Apple Slaps Mid-Cycle 20% Hike on Macs & iPads, Shares Tank in ‘RAMageddon’

Sudden component-driven price spikes aren’t new: after Thailand’s floods in 2011, hard-drive prices doubled overnight, and the 1988 DRAM famine forced PC makers to drop memory specs. Apple’s hike echoes those shocks but is unprecedented for a company that held retail prices even during the 2020–21 COVID supply chaos. It spotlights two long-running trends: 1) AI hyperscalers are now the priority customers for Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, reversing decades of consumer-electronics dominance; 2) the end of Moore’s-Law-driven cost declines means memory has become a strategic choke-point akin to oil in the 1970s. On a 100-year arc, this may mark the moment when silicon commodities, not finished gadgets, dictate tech giants’ fortunes—shifting power upstream and testing the resilience of premium-branding models like Apple’s. Whether expanded capacity arrives before demand from AI, edge computing and autonomous systems explodes will determine if 2026 is remembered as a blip or the start of a structurally more expensive hardware era.