'Not constructive': Tim Cook blames Micron for Apple's $300 price hike. Micron suggests Apple helped cause the shortage

1 hour ago 3

Rudro Chakrabarti

Tue, June 30, 2026 astatine 7:15 AM CDT 6 min read

On June 25, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) announced sweeping terms increases crossed its MacBook and iPad lineups — on with Apple TV, HomePod and Vision Pro — with CEO Tim Cook laying the blasted connected the companies that proviso the representation chips wrong its products.

"There's little proviso astatine a clip erstwhile consumers privation devices and the representation guys are passing on immense terms increases," Cook had told (1) The Wall Street Journal the week before, calling the increases "unavoidable" and the concern "unsustainable."

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Apple said the maturation of AI information centers had "created an bonzer surge" (2) successful request for representation and storage, and that it had ne'er seen a constituent terms emergence this acold this fast.

But hours earlier, 1 of those "memory guys" had pointed backmost astatine Apple.

Micron's mentation of events

In a Wall Street Journal interrogation pursuing a blockbuster net report, Micron (NASDAQ:MU) Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana suggested that assertive buyers, without naming Apple, helped make the precise shortage present squeezing consumers. When representation prices collapsed during the past manufacture downturn successful 2023, helium argued, large customers utilized the slump to negociate rock-bottom prices, gutting suppliers' margins astatine the nonstop infinitesimal they needed currency to physique caller capacity.

"We told a mates of the customers who were being precise assertive with pricing astatine that clip that this is not constructive," Sadana told the Journal. "A batch of the manufacture investments got unopen down successful 2023 due to the fact that of truly mediocre pricing and truly mediocre margins." Micron's gross borderline had successful information turned sharply antagonistic (3) that year, bottoming astatine minus 17.8% successful its fiscal 3rd quarter.

Sadana ne'er said "Apple." He didn't person to. Apple has a well-known estimation for extracting favorable presumption (4) from suppliers done semipermanent purchasing contracts, and it is 1 of Micron's customers, buying the moving representation and retention chips that spell into iPhones, Macs and iPads.

Micron's banal soared arsenic Apple's fell

Micron's fiscal third-quarter gross (5) jumped 345.7% to $41.46 billion, with a gross borderline of 84.6%, and its shares climbed astir 15% successful after-hours trading. Apple's banal fell much than 6% to $275.15, its worst time since April 2025.

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