Friday, July 31st 2026
Apple Talks Memory Shortage and Evaluating More Suppliers
Apple has reported record quarterly results for the second quarter, ending with $109.4 billion in revenue, highlighting the resilience of its business in recent months. The company is also one of the largest supply chain operators globally, manufacturing electronics across mobile, laptop, and desktop computing. When asked about recent memory inflation during an earnings call, Apple's CEO Tim Cook explained that the company has benefited from stockpiling memory inventory and reduced costs for some other non-memory components in its bill of materials (BOM) for each device. Additionally, Apple sources memory from three suppliers: SK hynix, Micron, and Samsung, while also exploring other options. This suggests that the rumored evaluations of YMTC for NAND Flash and CXMT for DRAM are accurate, and Apple is likely undergoing some form of regulatory approval.
You can see the statement from CEO Tim Cook below.
Source:
Apple Earnings Call Transcript
Apple CEO Tim CookYeah. Let me back up and talk about memory in general, because I know this is a subject on many of your minds. If you look at, as I'd said on the last call, we paid more for memory in the March quarter than the December quarter. As I alluded to last quarter, we expected to pay significantly more in the June quarter than the March quarter, and that is what happened. It was partially offset by the benefit of carry-in inventory. For September, we expect to pay even higher memory costs, and we're able to offset partly by a few factors, and let me walk through kind of what they are. The first is, as you would expect, we have a benefit from some carry-in inventory in the September quarter. However, we believe we'll see decreasing benefit from this over time beyond the September quarter.
The second is, we're expecting lower costs on certain non-memory components that are in our BOM. If you look beyond September, we see the market pricing for memory continuing to increase, which could drive an increasing impact on our business, and we're continuing to evaluate this. In terms of the sources of supply, primarily the DRAM market has three suppliers. Obviously if there were more suppliers, that would be good, and it would help us on the supply side and perhaps the pricing side. It's unclear on the pricing side, it could help on the supply side. We're evaluating all options.
15 Comments on Apple Talks Memory Shortage and Evaluating More Suppliers
And again, who's responsible for the current crisis and because of what. We all know the answer to this but companies choose to play coy.
That's a whole lot of valuation gone up in smoke
Anyhow, if you replaced "Apple" with "Razor", "Lenovo", "Dell" , "HP" or "Framework" do you think there would be same amount of vitriol?
I dunno. I feel like the people who complain the most about this have some sort of massive inferiority complex.
Anyhow what sane computer designer WOULDN'T explore additional vendors in times of supply shortfalls?
If you're a chef and your favorite spaghetti brand doubled in price, wouldn't you look at other manufacturers' products? DUH
When I'm complaining, is something like that:
- I want to plug the (USB 3) cable in the phone and see, then download all the pictures and movies I took, WITHOUT any hassle.
- I want to plug the cable and download/upload all my saved music WITHOUT any hassle, or additional software.
- I want to view all files on my folders, including saved documents, text files, notes, without any hassle and same as above.
Q: Can you do that on any Apple device, specifically an iPhone??
A: NO.
End of discussion.
IOS has had a file explorer for some time, you can save documents, text files, etc and view them.
Music is a hassle if you aren't buying off itunes though. I tried looking for a 3rd party option outside of the music app, but none seemed very good for just dragging and dropping playlists I have elsewhere onto the device. You can manually add music you already have to the music app, it's just annoying.