Tim Cook says Apple price increases are unavoidable, Q3 2026 - qz.com

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company will raise prices on its products due to surging costs of memory and storage chips, calling the price increases 'unavoidable.' The root cause lies in the ... Read original →

The AI server boom’s voracious demand for high-bandwidth memory is triggering a supply chain quake across consumer electronics. Technically, HBM and DRAM capacity reallocation not only inflates costs for Apple but also delays UFS 4.0 and LPDDR5X adoption in mid-tier devices. Policy-wise, the U.S. CHIPS Act’s logic-chip bias ignores critical memory imbalances; without federal coordination, regional shortages could emerge by 2027. Strategically, Microsoft and Google—armed with long-term CoWoS deals at TSMC—force HP and Dell toward riskier second-tier suppliers like Samsung or SK hynix, where yield and delivery reliability remain uncertain. Over the next 18 months, price hikes will cascade from premium to mainstream segments. Apple’s refusal to vertically integrate reveals its deep reliance on mature-node foundry ecosystems—a ‘hundred-year flood’ that’s really a systemic misallocation driven by AI capex gravity.