A $1 Billion Bottleneck: Why an iPhone 18 Pro Could Be Impossible to Find This Fall
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It’s already a given that the iPhone is going to get more expensive this fall. Analysts may still be debating how much the price will go up, but nobody’s claiming it’s not going to happen.
After all, the iPhone is subject to the same forces that caused Apple to hike nearly all of its other prices in June. Memory prices have been skyrocketing — both for RAM and flash storage — as big AI companies gobble up supply by the literal boatload. Macs, iPads, and iPhones all use DRAM and NAND chips, so there’s no way the iPhone will be immune to this rising tide.
The consensus among analysts right now is that Apple is simply waiting until it unveils its new lineup this fall. The iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods were the only three device categories that didn’t see huge price increases in June, and the first two of those are now set for a refresh in less than six weeks. The third — Apple’s AirPods — might be spared simply because they’re one of the few mainstream products that don’t contain traditional memory chips.
However, the situation may be even worse than many suspected. The supply chain crunch has become so bad that it’s not even about money anymore. Demand for RAM is so off the charts that even a company dancing around the $5 trillion line can’t get its hands on enough.
According to Tim Culpan at Culpium, Apple and its downstream suppliers are “scrambling” to secure memory for this year’s iPhone 18 Pro models (and likely for its much-rumored foldable as well — a device that’s been colloquially dubbed the “iPhone Ultra” although it remains to be seen if Apple will actually do something so derivative of its biggest competitor).
With less than six weeks until the expected debut of the foldable iPhone Ultra as well as the iPhone 18 and iPhone 18 Pro, assemblers are working with Apple to rush shipments of DRAM used in mobile devices, I am told. Apple leans heavily on Micron for DRAM, but also procures from SK Hynix and Samsung.
Tim Culpan
Culpan uses that term for the foldable, but he also suggests the iPhone 18 will debut this fall, which flies in the face of everything else we’ve heard from other insiders and the supply chain itself, which all point to Apple’s shift to a new split-release cycle where the standard iPhone will debut alongside the “e-series” model, putting the iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e together in early 2027.
Either way, the twist here is that Apple’s A20 Pro chip, which will likely power all three of this fall’s iPhone models, is falling behind in production not because TSMC can’t crank them out fast enough, but because it’s waiting on the DRAM that needs to go into them.
Ironically, Apple managed to book up enough capacity on TSMC’s new 2-nanometer N2 node, which means there’s no bottleneck on fabricating the chips — Culpan says they’re “progressing well with good volume and yields” — but that process can’t start until the DRAM shows up to package with the wafers. That’s left TSMC sitting on approximately $1 billion worth of stalled Apple chips.
This in turn is stalling downstream assemblers, since the A20 Pro needs to go onto a logic board, which in turn has to go into an iPhone, and so forth.
The end result is that you may find it hard to get a new iPhone 18 Pro when it launches this fall at any price. Of course, Apple is no stranger to limited availability — new iPhone models frequently fall into four- to six-week delivery dates within a few hours of launch — but that could happen even sooner this year. We’ll keep you posted if this changes, but if you’re hoping to snag a new iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max on launch day, you should plan ahead.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
