A New York Times report into the global DRAM shortage has put Apple at the center of the most severe memory supply crisis in decades, with Tim Cook describing the situation as a “hundred-year flood” and saying he has “never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.” The Times reported that Dan Kim, chief strategy officer at TechInsights and a former chip strategy official in the Biden administration, expects shortages to continue for roughly two more years and that there is “almost no ceiling” to what AI companies will pay for memory, a dynamic that non-AI buyers simply cannot match.
“Yes, the prices of your iPhone are going up,” Kim told the Times. “But it’s also possible the prices of your MRI machines may go up, or worse than that, that MRI machine may not get made.” Memory manufacturers have been prioritizing supply contracts for AI data center chips, which carry higher margins than consumer-grade DRAM, pulling capacity away from the components Apple needs for Mac and iPhone production.
The consequences for Apple’s product lineup are already visible. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that Apple is cutting its 2026 hardware shipment targets due to the worsening DRAM shortage, making it the strongest public acknowledgment yet of a crisis that has left the MacBook Air back-ordered for weeks and put iPhone 18 Pro supply at genuine risk ahead of September’s launch.
The crisis has also drawn a policy response. An industry coalition representing broadband and technology companies filed a letter with policymakers in June urging government intervention to address the memory supply imbalance, arguing that the shortage poses risks extending well beyond consumer electronics. Kim’s background as a former chip strategy official in the Biden administration has made him a prominent voice in Washington on the issue, and the Times investigation reflects growing pressure on regulators to treat the DRAM crunch as a matter of industrial policy rather than a market correction that will resolve itself.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that TSMC is currently holding roughly $1 billion worth of Apple’s A20 Pro processors that cannot advance to the next packaging stage because the required DRAM is unavailable. Apple’s A20 Pro chips are built on TSMC’s 2nm process and use Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module packaging to integrate processor and memory at the wafer level, which means TSMC must have DRAM on hand before assembly can complete. Apple cannot stockpile finished dies and add memory later.
The MacBook Air is currently showing 2-6 week delivery estimates on Apple’s online store, with higher-RAM configurations running the longest delays. Gurman reported that retail store sources say Apple is struggling to keep the laptop in stock and that shipments are “more constrained than they can ever recall.” Apple has also added availability language to its back-to-school promotional materials for the MacBook Air, which is unusual for a midcycle product.
Prices have already moved, the MacBook Neo now starts at $699, up from $599, and the MacBook Air has risen from $1,099 to $1,299, with the average increase across affected products working out to approximately $246.67. Microsoft, Samsung, Lenovo, HP, and Dell have all raised prices in response to the same underlying shortage.
