US confounds Apple’s memory supply challenge

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is “not in favor” of Apple’s plan to alleviate the impact of rapid memory price inflation by purchasing RAM made in China for use in devices sold there. Trade by US firms with the biggest Chinese memory manufacturers, CXMT and Yangtze Memory Technologies, is restricted. Apple must secure a license before it can share product information with either firm, though it can still purchase off-the-shelf components that do not require any product details to be shared. That may be good for Apple, despite White House reticence. Apple has said there isn’t a lot of customization in how it uses memory on its systems, which means it might be able to purchase off-the-shelf RAM. Still, Lutnick seems ideologically against such a move, saying there must be “other solutions to the memory issue, but it’s not great American companies using Chinese memory.”  No solution in sight Apple isn’t alone. HP and Acer are both using memory from CXMT in devices sold outside the US, which suggests a US-native solution to the memory crisis doesn’t yet exist. Pending discovery of any magical fix to the real-world supply challenge, the big three US-approved memory vendors continue to raise DRAM prices as they focus manufacturing on data center clients. The vendors have promised to bring more capacity online, but this won’t get into production until 2029 at the earliest. The US seems to be rushing to make this more difficult; there’s a bipartisan Senate push to force Apple to avoid doing business with the firms, alongside calls to place even heavier restrictions on trade with CXMT. That would prevent Apple from purchasing even commodity memory from the companies. The lack of memory supply is raising prices across the consumer and enterprise electronics industries worldwide, putting smaller companies out of business and making tech far less affordable for US and international consumers. It is also affecting product inventories; Apple has had to delay delivery dates for newly purchased devices and was forced to temporarily stop sales of some high memory configurations. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo even warned Apple has scaled back its hardware shipment plans for 2026 in response to the crisis. (There are even reports that the supply of Apple silicon processors has been hit by the shortage of good memory.) We pay the price The only positive way to escape this inflationary loop is to source, manufacture, or otherwise secure more supply — as Apple is attempting to do with CXMT. Alternatively, the government might need to force existing vendors to divert additional capacity to DRAM, which the Trump Administration hasn’t done and has flagged no intention to do. US consumers and US businesses continue to pay the price for that indifference. Apple has been forced to raise some product prices up to 25% and might yet have to implement another wave of price increases. The rapid increase in prices is being reflected by consumer purchasing behavior. The biggest signal so far on how this will play out comes from Japan, where refurbished iPhone sales more than doubled after Appe’s July price hikes. That trend was confirmed by a second report in Japan Times, which reports a huge spike in iPhone sales via the Nicosuma online marketplace. As that trend asserts itself globally, it will affect new device sales, hurting both down- and upstream manufacturers in the consumer electronic supply chain, creating another vortex of inflationary pressure. Consumers will also wind up using their devices longer and turn to lease and hire schemes in preference to cash or credit to settle high purchase costs.  New consumer habits This change in behaviour can only go on for so long while new device sales shrink. At some point, it will become apparent that not enough new devices are entering the second user value chain to satisfy demand in that side of the market. The result: an additional inflationary wave, prompting second-user devices to become even more costly as lowering sales of new devices put smaller manufacturers out of business entirely, further reducing competition, denting corporate profits and, conceivably, undercutting tax receipts. You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon and subscribe to The Core.Apple’s Chinese memory puzzle