TL;DR: Apple ended September with $14.54 billion of inventory, up 154% in a year, and almost all of the increase was parts. Apple expects memory to keep getting more expensive, and TrendForce’s contract-price forecasts agree on direction, though its forecast quarterly increases have shrunk from 58–63% in the spring to 10–15% now. Taken together with other forecasts, that suggests memory prices in 2027 still rising early in the year, with views split on the second half between slower increases and a slight dip.
Apple ended its fiscal year on September 26 holding $14.54 billion of inventory, up from $5.72 billion a year earlier and $11.09 billion in June, according to its quarterly financial statements. That is a 154% rise in a year and 31% in a single quarter. On the earnings call, Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, said “what we’re seeing with memory pricing right now is unprecedented.”
The cost is already showing up in Apple’s results. Apple expects its gross margin, the share of revenue left after the cost of making its products, to fall to 45–46% in the December quarter from 47.9% in September, and it named higher memory costs as the main reason. Because Apple buys memory in enormous volume, what it says about its costs is a useful signal of the pressure buyers face across the memory market, even though Apple does not disclose what it actually pays.
Why Apple’s inventory rose
Almost all increase is parts. Apple’s annual report, shows components rising from $2.1 billion a year earlier to $10.4 billion, nearly five times as much, while finished goods rose only from $3.6 billion to $4.1 billion. Working from those figures, parts account for about 94% of the increase. Demand for the finished products was strong, with iPhone revenue up 17.5% and Mac revenue up 23.7% from a year earlier in the September quarter.
Apple’s stated reason is supply. The company “is experiencing supply constraints and rising costs” for components including “memory and storage,” and that it “expects these trends to intensify for memory and storage components.” Ternus tied the extra orders to Apple’s work “to improve supply.” Buying early also shields Apple from prices it expects to keep rising, though that is a reading of the timing rather than something Apple said. Apple has not said how much of the inventory is memory.
Part of the jump may be price. Parts bought recently are booked at today’s higher costs, and market tracker TrendForce estimated in September that memory for a 256GB iPhone 18 Pro would cost nearly 400% more that quarter than a year earlier. Apple’s disclosures don’t show how much of the 154% that explains, or how much went to parts for the new iPhone Duo foldable.
Apple’s purchase commitments
The orders Apple has promised to pay for dwarf what sits in its warehouses. Its manufacturing purchase obligations reached $89.7 billion at the end of September, up about $33 billion since June and roughly six times its inventory. The amount due after 12 months grew from $0.8 billion to $7.0 billion, working from the June filing and the annual report, a sign the company is starting to commit further out, though analysts who asked twice about long-term supply deals got no direct answer. Ternus said Apple will see “a decreasing benefit from the carry-in inventory on memory over time,” as the cheaper memory it bought earlier runs out. Mac and iPad prices rose at the end of June and iPhone prices in September, a step the company said it took “reluctantly.” No one on the call said whether more increases are coming.
What Apple’s results say about DRAM today
Apple pays contract prices, the prices large buyers negotiate directly with Samsung, SK hynix and Micron. Spot prices, by contrast, are what loose chips trade for day to day. TrendForce’s contract forecasts cover standard DRAM, meaning all DRAM except the HBM stacked on AI accelerators, and they point the same way Apple did on the call.
| What Apple said on Nov 2 | What TrendForce and chipmakers say | Same direction? |
|---|---|---|
| Memory pricing is “unprecedented” | TrendForce forecast standard DRAM contracts up 58–63% in Apr–Jun alone | Yes |
| Memory cost more in the Sept quarter than in June | TrendForce forecast standard DRAM contracts up 13–18% for Jul–Sep | Yes |
| “Even higher memory costs” in the Dec quarter | TrendForce forecasts standard DRAM contracts up 10–15% for Oct–Dec | Yes, but forecast rises are shrinking |
| Older, cheaper memory stock is running out | TrendForce cites “depletion of low-cost inventories” across phone makers | Yes, industry-wide |
| Mac and iPad supply limited mainly by memory in the Dec quarter | Chipmakers moving capacity to servers, “leaving mobile DRAM allocations tight” | Yes |
| Memory prices keep rising after December | TrendForce expects server DRAM contracts to rise every quarter through 2H27, more slowly; chipmakers expect tight supply in 2027 | Yes for servers; no 2027 figure found for phone and PC memory |
The middle column comes from TrendForce’s quarterly forecasts for April–June, July–September and October–December, each published around the start of its quarter, and from the chipmakers’ own results. Apple doesn’t disclose what it actually paid for memory, so the two sets of figures agree on direction without confirming each other’s numbers. Apple’s results fit a tight memory market, but they don’t measure prices across it.
