In an era of unprecedented memory-led chaos in the global smartphone sphere, Apple lobbed nothing short of a bombshell during its earnings call this week, declaring that TSMC's advanced node capacity - not memory - was the main bottleneck for its products.
Think about this. As per conservative estimates, Apple's iPhones are all set to consume 2.4 exabytes of memory this year! And yet, the Cupertino tech giant declares it is not memory-constrained, while seemingly capping the prices of its products. This declaration is nothing short of a gauntlet for Chinese OEMs: Apple is coming after your market share!
Apple's cunning strategy is forcing Chinese OEMs to cede ground when it comes to the high-end smartphone segment
We reported on a specific bit of supply chain chatter in early April, which suggested that Apple was actively buying up "all available mobile DRAM on the market" to prevent its competitors from securing enough memory chips.
A few days later, Daishin Securities partially validated that supply chain chatter by postulating that Apple was actively hoarding memory to prevent its competitors from reaching their respective shipment targets, all the while increasing its own iPhone shipment target to a still-conservative 240 million units.
Now, another report indicates that Apple - with Samsung following suit - is "sweeping the LPDDR market" while signing long-term agreements (LTAs) with major memory vendors.
Concurrently, Apple is trying to freeze the prices of its products as much as possible. When a price hike becomes inevitable, Apple appears more than willing to sacrifice the base variants, as was the case with the M4-based Mac mini recently, to freeze prices at the high end.
This situation is becoming entirely untenable for the Chinese OEMs, many of whom now face Bill of Materials (BOM) as high as $917 for their Ultra-class flagships. Consequently, according to the tipster Schrödinger, many Chinese OEMs are now mulling whether to axe their Ultra smartphone variants entirely, leaving the proverbial arena wide open for Apple, and Samsung to a certain extent.
When you consider the fact that Apple's iPhone 17 series has already clocked 20 million activations in China, with around 10 million of those activations coming from the iPhone 17 Pro Max alone, the situation becomes patently clear: Chinese OEMs can't compete with Apple at its current flagship prices.
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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