Your Next Laptop, Phone, and Xbox Cost More Now — Chip Shortage Behind It

On a Monday in late June, an Apple MacBook Pro cost $1,699. By Thursday, it cost $1,999. Apple shipped no new model, added no features, and changed nothing inside the case. The $1,999 machine was the same laptop that had sold for $300 less three days earlier.

That single price jump, reported byFortune, captures a shift that has been building for a year and now lands on anyone shopping for a computer, a phone, or a game console. Apple raised prices on more than 14 products on June 25, with increases averaging roughly $247 per device, according to a tally by iThinkDiff. Within hours, Microsoft said it would raise Xbox prices starting August 1. Both companies pointed to the same culprit: the memory chips inside almost every modern gadget have become scarce and expensive, and the artificial intelligence boom is the reason.

Here is what changed, why it reaches your wallet, and what to do about a new device this year.

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What got more Expensive

Two kinds of chips sit inside your laptop and phone. DRAM handles short-term memory, the RAM that lets a machine juggle open apps. NAND flash handles storage, the space that holds your files. Both rely on the same factories, and both have spiked in price.

The numbers are steep. Market research firm SigmaIntel found that a common 12GB LPDDR5X memory module rose 89% in a single quarter, climbing from $77 to $146 between the first and second quarters of 2026. A 512GB solid-state drive jumped 54% in the same three months. One category of phone storage more than doubled.

PC builders have felt it the longest. AConsumer Reports writer documented one 32GB memory kit that sold for $90 in September 2025, tripled to $270 by late November, and reached $350 a few weeks later. If you’re wondering what rising RAM prices mean if you build a PC, read our detailed guide explaining why memory costs have surged and what it means for gamers, creators, and everyday users. Tom’s Hardware tracked DDR4 kits that ran $60 to $90 in October 2025, selling for $150 to $180 by January. HP told investors that memory now makes up 35% of what it costs to build a laptop, up from 15 to 18% a single quarter earlier.

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Why AI Data Centers Emptied the Shelves

For three decades, memory has gotten cheaper almost every year. Apple said as much in its own statement: “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.” Willy Shih, a management professor at Harvard Business School, told CBC he had never seen memory prices climb like this in his career.

The cause traces back to one ingredient that AI hardware devours. The graphics processors that train and run AI models, the Nvidia chips that data centers buy by the thousand, depend on a specialized component called High Bandwidth Memory. HBM stacks memory dies on top of each other to move data fast, and that stacking wastes silicon. Each gigabyte of HBM eats roughly three times the factory capacity of a gigabyte of standard DDR5, according to analysis cited by TechTimes.

Three companies make most of the world’s memory: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. The same AI boom is also increasing electricity demand worldwide. Learn how the same AI boom is raising electricity costs and why expanding data centers are pushing power bills higher. Faced with AI customers willing to pay premium prices and sign multi-year contracts, all three shifted factory space toward HBM. Deutsche Bank analysts described the result plainly in a research note: every wafer devoted to AI memory is a wafer unavailable for a phone or a laptop. IDC, a research firm, called the memory market’s state an “unprecedented inflection point” and expects the squeeze to last into 2027.

Micron made the priority shift literal. The company retired its Crucial brand, the memory and storage sticks aimed at ordinary PC builders, to concentrate on enterprise AI buyers.

Who Absorbs the Cost and who Passes it on

Apple and Samsung sit in the strongest position. Both hold enough cash and enough supply contracts to lock in memory a year or two ahead, which softened the blow for a while. Even so, Apple’s stock fell more than 6% the day it announced the hikes, its worst session in over a year.

Smaller manufacturers face a harder choice. GoPro warned this month that it might go out of business after memory costs rose between 80 and 115% at the end of the first quarter. Nabila Popal, an analyst at IDC, put the problem bluntly to CNBC: memory suppliers are answering calls from the big players first, so small companies often cannot buy the chips at any price.

The pressure reshapes what you can buy, not only what you pay. Counterpoint Research expects some phone makers to quietly downgrade cameras, displays, and audio parts to hold a price point. TrendForce predicts manufacturers will lean on the same trick computers and phones have used for years: keep the sticker the same, cut the RAM from 16GB to 8GB, and dim the screen. Gartner forecasts PC prices rising 17% and smartphone prices 13% across 2026, with global PC shipments falling more than 10%, the steepest drop in over a decade.

Should you buy now or wait

The honest answer depends on whether you need a device or want one.

If your laptop died or your phone screen is cracked and you need a replacement, buying sooner carries less risk than waiting. Every forecast points the same direction through the rest of 2026. A memory expert who spoke to Jefferies projected another 40 to 50% rise in the third quarter and a further 30 to 40% in the fourth. Apple CEO Tim Cook called the surge in memory demand a “hundred-year flood” and said prices will not ease until supply returns to normal, which he framed as outside the company’s control. Micron expects the shortage to run through 2027. AMD told its Computex audience that DDR5 prices will not normalize until 2028.

If you only want more memory for headroom, you have room to wait and watch. Some analysts have spotted early signs of prices flattening as buyers balk. A TechRadar columnist argued that shoppers will close their wallets at some point, which would force prices down faster than the gloomy forecasts assume.

A few practical moves hold up regardless of timing:

• Consider last year’s model. Year-over-year gains in laptops and phones tend to be small. A 2025 machine at 2025 pricing often beats a 2026 machine that costs more and ships with less RAM. Refurbished units stretch the savings further.

• Check the specs, not the sticker. A $600 laptop in 2026 may carry 8GB of RAM, where the 2025 version held 16GB. Read the memory and storage line before you judge the deal.

• If you build your own PC, buy what you need now. No new consumer DDR4 is being made, so older platforms face the tightest squeeze. Watch for counterfeit memory, which Tom’s Hardware has documented circulating as scarcity drives prices up.

The Bigger Picture

The chip shortage that began as a supply-chain story for data centers now shows up on the price tag at Best Buy. Deutsche Bank analysts argued that memory has crossed a line, turning from an ordinary commodity into something closer to a macroeconomic force, one that raises the cost of living for anyone who owns a device. A coalition that includes the National Retail Federation has asked the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments to examine the imbalance.

For now, the AI buildout that powers chatbots and image generators is billing consumers directly, through the laptops, phones, and consoles they were going to buy anyway. The line items are familiar. The prices are not.

 Sources & Refrences

• CBS News — “Apple and Microsoft are raising their prices by hundreds of dollars as chip costs soar”

• CBS News — “Gadget prices have fallen for decades. Then AI happened.”

• CBC News — “Apple and Microsoft hike prices as AI crunches global memory chip supply”

• Al Jazeera — “Apple, Microsoft hike prices over surging chip costs”

• Fortune — “Even Apple couldn’t escape the memory chip ‘RAM-ageddon’ crisis”

• CNBC — “The memory shortage shaking Apple and Microsoft is ‘existential crisis’ for smaller players”

• CNBC — “Rise in memory chip costs puts pressure on electronics retailers”

• Consumer Reports — “With AI Data Centers Scooping up RAM, Laptop Prices Could Spike in 2026”