Apple’s Mac business is booming, but the memory market has other plans
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. 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. "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…