When Gabe Newell, head of Valve, asked for help a few weeks ago to find RAM memory anyway and be able to take out his Steam Machine, the comment was half joking… half serious. It was planted in the same GDC in which NVIDIA took advantage of its technology of artificial intelligence to beg beg for some RAM.
It was not a situation that caught us by surprise, since we have had quite negative news since 2025 regarding memory supply. RAM, SSD, hard drives and any element that the monster data centers to function. But the wheel does not stop, devices must continue to be launched and the problem is that, beyond the initial ‘run’, no one knows very well if they will be able to continue selling the hardware.
And it is a problem that concerns even Apple.
Neither one of the main clients of a giant like TSMC is above the needs of the hyperscalers. And he is already suffering the consequences: They have stopped selling Mac models with high amounts of RAM in a coup, especially for professional users who need all the memory possible on their computers.
There are no Macs with a lot of RAM left, kid, only Maxibon
A few hours ago, media like 9to5Mac and Macrumors They echoed the problem. If you went to Apple’s settings page and tried to purchase a Mac Mini or a mac studio with the largest amount of RAM available (64 GB and 256 GB respectively), the warning was not the one that usually appears on occasions of “it will take x weeks”, but rather a “not available”.
That already made us suspect that something was wrong with the supply, but it is also not an isolated problem in the Apple Store in the United States. If right now we go to the Spanish page to configure either of the two Macs with the maximum amount of RAM, it directly sends the same message that it is not available.
This goes beyond the classic “reserve and we ship it on a certain date”, it implies that Apple does not accept orders for those specific models. And it is not an anecdote.
As pointed out MacRumorsa few weeks ago Apple quietly removed the option to configure Mac Studio with 512 GB, which already indicated that something was up. Other configurations had delivery times of one to five months, and the fact that both models cannot now be configured with the maximum versions of RAM suggests that they will probably also end up disappearing from the store.
For most users, 16 and even 32 GB of RAM is more than enough, but those who configure a Mac Mini and Mac Studio model with 64 or 256 GB of RAM do so because it is necessary. It is no longer so much the extra price as it is knowing that that amount of RAM is needed for professional tasks, and eliminating the option (just when Apple has killed the Mac Pro) can be a problem for a niche of users who precisely need these features.
For now, if we are going to configure a MacBook Pro, we can choose the maximum amount of RAM without a problem (beyond the longer waiting times than when there was no global supply problem), but in the background there is a much bigger problem. The estimates They point out that RAM producers will increase their production by 16% year-on-year, a figure very far from market needs.
Analysts predict that this shortage will last until 2027 or 2028, but also there are more negative estimates They point to 2029 or 2030 to begin to see the market recovery. As soon as possible. And, although we focus on Apple because it is always the most striking case, we have already commented the case of the Steam Machine which cannot be launched because Valve does not have RAM… and there are more cases from manufacturers such as Dell, Lenovo or Asus turning to the Chinese market to be able to launch teams.
Computex is one of the big annual events for PC manufacturers and is just around the corner in the middle of an unprecedented crisis. Because there is no RAM, there is no SSD, hard drives are in danger and even graphics cards are not secured. The truth is that it will be interesting to cover the event because the Manufacturers and sellers are going to have to juggle with the little that is available to them.
And in Apple’s own upcoming calendar, we will have WWDC where, supposedly, there will be new professional processors. And, no matter how much there are new Apple Silicon, if these professionals cannot configure their computers with large amounts of RAM… it will not be worth much. It could also be a movement in anticipation of the renewal of the equipment, but they eliminated the 512 GB in March and now this is strange.
In short, and as has been happening for months, everything is wrong with the RAM market.
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