Apple has been loudly and forcefully complaining of the sky-high memory prices for the past few months, using its soaring cost of key components as a cudgel to implement sweeping price hikes. Now, however, memory chip makers such as Micron are pushing back by blaming Apple's penny-pinching ways for years of under-investment and the resulting dearth of capacity.
Micron says it informed Apple a few years back that its "aggressive" attitude on pricing was "not constructive"
Memory chip makers apparently have had enough of Apple using their shoulder to preserve its margins. As a case in point, consider the valuable nuggets of information recently shared by Micron's Chief Business Officer, Sumit Sadana, where the executive was adamant that Apple was to blame for the industry's chronic under-capacity at the moment.
Without directly naming Apple, Sadana disclosed that Micron had informed a couple of its customers "who were being very aggressive with pricing" that their strategy was "not constructive."
While noting that Micron's gross profits went negative a few years back because certain customers (Apple) took advantage of a memory down-cycle "to pay rock-bottom prices," Sadana disclosed:
"A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins."
In essence, Micron is blaming Apple's penchant for driving really hard bargains for the memory industry's capacity-related disarray at the moment.
Of course, as we noted recently, Apple adopted a uniquely aggressive strategy over the past decade, pressuring its supply chain partners to reduce prices while concurrently hiking the prices of its own products, resulting in juicy margins.
For instance, Apple has hiked the price of its highest-end iPhone by 60 percent over the past decade, as tabulated by the price difference between the $749 iPhone 7 Plus in 2016 and the $1,199 iPhone 17 Pro Max in 2025. Yet, over this period, the CPI basket in the US has grown by just 37 percent.
What's more, while Apple is hurting, its margins are still expected to hover at a very healthy 45 percent in 2027, as tabulated by JP Morgan recently.
Of course, at the other end of the spectrum, with Micron's latest gross margin printing at an eye-popping 85 percent in its recently concluded quarter, the company can no longer get by with pinning all its capacity-related woes on Apple, even if the iPhone maker might have laid the seeds for this crisis a few years back.
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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