When push comes to shove, Apple is apparently not afraid of playing dirty, and appears all-in on leveraging its unparalleled heft and resources to starve out competitors, as appears to be the case with the Cupertino giant's apparent cornering of all available mobile DRAM.
Apple is not above playing dirty as it tries to corner the global mobile DRAM market to starve out competition
TF Securities analyst, Ming-Chi Kuo, recently noted that Apple could substantially boost its market share in the ongoing chaos in the memory sphere by absorbing stratospheric memory chip prices and sacrificing some of its already-hefty margins to freeze the prices of its sprawling portfolio of devices.
Well, Apple appears to have taken Ming-Chi Kuo's advice to its heart, as evidenced by the recent launch of the very competitive MacBook Neo at just $599 - a price point that now positions the Cupertino giant at the cusp of clinching a $30 billion market opportunity for laptops priced within the $600 - $800 range, spanning an annual sales volume of 50 million units.
Even so, Apple appears to have gone a step further by actively sabotaging the prospects of its competitors amid a historic production squeeze in the mobile DRAM sphere.
According to a South Korea-based source, Apple has been buying up "all available mobile DRAM on the market at extremely high prices, even at the cost of operating profit losses" to prevent its competitors from securing enough memory chips. This is diabolical to the extreme and would allow the Cupertino giant to substantially expand its market share.
Of course, there are signs that Apple's strategy is working. As we noted recently, both MediaTek and Qualcomm appear to have slashed their production cadence for 4nm chips, which feature prominently in low and mid-tier smartphones. As such, this production curtailment currently equates to around 20,000 to 30,000 wafers, which corresponds to a volume of between 15 million and 20 million mobile chips.
What's more, Samsung has also now hiked the prices of the 512GB and 1TB variants of a host of its tablets, as well as the Galaxy S25 Edge, the Galaxy Z Fold 7, and the Galaxy Flip 7 in South Korea.
Do note that Apple's Tim Cook identified memory chips and TSMC's choked 3nm node capacity as major constraints during a recent earnings call. From the latest tidbit, however, Apple appears to have settled on leveraging its cash-rich coffers not only to ease through these restrictions but also to sabotage its competitors in the process.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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