Apple's Mac business is booming, but the memory market has other plans

New CEO John Ternus toasts record sales as soaring RAM costs threaten supplies and squeeze margins

Apple says it sold more Macs in fiscal 2026 than in any previous year, but soaring memory prices are threatening to spoil the Cupertino-based gadget maker's record-breaking run.

The warning came during Apple's fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call on Monday, the first since John Ternus took over as CEO.

"What we're seeing with memory pricing right now is unprecedented," Ternus told analysts.

REG AD

Apple has already raised prices across much of its hardware lineup, including Macs and iPads in June and iPhones in September. Those increases, along with existing inventories and cheaper components elsewhere, have softened the blow. Unfortunately for Apple, memory prices haven't finished climbing.

REG AD

"For the December quarter, we expect even higher memory costs," Ternus said, adding that Apple expects to pay more for memory beyond the end of the year.

Mac buyers haven't been deterred so far. Apple pulled in $10.8 billion from Macs in the September quarter, up 24 percent year-on-year, following $10.35 billion in the June quarter, up nearly 29 percent year-on-year. The MacBook Neo and MacBook Pro accounted for much of the latest growth.

"We have never sold more Macs in a fiscal year than we did this time," Ternus said.

Whether Apple can keep enough of them on shelves is another matter. COO Sabih Khan said the company had already experienced supply constraints across iPhone, Mac, and iPad during the September quarter, largely because of limited availability of advanced chipmaking capacity. Now memory is taking over as the chief headache.

"For the December quarter, we expect constraints on Mac and iPad, primarily driven by memory, as demand has been higher than what we expected," Khan said.

Apple isn't sitting idle. Ternus revealed that its manufacturing purchase obligations jumped by $33 billion between June and September as it bids to secure supplies, although he offered no indication of when the memory crunch might ease.

Higher memory costs are also squeezing Apple's margins. CFO Kevan Parekh said gross margin fell by roughly one percentage point between the June and September quarters, excluding tariff effects, entirely because of memory costs. The damage would have been worse without existing inventory, cheaper non-memory components, and those price hikes.

Apple expects its gross margin to fall from 47.9 percent in the September quarter to between 45 and 46 percent in December, primarily because of higher memory costs. Costs associated with rolling out Siri AI will also weigh on the figure.

REG AD

Parekh said Apple had "reluctantly" raised hardware prices, but supply constraints made it too early to assess how customers were responding.

Meanwhile, Ternus is keen to sell customers on the Mac as an AI machine, particularly for running models locally.

"Mac mini and Mac Studio in particular are pushing the boundaries of local private AI," he said, pointing to workloads that previously would have been difficult to run on desktop hardware.

Apple has also refreshed its Mac lineup with M6-powered machines and a touchscreen MacBook Pro, giving customers more reasons to upgrade, provided there's enough memory to build the things.

Not that the wider business is struggling. Apple reported September-quarter revenue of $114.5 billion, up 12 percent year-on-year, while iPhone revenue climbed 17 percent to $57.6 billion. Services brought in $31.6 billion, up 10 percent.

Apple forecasts revenue growth of 7 to 10 percent in the December quarter despite the supply constraints. Even with memory prices running wild, it isn't expecting to go hungry. ®