form of price hikes across multiple product categories, including MacBooks, Macs, iPads, and HomePods.
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It was inevitable and, as Apple told us, the culprit is clear: “The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage.”
It’s the component crunch we’ve seen repeated over and over again. Everything from the latest gaming rigs to storage and memory is getting more expensive.
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And it’s only going to get worse.
“We are not at the bottom and will take more time to climb out,” wrote Creative Strategies Founder and longtime analyst Tim Bajarin when I asked him via email if this marked a tipping point for our RAM crisis travails. It did feel like Apple held off as long as possible, and I think Bajarin concurs, “Apple had no choice,” he wrote to me.
No RAM crisis end in sight
Not only does Bajarin see the issue continuing, but he thinks it could drag on for years. As he wrote in his recent Forbes column, with just a few major memory factories already “maxed out” and those under construction years away from coming online, “I see this memory squeeze at the least lasting another two years,” he told me via email.
This aligns, by the way, with reports we’ve seen elsewhere from those who run these memory plants.
“We expect tight conditions to persist beyond calendar 2027 as a result of AI-driven demand across all segments coupled with structural supply constraints,” said Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra in a recent earnings report.
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