“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook told WSJ. “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.”

The interview comes after months of visible strain on Apple’s product lineup — from Mac configurations being quietly delisted to delivery timelines stretching into months. Cook’s remarks are the clearest signal yet that the company is moving from managing the situation internally to passing costs on to customers.

The memory problem

The root cause is something that has been building for over a year. AI infrastructure is consuming memory at a scale the industry wasn’t built for. Data centres running large language models require high-bandwidth memory (HBM) — a specialised type of DRAM — and manufacturers like Samsung and SK Hynix have been steadily shifting production capacity toward it because the margins are substantially better. The result is a supply squeeze on general-purpose DRAM and NAND flash, the kind that goes into smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook told the Journal. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”

Cook indicated that Apple is particularly exposed on the DRAM side, singling out the LPDDR market as a specific concern. He also noted that Apple is prepared to use its cash reserves to help secure memory supply, without going into specifics. “We’re willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part of the solution,” he said. “Obviously, more capacity is needed.” He was careful to clarify, however, that Apple has no plans to build its own memory or storage factories.

Cook will hand over the reins to John Ternus in September. This interview may be one of the more consequential things he says before he does.

This was coming

The signals were there months before Cook put it on the record.

In January, ZDNET Korea reported that Samsung and SK Hynix had raised LPDDR prices for Apple by close to double compared to the previous quarter — Samsung reportedly proposed an increase of over 80 per cent, while SK Hynix proposed roughly 100 per cent.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo flagged the implications at the time. In a post on X, he noted that iPhone memory pricing had moved to quarterly negotiations from the previous six-month cycle, and that another hike was already visible for the second quarter of 2026. Kuo also wrote that Apple’s plan for the upcoming iPhone was to absorb as much cost as possible and keep starting prices flat — at least for marketing purposes — while accepting margin compression.

By February, after Apple’s Q1 FY2026 earnings call, Kuo summarised the situation: Apple had publicly identified memory as a “cost pressure” rather than a “supply constraint.” That distinction mattered to investors tracking semiconductor stocks. On the earnings call itself, Tim Cook acknowledged that memory had a minimal impact on Q1 gross margins but would be more of a factor in Q2 — a signal that the numbers were already starting to move.

Already visible on the Mac lineup

Price hikes are still ahead, but supply constraints are already here, and buyers have been living with them for months.

As reported by Business Standard in May, several Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook configurations were already facing delays or had been quietly delisted from Apple’s online store in India. What started with high-memory Mac Studio variants in April — where 512GB unified memory options disappeared and 256GB variants showed four-to-five month delivery windows — had, by May, spread to the MacBook line. MacBook Air models with 32GB unified memory were facing weeks of delivery delays. The MacBook Pro with 128GB unified memory was showing roughly a month of lead time.

The pattern was consistent: higher-memory variants vanish first, then mid-tier configurations start stretching out, and by the time you notice, the options have quietly narrowed.

Apple’s structural advantage, and its limits

Apple is not a normal customer for memory suppliers. It ships approximately 247 million iPhones a year, according to a Business of Apps report. iPhone DRAM and NAND consumption accounts for something in the range of 20 to 25 percent of global smartphone memory demand, as per Kuo. That scale gives Apple leverage that only a few consumer device companies can match.

Counterpoint Research, in a note published on June 16, made Apple’s advantage explicit. In week 20 of 2026, global smartphone sales fell 8 per cent year-on-year — the ninth consecutive week of decline. Apple was up 10 per cent over that same period, while Chinese OEMs like Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo were down between 10 per cent and 19 per cent.

Counterpoint’s Associate Director, Sujeong Lim, noted that brands with stable supply chains and high visibility into memory were able to maintain more consistent pricing and promotional strategies, calling Apple’s position in that regard “advantageous.”

Faisal Kawoosa, Founder and Chief Analyst at Techarc, echoed a similar stance “Apple is not only tier 1 customer for all the supply chain but a marquee one as well for everyone supplying them components including memory. At the same time it doesn’t operate in segments like sub Rs 30k in smartphones where BOM structure is completely disrupted. So from both negotiations powers and cost structure it’s well cushioned as a brand.”

