Apple hit by RAMpocalypse

Cupertino is just the latest victim of the AIification of everything, says Jason Walsh

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Image: Sergei Starostin via Pexels

Apple has significantly raised prices on its devices in the face of a severe shortages of DRAM and NAND memory. This RAMpocalypse, with wholesale memory costs in some cases quadrupling recently, resulted in Apple’s price hikes appearing without note, but not entirely without warning.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, outgoing chief executive Tim Cook did not mince words: price increases are “unavoidable”.

“We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable,” he told the paper’s Rolfe Winkler.

The culprit? Artificial intelligence (AI). Just as AI juices the stock market, the actual market in actual material things is being affected, and not just CPUs and GPUs. RAM, now, is on the hit list, with this dull commodity suffering a manufacturing crisis.

Except it’s not. RAM is still being bashed out, it’s just going somewhere else. What is driving Apple’s price rises, and those of other manufacturers, is a the result of ongoing reallocation of the world’s memory production toward AI, with consumers and PC makers left to compete for whatever is left over at much higher prices.

There’s another complication. Micron, for instance, is getting out of the consumer RAM business altogether. The chip giant, which owned Crucial, decided to instead focus on RAM in the AI data centre sector. Since then, its share price has gone on a tear of something like 700%.

As long as the AI spending frenzy continues we can expect more price hikes. Interestingly this is coming at a time when people are increasingly slow to upgrade devices: phones just have a longer useful life, and Apple significantly upped the laptop power ante, and therefore useful life, with its custom ARM-based silicon.

PC makers and phone manufacturers, and therefore consumers, are now downstream of the data centre. Since its introduction, AI has shown up in the strangest places. Even in the till receipt.

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