Some back of the envolope math, Apple sells roughly 30 million macbooks per year [1], lets say they average out to 16gb per unit, their demand is about 500 petabytes of ram.

A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter.

So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter.

I can see how they succumed to the pressure.

[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reporte...

[2] https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-...

(I know this is not how business works, but..) I worked out if they ate a $200 per Mac bump themselves, their reserves would run out in 58 years at current sales rates :-D

More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.

Alternatively, they're launching improved products soon (like the rumored touch-screen OLED MacBook), and they want to raise prices now to (a) discourage people from buying last-gen tech ahead of increased prices for next-gen tech, and (b) give the new prices enough time to simmer in the consumer consciousness before launching the next-gen tech, to dull the shock of the price increase for next-gen tech.

I think the AI companies are so motivated (desperate) it just puts all the existing rules and contracts at risk. The Apple supply chain has always had aggressive contracts and commitments... for normal times.

why would they cut their fat margins when customers line up to buy their products anyway?

capitalism needs its profits.

also, apple is a luxury brand first and foremost.

Utter planning failure. At the same time they have a quarter trillion in cash sitting.

If they could, they would.