Apple has historically absorbed memory cost spikes better than any peer, but CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal the latest squeeze is 'unsustainable' to cushion, and the iPhone 18 Pro could land near $1,300.
The AI data-center buildout's appetite for specialized memory is reshaping the supply chain beneath the devices consumers already own, and now it is coming for the phone in your pocket. The same high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that train frontier AI models have pulled enough DRAM and NAND capacity out of the consumer pool that Apple, the company that has historically absorbed component inflation better than any peer, is publicly conceding it cannot do so this time.
Apple CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal in an interview posted late Wednesday that the memory price spike has become "unsustainable" for Apple to absorb on its own, and that higher iPhone and Mac prices are coming. The Wall Street Journal suggests the iPhone 18 Pro will land near $1,300, roughly $200 more than the iPhone 17 Pro, though Apple has not confirmed the figure (Gizmodo summary of the Cook interview).
The mechanism is not a normal cost-pass-through. Memory makers Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix have spent the last two years retooling fabs and reallocating capital to chase HBM, the specialized stacked RAM that feeds the AI accelerators powering cloud training and inference workloads. That pivot has tightened supply and lifted prices across the broader memory market, including the ordinary DRAM that goes into phones and the NAND flash that goes into storage. When the highest-margin customers in the world are buying every HBM die a fab can produce, the commodity pool shrinks and prices rise for everyone downstream.
For years, Apple's scale, multi-year supply deals, and willingness to pre-pay for components gave it more room to swallow cost increases than any other device maker. Cook's "unsustainable" line is a public signal that the spread between Apple's negotiating leverage and the memory market's gravity has closed. If the company that set the bar for consumer-electronics supply-chain management cannot cushion this shock, the pressure on mid-range Android handsets, Windows laptops, and entry-level MacBooks is likely to land harder, because those vendors have thinner margins and shorter supplier commitments to begin with.
There are narrow agency points for buyers. Holding a device through the iPhone 18 cycle becomes more attractive, especially for users on older hardware who can defer with a battery swap and a storage upgrade. The Pro-versus-non-Pro math changes too, since memory and storage are typically tiered in ways that make the standard iPhone 18 the more disciplined buy if base RAM holds at current levels. Apple accessory and AppleCare spending can be deferred without much sacrifice, and trade-in values for iPhone 15 Pro and later models should be priced against the new Pro tier rather than last year's. None of these moves changes the underlying supply picture. They just change how much of it a given household decides to absorb.
The forward question belongs to John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering and the executive widely reported as Cook's eventual successor. Ternus would inherit a product line whose input costs are coupled to a market Apple does not control: the HBM allocation decisions of three memory makers answering to hyperscaler demand. The next iPhone cycle would be the first major hardware launch under his tenure, and the first real test of whether Apple's supplier playbook can be re-tuned for a memory regime that is no longer shaped primarily by smartphone demand. For buyers, the practical question is not whether the iPhone 18 will cost more. It is how long the AI buildout keeps the memory market tight, and how much of that tightness the next CEO chooses to pass through.