Apple has agreed to pay $2.00 per gigabit for DRAM starting in 2027, up from the $1.50 it pays today. That 33 percent jump all but guarantees another round of iPhone price increases next year, on top of the ones that already happened this year.
The new pricing was first reported in a social media post from a supply chain analyst on September 14, and confirmed days later, according to AppleInsider.
This Year’s Price Increases Already Show the Pattern
Apple raised prices across nearly its entire product lineup earlier this year because of rising memory costs, everything except the iPhone at first. That changed in September. The base iPhone 18 Pro launched $100 higher than its predecessor, and Apple separately added $100 to the price of the older iPhone 17 lineup it kept on sale alongside it.
Apple kept the base iPhone 18 Pro increase to just $100, but it made up the difference by raising prices more steeply on higher storage tiers instead. The clearest example is the iPhone Duo. Its 2TB configuration is priced above $3,000, the first time any iPhone has crossed that mark.
Supply Isn’t Catching Up to Demand
The pricing jump traces back to a widening supply and demand gap for memory chips. Industry data cited by AppleInsider puts memory demand growth at 36.2 percent for 2027, against supply growth of only 19.3 percent. That gap was already negative 8.1 percent in 2026, and it is projected to widen to negative 13.6 percent next year, with no meaningful improvement expected before the second half of 2028.
The underlying cause is capacity, not politics. DRAM and the high-bandwidth memory used in AI data centers come from the same manufacturing wafers, and Apple has already been lobbying the US government for help as AI companies buy up production capacity years in advance.
Apple’s next mainstream iPhone update arrives in spring 2027, right as the new $2.00 per gigabit DRAM pricing takes effect.
Our Take
A 33 percent jump in one input cost rarely stays contained to a single product line, and Apple has already shown this year that it will pass at least some of that cost on to buyers rather than absorb it quietly. The storage tier strategy is going to be interesting in 2027. Pushing bigger increases onto higher-capacity models lets Apple protect its cheapest price points on paper, even as the average amount people actually pay keeps climbing.
