If you are planning to upgrade to an iPhone 18 Pro this fall, the only problem might not be the expected price hike, but the possibility of finding a device to buy in the first place. It seems that the massive boom in artificial intelligence technologies is not only swallowing up the computing power of major companies but has also begun to devour Apple’s supply chains, putting the company in a predicament it hasn’t seen in a long time.
A billion-dollar bottleneck at TSMC
According to recent reliable supply chain reports, Apple and its suppliers are racing against time to secure DRAM shipments for the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models. The strange thing this time is that the problem is not with the new A20 Pro processor; Apple’s lead partner, TSMC, is working very efficiently to manufacture the processor using the 2nm (N2) process and is achieving very good production yields.
However, the irony is that the processor manufacturing cannot be completed without the DRAM chip that must be assembled on top of it. This has caused a backlog of Apple processor chips worth about a billion dollars inside TSMC factories, waiting for the arrival of memory chips to begin the final packaging process.
The AI race is devouring memory chips
Apple relies primarily on companies like Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung to provide DRAM chips. But with major AI companies buying massive amounts of memory to feed data centers, competition has become fierce. The fact that a company the size of Apple is struggling to get enough memory reflects the scale of this global crisis.
This acute shortage in memory supply has, in turn, affected final assembly companies; the A20 Pro processor cannot be mounted on the motherboard without the integrated memory, which has led to a slowdown of entire production lines and delayed the delivery of the first shipments for all potential models this fall.
What does this mean for those wanting to buy?
We are all used to the fact that new iPhone shipments selling out on launch day is normal, with delivery dates often extending to 4 or 6 weeks within a few hours of opening pre-orders. But with this supply bottleneck, the first shipments of the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are expected to be unprecedentedly limited.
If you intend to get an iPhone 18 Pro on launch day, you must be prepared and take the initiative to order in the first minute that pre-orders open, otherwise, you may find yourself waiting for several weeks until Apple overcomes this complex crisis.
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