The one place where Apple and the forecasts seem to pull apart is the size of the increases. TrendForce expected standard DRAM contract prices to rise 58–63% in April through June, then 13–18% in July through September, then 10–15% in October through December. For phone memory specifically, it says growth “is expected to moderate” because “substantial increases were already priced in during previous quarters.” Ternus was describing how high prices have climbed, and TrendForce is describing how fast they are still expected to climb. Both hold at once. Memory that TrendForce expected to rise by more than half in a single quarter this spring is still expected to get more expensive. Each quarter’s forecast increase is smaller than the last.
Apple’s evidence covers the memory in phones and Macs. The iPhone 18 Pro Max, for example, uses LPDDR5X, the low-power DRAM mounted with the processor, according to a TechInsights teardown, and Mac memory sits inside the Apple chip package, so none of it is the DDR5 server modules data centers buy. The two markets are still linked. TrendForce says chipmakers keep shifting production toward server memory because AI servers pay more, and that shift is a large part of why phone and PC memory is tight. It expects server DRAM to stay undersupplied through the end of the year, and its July forecast has server contract prices rising every quarter through the second half of 2027, at a slowing pace.
Where memory prices go in 2027
Put together, Apple’s results say two things about memory prices in 2027. For the early months, the signals agree. Apple is still committing more money to parts, its annual report says it expects the supply constraints and rising costs to “intensify” for memory, and “looking beyond the December quarter, we see the pricing for memory purchases continuing to increase,” according to Apple’s call transcript. Even the forecast cited here that sees the earliest end has prices rising until the second quarter. The second half of the year is where the views split.
TrendForce predicts server DRAM contract prices to keep rising every quarter through the second half of 2027, more slowly. Citi also said in August that it expects prices to peak in the second quarter of 2027 and dip slightly afterward, while Gartner’s April forecast said “any meaningful pricing relief is not expected until late 2027.” The memory makers sit at the high end. SK hynix said recently that demand will outrun supply through 2030, and Samsung said AI-driven demand “will far exceed the industry supply in comparison with 2026”. BuySellRam.com‘s look at Samsung and SK hynix’s Q3 results covers their outlooks in more detail.
Two things could pull the second half lower. One is Apple’s own stockpile, because a company that has bought many months of parts ahead can order less later, and when large buyers slow at the same time, memory makers lose pricing power. The other is shoppers. Some Chinese phone brands raised prices in September, saw demand stall, and cut prices again for Double 11, China’s November 11 shopping festival. In the week of October 26, the spot price of 512Gb TLC NAND wafers, one grade of the raw material for phone storage and SSDs, fell 9.19%, while spot prices for DDR4 chips still edged up. TrendForce also expects notebook shipments to fall in 2027, by a low-single-digit percentage in its base case. The wider range of views is collected in 20 forecasts on when the memory shortage ends.
What it means for hardware buyers and sellers
For a refresh that is already scheduled, these forecasts give little reason to delay in the hope of cheaper memory, although the right timing still depends on the exact parts needed, delivery dates and what downtime costs. Spare modules are a separate decision. Modules pulled from decommissioned servers and PCs are a different product from Apple’s LPDDR5X, and their value depends on the part number, condition and current bids rather than on contract forecasts. The practical step is to get a quote while the wider DRAM market is tight, then decide whether to sell memory that is no longer needed or keep it as spares.
What to watch
Two releases will show whether Apple’s reading holds. TrendForce’s next quarterly forecast, covering January through March, will show whether the forecast increases keep shrinking from 10–15%, or whether Citi’s expected peak starts to show. Apple’s December-quarter results are the other. The margin alone can’t isolate memory, because product mix, Siri AI costs and the timing of Apple’s purchases all move it. If the margin lands outside 45–46%, what Apple says about the gap will tell more about memory costs than the figure itself.