- John Ternus has warned that: “What we’re seeing with memory pricing right now is unprecedented.”
- The Apple CEO cautioned that RAM costs are going to climb higher in this final quarter of 2026
- It sounds even bleaker than Apple’s previous statements on the RAM crisis, and follows many other warnings that 2027 is set to be a miserable year price-wise
Apple is warning of an ‘unprecedented’ rise in the cost of RAM, adding to the cacophony of alarm bells that have been ringing about the price of memory chips (and other PC components besides) recently.
The Guardian reports that in a conference call following Apple’s fiscal Q3 results — which were better than analysts expected, driven by the iPhone, Mac mini and sales in China — Apple’s new CEO John Ternus touched on the subject of the RAM crisis.
Ternus, who recently took the reins from Tim Cook, cautioned bleakly that: “What we’re seeing with memory pricing right now is unprecedented.”
He then observed that memory costs would climb even higher in the final quarter of 2026 compared to the rest of the year, during which, as you’ve doubtless seen, we’ve already witnessed a steep climb in pricing.
Despite its financial results outperforming analyst forecasts, Apple informed investors that these higher memory costs are going to erode some of its profit margins, which meant the company’s stock dropped.
Apple raised the prices of Macs earlier this year, as well as iPads and more recently iPhones, and Ternus acknowledged that this had “provided some offset” for Apple in terms of the ongoing cost crisis around components.
Analysis: Ternus takes a turn for the sterner
It’s an ominous utterance from Ternus, and sounds more severe than the warning Apple issued back before the Mac (and other) price hikes happened in June 2026. Back then, when Cook was still chief executive, he warned about “significantly higher memory costs” that would “drive an increasing impact” on Apple’s products, which, as noted, came to pass.
Now we’re hearing the word “unprecedented”, which sounds a lot more concerning than “significant”; although in fairness, this is referencing what’s already happened this year as much as what’s to come. But we’re clearly being primed for more price-hike misery by Ternus here, and it’s difficult to see how this won’t have a further impact on Macs, iPhones and iPads, if not in this quarter, then in 2027.
We don’t, of course, know to what extent profits might be eroded by more expensive memory chips, or how this might be balanced by consumers having to foot that bill. Only time will tell on that score.
Mac mini sales were mentioned in the report — which quoted Ben Barringer, the head of technology research at investment management firm Quilter Cheviot — as being responsible for part of Apple’s boosted earnings for the most recent quarter, and that’s down to the increasing demand for local AI.
The Mac Studio is major part of that picture, too, and this particular PC just popped up as an example of how ridiculous RAM pricing has just become at the very top end of the Apple product tree. If you want a Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM, you’ll now pay more than double the cost of a Mac Studio that has 256GB of memory, meaning that it’s cheaper to buy two of the latter computers (while getting two CPUs/GPUs in the process).
It’s a bizarre situation, but this is what we’ve arrived at with memory upgrades, which were always seriously pricey with Apple, even before the RAM crisis kicked off (that goes for storage, too).
And this situation is only going to get worse, seemingly, according to Ternus, which is also, of course, the view of the wider industry and various analysts. I can’t begin to count the warnings we’ve had in the past couple of months about the RAM crisis becoming even more dire, so at this point it’s just a question of how much worse things might get.
I fear that some categories of tech and PC components are going to become increasingly unaffordable next year, and I recently wrote about why Black Friday could be a good time to move on certain purchases.
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