RAM-ageddon just made your MacBook, Xbox and iPad noticeably more expensive, and it's not stopping soon

[AJStyles]

Apple raised prices across its MacBook, iPad, iMac and Apple TV lines, in some cases by as much as 200 dollars, directly blaming what the company called an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage chips. Apple shares fell 6.12 percent the same day, the company's worst single day performance in more than a year, wiping out roughly 265 billion dollars in market value, a striking reaction given Apple's famously strong supply chain leverage usually insulates it from exactly this kind of squeeze

Microsoft announced Xbox price increases of 100 to 150 dollars on the very same day, and discontinued the console's highest end 2 terabyte storage configuration entirely. In its own statement Microsoft said console storage and memory prices have already increased by more than 2.5 times and it expects another full doubling by fall 2027, a genuinely startling trajectory for components that used to just quietly get cheaper every year

The underlying cause is a straightforward supply and demand collision nicknamed RAM-ageddon. Memory chips are essential to both consumer devices and the AI data centers cloud companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building out, and data centers are now forecast to consume around 70 percent of all memory chips produced worldwide in 2026, up from just 20 to 30 percent as recently as 2022. Data centers also disproportionately favor high bandwidth memory, a specialized stacked chip design that further eats into the silicon wafer supply otherwise available for ordinary laptop and phone memory

The pain isn't evenly distributed. HP disclosed that memory now accounts for 35 percent of its PC build costs, up from just 15 to 18 percent the previous quarter, and smaller companies without Apple or Microsoft's purchasing leverage are faring far worse, GoPro has warned it could go out of business after memory costs jumped 80 to 115 percent in a single quarter, and Sonos shares are down 23 percent this year on margin pressure. Analysts broadly agree there's no quick fix, new memory fabs take two to three years to build, and Micron's leadership says the company doesn't yet have visibility into when supply will actually catch up with demand

RAM-ageddon is here, and it's about to make your tech a lot more expensivewww.nbcnews.com