Apple announces on September 9, and the foldable iPhone Ultra is the headline. But the more structurally important story landed a day earlier, buried in supply chain reporting: a RAM shortage driven by Micron's production constraints is pushing iPhone prices up across the board, and the foldable form factor only amplifies the problem because it requires more memory to run its expanded display architecture.
Apple's iPhone Ultra Price and the RAM Shortage Explained
The shortage is not mysterious. AI features, now baked into every flagship phone, require significantly more on-device memory than previous generations. Apple Intelligence, Samsung's Galaxy AI, and their equivalents are not cloud-only tools. They run locally, which means every phone needs more RAM to function as a pocket AI. Demand spiked faster than Micron and its competitors could scale production. Bentley's new Torcal EV, which simulates V8 engine sounds through speakers because the electric powertrain is too quiet for the customer's emotional expectations, is a useful parallel: the premium market is increasingly about software simulating experiences the hardware no longer generates organically. Apple is charging more for a phone that uses its memory to run the AI that makes it feel like the phone it used to be.
Phil Schiller's Exit and the App Store's Revenue Problem
Phil Schiller's reported departure from App Store oversight adds a second pressure. New CEO John Ternus reportedly wants more recurring revenue from the store, which means higher fees or new extraction mechanisms at precisely the moment hardware prices are already rising. The Anthropic settlement dispute, where authors are pushing back against publishers claiming shares of AI training compensation, runs the same logic in a different medium: the platform extracts, the creator argues about who gets the remainder. Sony's decision to reissue the XM4 headphones six years later with minimal changes is the most honest product launch of the week: when the supply chain is stressed and prices are rising, selling the thing people already trust at the price they remember is actually the correct move.