Navkendar Singh, Associate Vice President at IDC India, put a finer point on what Apple’s leverage actually means in practice right now. Quantifying the buffer is difficult, he said, but the more important advantage is not price — it is supply assurance. “Even if somebody is willing to give the price, supply is assured to these brands more than the pricing.” Apple and Samsung, by virtue of their sheer volume and supply chain pull, are in a different conversation with memory manufacturers than everyone else, he added.

But scale has limits when the structural imbalance is severe enough.

Kawoosa said that Apple has always been tight on maintaining profitability, and as “increasing component costs eat up its profit margins, it will spill over some price increase to the customers.”

Kawoosa also connected the Mac delisting pattern to the broader cost environment: “Yes, due to memory costs, brands including Apple are having lesser variants of RAM-storage configurations.”

What gets hit first

Apple’s premium positioning gives it a buffer that mid-range Android brands don’t have, but that buffer does not apply uniformly across its own lineup.

Kawoosa flagged Apple’s so-called feeder portfolio as the most exposed. “For India and other emerging markets, I do see some concern around its ‘feeder portfolio’ — essentially the E series of smartphones, Neo for MacBooks and Air for Tablets — where we might get to see early impact.”

He added that he would not be surprised to see Apple introduce a Neo lineup for iPads, widening the entry-level tier in a way that gives it pricing flexibility without visibly raising prices on flagship models.

Singh added that Apple accessories such as Apple Watch and AirPods will likely remain insulated from the impact of component price inflation. He said that these devices “still run on legacy silicon, and the volumes are far lower” compared to the likes of iPhones, Macs and iPads.

“While you might see it somewhere, I think it will be more pronounced in these categories,” he said, referring to iPhone, Mac, and iPad.

Impact on possible foldable and September launches

Apple is reportedly on track to launch its first foldable iPhone in September alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. That is a significant new category, and it arrives in the middle of a component cost squeeze.

Singh does not expect the foldable to be shelved, but he does not rule out a minor slip in timeline. “Foldable, I’m not too sure that it will have an impact. Might be a delay of one or two months if at all. Otherwise, we’re looking at a foldable launch this year only.” He added that if it does not land in September alongside the Pro lineup, it will still happen by October or November at the latest.

As for the next generation iPhones, Singh said that higher storage tiers like 1TB will be available in smaller quantities, with supply weighted more toward 256GB and 512GB variants.

On pricing, Singh said Cook’s interview should be read partly as Apple setting the stage for price increases on the September launches. He added that buyers should expect roughly $100 to $150 upside on every SKU.

It should be noted that Bloomberg has reported that Apple is shaking up its release schedule. The company typically unveils all models in the new iPhone series at the same time in September. But this year, the September lineup will reportedly be limited to the higher-end models, such as the Pro, Pro Max, and the anticipated foldable. The report stated that the new standard iPhone model, along with the refreshed Air model, could launch in spring 2027.

What this means for India

While Apple’s premium offerings grab the most headlines, its feeder portfolio, as Kawoosa describes it, pulls first-time Apple buyers and young professionals into the ecosystem. If memory cost inflation makes those entry points more expensive, or thins out the configuration options available at existing prices, the calculus changes for a significant segment of buyers.

Singh’s read on India demand was measured. IDC’s forecast for the overall Indian smartphone market this year is a 13 per cent decline, but he said the bulk of that drop is coming from Android. Apple, he said, will not degrow in any meaningful sense. “Even if it degrows, it’s a plus minus few percentage points. It will hold because Apple customers are more price immune than other brands.”

Kawoosa was direct about what Apple’s exposure means at a market level: “Apple shrinking in demand will affect the value of the market more than volume.” Even a modest pullback in iPhone sales in India hits the premium segment hard because iPhones dominate the high average selling price end of the market.

This is even clearer from Counterpoint’s data. The market intelligence firm reported that in India, Apple had 28 per cent smartphone market wholesale value share in CY 2025 while having roughly 9 per cent market share in terms of shipments.