Last week announced price hikes for Macs and iPads across the board due to the rising cost of memory and storage chips. However, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says there’s no relief in site.
Here’s what he says in an X post: he memory supply-demand gap will keep widening through 2027. That is the real reason Apple is lobbying the White House to keep CXMT [a Chinese company] off the Entity List.
… The pressure on Apple has shifted from soaring memory costs to a widening supply gap.
1. Of the memory capacity allocated to consumer electronics in 2026, an estimated 15–20% is expected to shift to data centers in 2027, and that share could grow.
2. Due to tight memory (LPDDR) supply, Apple’s actual pull-in volume of A20 chips in 2H26–1Q27 could be 10–20% below its original target (though part of that may reflect Apple’s own overbooking).
CXMT states in its IPO prospectus that its capacity is far below domestic demand. Given the persistent global memory imbalance, even if Apple’s lobbying succeeds and it buys DRAM from CXMT, that would not materially lower costs or fill the supply gap. Still, with the imbalance widening, Apple has every reason to secure an additional source.
This also explains why Apple is being more proactive this time than it was when it evaluated YMTC in 2022. YMTC was mainly about lowering NAND costs; CXMT is about managing DRAM supply risk.
Tim Cook is one of the few tech leaders who can still navigate both Washington and Beijing, so this is better handled before he steps down as CEO. Even if the effort goes nowhere, the media coverage can still leave the market with the impression that Apple tried but was constrained by U.S. policy. That may help ease frustration over price hikes and longer delivery times.
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