Astronomical RAM prices are bad news for everyone, but especially for Apple

RAM memory prices have skyrocketed between 100% and 400% in just six months. 32 GB kits that cost $95 in the summer now cost $400. There are stores in the United States that They have removed the prices from the shelves and communicate them at the checkout, as if it were lobster on Christmas Eve.

Why is it important. RAM prices have skyrocketed between 100% and 400% in just a few months. Samsung and SK Hynix have committed 40% of all global production to Stargate, OpenAI’s infrastructure. The three manufacturers that control 93% of the market prioritize servers over consumption.

TrendForce has predicted that Entry-level smartphones will return to 4 GB of RAM in 2026. Budget laptops will stay stuck at 8 GB. For the first time in decades, specifications are not improving but going backwards.

The paradox. The scarcity is caused by AI, but that same scarcity is going to undermine our ability to use local AI. Data centers take up all the memory to train huge models, but users won’t be able to run those models on their computers because much-needed RAM has exploded, so we’ll have the same, or less.

Main loser. Apple has the most to lose in this scenario. Meta, Google and Microsoft can use the cloud for their models as they have been doing until now, but Apple has been betting heavily on local AI for two years as a great differentiator: models that run on your device, privacy by design and processing without depending on servers.

The entire narrative of Apple Intelligence It is built on having enough RAM and local computing power. The iPhones They have been increasing their RAM precisely to run Apple Intelligence smoothly, closing the RAM gap between base and Pro models. Macs with Apple Silicon They have normalized 16 GB, after many years stuck at 8 GB, as the base in all models.

The impossible dilemma. Apple has financial muscle and preferential contracts that allow it to get memory when others cannot. But that doesn’t solve your fundamental problem: you have two options and neither are good.

1. You can maintain specifications and raise prices, but there is a limit to what the market will tolerate.
2. Or you can start cutting RAM, but that means compromising just the competitive advantage you’ve been selling for two years.

Between the lines. Other manufacturers can adapt by lowering specifications without breaking their value proposition too much. Samsung can put 6 GB in a mid-range Galaxy and still function the same: its AI depends on the Google cloud.

But Apple has committed to an architecture that requires powerful devices in the user’s hands. And those devices are now much more expensive to manufacture. Private Cloud Computing It is a help, but it does not change the local narrative.

The unexpected turn. Apple Intelligence may end up being much more expensive than Apple had planned. Not because the technology is expensive, but because the raw materials to execute it have become a scarce commodity.

Apple is probably the company best positioned to weather this crisis due to its purchasing power (as we already saw with the semiconductor crisis due to the pandemic), but it is also the one that has the most to lose strategically.

• Apple chose a different path than its competitors precisely when that path was about to become prohibitively expensive.
• Cloud AI scales with servers you can rent or expand.
• Local AI scales only if each user has powerful hardware, and that hardware just got wildly expensive.

In summary. For the first time in years, Apple does not control the key variables of its strategy. You can pay more than anyone else for memory, but you can’t change the fact that only three companies manufacture it or that those companies prefer to sell to OpenAI and company rather than to mobile and laptop manufacturers for the consumer market.

The era of cheap memory is over, and among its many consequences is also the economic viability of Apple’s great differentiating bet.

In Xataka | The RAM crisis is so extreme that it has achieved what seemed unthinkable: Apple’s memories are “cheap”

Featured image | Georgiy Lyamin