iPhone 18 Pro Price And The RAMageddon Impact: Beyond The Global Memory Crisis

The massive demand from the artificial intelligence industry for RAM has led to huge shortages as manufacturers are not being able to keep pace with it. This RAM shortage has affected all tech companies and many are having to change their plans and even products, and we are talking about downgrades, cutting production and hiking prices here. Now, fears of the so-called RAMageddon are making fans worry about the possible fallout on the Apple iPhone 18 Pro price. The smartphone is set to launch in September.

The shortage has caused many companies to raise prices of their mobile phones, laptops and even gaming consoles. It has caused even Apple to jack-up the price of its new MacBooks. Bloomberg tech analyst Mark Gurman wrote, "As part of the price increases, the MacBook Air moves from 256 GB of storage at the base to 512 GB, while the MacBook Pro goes to 1 terabyte at the base (2TB for the M5 Max models). The October M5 MacBook Pro 14-inch also goes up, from $1599 to $1699." He also added how the company tries to keep customers happy even while raising rates, "Apple storage margins are industry leading and upping the storage alongside price increases has always been a key Apple lever to raise prices while softening the blow to consumers — while improving or retaining overall margins."

Coming back to iPhone 18 price in India and Apple being Apple, the chances of a price increase are minimal, if any, as per reputed tech analysts. More on that later.

RAMageddon

RAMageddon, the shortage of memory chips, is a worry that would definitely be causing some sleepless nights at Cupertino. Generative AI data centers have increased in massive numbers globally and they have bought most of the world supply of memory chips. It has created a critical shortage for consumer tech companies. This has generated problems of a mismatch in demand and supply and that means prices of memory chips has surged, putting pressure on smartphone manufacturers and others to raise retail prices for the consumers. How high has been the jump in rates? In some cases, prices have tripled.

Apart from price hikes of their smartphones, manufacturers are looking at other ways of dealing with the problem and this includes, RAM downgrades. Yes, instead of upgrades, smartphones are facing downgrades, an unheard of situation. And some manufacturers have even cut their production forecasts.

iPhone 18 Pro Price in India

Does that apply to major manufacturers like Apple? Only to an extent. The reason is that manufacturers like Apple protect their interests through signing long-term, volume-discounted supply contracts with chip manufacturers. This especially gives Apple a distinct advantage in being able to restrict manufacturing costs and that ultimately leads to very few price increases for the iPhone.

Apple is also willing, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, to even absorb higher memory costs, even though it has itself admitted that it faces "significantly higher memory costs" and not announce an iPhone 18 Pro price hike. If that happens, Apple will be able to weaponize this ability and put a lot of pressure on rivals.

Also, for memory manufacturers, Apple is the biggest client of them all and they would not like to antagonise the company for short-term gains.

Last year, iPhone 17 Pro price on launch was Rs 1,34,900. The company had increased the price by Rs 5000 vis a vis iPhone 16 Pro. While it will be tough for Apple to maintain this same price, analysts expect it to do so. GF Securities analyst Jeff Pu expects Apple to hold the price point for the iPhone 18 Pro at last year's level. In fact, he expects Apple to roll out an "aggressive pricing strategy".

What that means for fans is that the iPhone 18 Pro price range will not likely rise out of their reach and they can look forward to the launch.