‘RAMageddon’ Comes for the Mac

While Apple is reportedly planning to hold the line on iPhone prices despite the skyrocketing costs of memory and other chips, it seems its hands may be more tied when it comes to its impact on product availability.

By now you’re probably well aware that the cost of storage has been going up dramatically over the past few months. While inflation has come to nearly everything in today’s economy, RAM, SSDs, and processor chips are getting hit even harder due to an “AI gold rush” — big tech companies like Nvidia and Google sending memory prices into orbit as they demand more and more capacity from manufacturers that are being pushed to their limits.

It’s a standard “Econ 101” supply and demand issue, which makes it about more than just prices. RAM is expensive because it’s in short supply, and that scarcity means even industry giants are struggling. While Apple is famous for locking down its supply chain agreements, it’s still being hit in some spots, and it appears some of its desktops are bearing the brunt of it.

Apple already quietly removed the Mac Studio configuration with 512 GB of RAM (“Unified Memory”) from sale early last month, shortly after its big week of product launches. That was the maximum configuration for the M3 Ultra Mac Studio that launched last year, but its removal lowers the bar to 256 GB. That’s still better than its 2023 M2 Ultra predecessor, which topped out at 192 GB, but not by quite as much.

Many believed the decision to pull the 512 GB model from sale was driven by the limited availability of chips. 512 GB is a massive amount of RAM, but it’s also baked into the M3 Ultra chip, so it’s not like Apple is buying memory chips on the open market.

Instead, this would be more of a fabrication issue with TSMC, which is being pushed by the demand for more powerful chips by some of its other clients. Apple may enjoy preferred customer status with the chipmaker, but there are still finite limits on its capacity. If anything, Apple may be shifting its priorities to make sure TSMC can crank out a sufficient supply of chips for newer and more popular devices. After all, the 512 GB Mac Studio isn’t exactly the most popular model on the market.

However, now Apple seems to be facing similar issues with the rest of its Mac Studio lineup — and with the Mac mini as well. Although it hasn’t pulled any other configurations from sale, online delivery times from the Apple Store are reaching levels we’ve never seen before.

Some base models remain available in brick-and-mortar retail stores — and can be shipped directly from there if you live close enough — but if you want a configure-to-order model, you’ll likely be looking at 16–18 weeks for a Mac mini, and up to five months for a high-end Mac Studio setup.

Based on these numbers, it’s unclear how long the off-the-shelf stock will last in stores, since this suggests that Apple may be struggling to backfill inventory from its supply chain. Still, the most significant constraint appears to be memory and storage. Settle for an entry-level configuration and you might be able to get your hands on an M4 Mac mini by the end of April, but if you want to push it to an 8 TB SSD or 64 GB of RAM, you’ll probably be on your summer vacation before it shows up.