Why Your Next MacBook Won't Get Cheaper Until 2027, Apple's Most-Trusted Analyst Explains

Apple just did something it almost never does in the middle of a year, with no new product to justify it, raising prices across the MacBook, iPad, Apple TV and HomePod, and India ended up getting hit harder than nearly every other market, with some configurations climbing by as much as Rs 70,000 overnight. The reason Apple gave was short and tidy, that memory chips have become expensive because of the AI boom, which is true enough as far as it goes.

Notable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo recently tweeted that this price hike is not a one-off correction that quietly sorts itself out in a few months. It is the first visible crack in a memory shortage that he expects to keep widening all the way through 2027. And buried inside that analysis is the part nobody else bothered to lead with, which is that to deal with this whole issue, Apple is now quietly turning to China.

First, understand what is actually going wrong

Every MacBook and iPad runs on memory chips, the same way your phone needs its RAM and storage, and these chips, called DRAM and NAND, used to be so cheap and ordinary that nobody ever thought about them. Then AI arrived and changed the math entirely. All those data centres being built to run AI models need the exact same chips, except they need them in quantities that make consumer gadgets look like an afterthought. So the memory that once flowed into laptops and tablets is now being pulled toward AI servers instead.

Kuo estimates that in 2026 somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the memory meant for consumer electronics will get redirected to data centres in 2027, with the possibility of more after that. The logic from there is simple enough, because less memory for the things regular people buy means that when supply shrinks while demand holds steady, prices rise. And Apple itself admitted it had never seen component costs climb this quickly. Kuo also notes that Apple's chip orders for its upcoming A20 processors, in late 2026 and early 2027, may come up 10 to 20 percent short of what it originally wanted, though he is fair enough to add that part of that gap could simply be Apple over-ordering in the first place. Either way the takeaway does not change, which is that Apple is short on memory and the situation is forecast to get worse from here.

Now the part nobody is really talking about

This is where Kuo's analysis turns genuinely interesting, because once you accept that Apple is running short, it needs new places to buy memory, and one of those places happens to sit in China. According to Kuo, Apple is lobbying the White House to keep a Chinese chipmaker called CXMT off the US entity list, which is the trade blacklist that would stop American companies from buying its chips, and when you read that slowly it is a remarkable thing, an American company quietly pushing its own government to protect a Chinese supplier, simply because that supplier might soon be one of the few sources Apple can still get the memory it needs.

There is also a clock ticking on all of this, and Kuo flags it neatly. He points out that Tim Cook is one of the very few tech leaders who can stay on good terms with both Washington and Beijing at the same time, and reckons Apple would want this sorted out before Cook eventually steps down as CEO, because that window of access might not stay open once he is gone.

Kuo then floats a sharper, more cynical theory, and this is one I would clearly label as his interpretation rather than established fact. He suggests that even if the lobbying ultimately goes nowhere, simply letting the media know that Apple tried could plant a convenient idea in people's heads, the idea that Apple did everything it possibly could but was held back by US policy, so that when prices climb the anger lands on geopolitics instead of on Apple itself.

Here is the catch, though

If you have already assumed that the China route is Apple's clean escape from all this, Kuo quietly shuts that idea down too. He highlights that CXMT's own prospectus admits the company cannot even produce enough chips to meet China's domestic demand, let alone Apple's, which means that even if the lobbying succeeds and Apple does start buying DRAM from CXMT, it will not meaningfully bring costs down or close the supply gap. So the China move is not some clever money-saving masterstroke at all, but something closer to an insurance policy, a way to lock in one more source of supply in a market where every single chip counts.

Should you buy or wait?

If you set the geopolitics aside for a moment, here is the part that genuinely matters for anyone in India eyeing a MacBook, iPad or Apple TV. The price relief that most buyers are quietly hoping for is, realistically, not coming anytime soon, because the shortage driving these hikes is forecast to widen through 2027, and even Apple's China backup, by Kuo's own reading, will not pull costs down in a hurry. India also feels this more sharply than most markets, since Apple hardware already carries import duty and 18 percent GST stacked on top of the global price, which is exactly why a hike that was only a few hundred dollars in the US ended up becoming tens of thousands of rupees here.

So if you genuinely need a Mac or an iPad right now, sitting around waiting for a price drop is the wrong bet to make. The smarter play is to dig around for older stock still listed at pre-hike prices on Flipkart and Amazon before that inventory clears out, and to lean on Apple's trade-in and zero-cost EMI options to soften the blow. If you can comfortably hold off on the purchase entirely then that is perfectly fine too, but do it because you do not actually need the device yet, not because you are expecting the price to fall, because it is not going to.

And the iPhone, the one product Apple left untouched this time, may not stay safe for very long either. Apple spared its biggest seller almost certainly because phones bring in the most revenue and the market for them is brutally price-sensitive, but analysts have already warned that if memory stays this expensive heading into the autumn iPhone launch, the phone could well be next in line.