Apple's next iPhone launch this week is expected to come with higher prices, reflecting a broader surge in memory chip costs that is reshaping consumer electronics pricing across the industry. This "memory crunch" is reversing decades of falling memory prices and, according to industry data, is a problem the sector expects to take years to resolve rather than fix quickly.

While generative AI's huge appetite for memory has intensified the shortage, the roots go back further: memory manufacturers found they could no longer boost capacity simply by fitting more chips per wafer, and pandemic-era demand swings left them cutting investment just before AI demand exploded. The market is highly concentrated, with Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron controlling around 90% of global memory supply between them (39%, 26% and 25% respectively as of Q2 2026), leaving little slack to meet both AI data-centre needs, particularly for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and everyday consumer devices.