Analysis
Two of the world's biggest consumer hardware companies are responding, in opposite ways, to the same memory-price shock this week. Apple and Klarna launch "Apple Upgrade" on Tuesday, a US lease-to-own program covering iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watches, with 24-month lease terms for phones and watches and 36-month terms for the pricier iPads and Macs. Separately, Google confirmed the entire Pixel lineup will see price increases, with a company VP explicitly citing memory costs as the driver.
The root cause is the same for both: the cost of a gigabyte of RAM has risen roughly sixfold, from about $2.80 in 2025 to $12 in 2026, as AI data center demand for high-bandwidth memory pulls DRAM supply away from smartphones, laptops and other consumer electronics. Leaked pricing suggests the base Pixel 11 will start around $899 when it launches August 12, up roughly $100 from its predecessor, even as Google doubles base storage to 256GB to soften the blow.
“The two companies' responses diverge in a way that says something about each one's leverage.”
The two companies' responses diverge in a way that says something about each one's leverage. Apple isn't cutting sticker prices at all -- instead, it's restructuring how consumers pay for them, spreading the cost of increasingly expensive hardware across multi-year lease terms with a soft credit check, letting Apple hold pricing power while shifting affordability pressure onto financing structure. Google, by contrast, is absorbing the cost hit directly into list price while publicly committing to "aggressively engineer" Android's memory footprint down over time -- a slower, harder fix that won't show results before the Pixel 11 ships.
This same memory shock is rippling through public markets: Samsung's $200 billion HBM4E supply deal with Broadcom and China's CXMT IPO -- which triggered double-digit single-session declines in SanDisk, Micron and SK Hynix shares this week -- are both downstream of the identical AI-driven DRAM demand squeeze now hitting consumer device pricing. What was, a year ago, a component-cost story confined to AI infrastructure earnings calls is now a line item on every iPhone and Pixel buyer's monthly bill.
What to watch: whether other device makers -- Samsung, Motorola, PC OEMs -- announce comparable price increases or financing pivots in the coming weeks, whether Apple Upgrade's lease structure meaningfully offsets unit sales pressure once Pixel 11 and the next iPhone cycle both carry higher list prices, and whether the memory shortage eases enough by 2027 for either company to reverse course.
