Apple anticipates that supply constraints will have a substantial impact on revenue during the September quarter, Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the company’s earnings call for the third quarter of 2026 on Thursday.
He said the problem is a demand forecast issue, not a supply issue. Cook said the iPhone and Mac are doing “remarkably better” than expected.
Here are his comments from the call: We continue to expect high levels of demand. However, with less flexibility in the supply chain, we expect the impact from the supply constraints to increase significantly sequentially.
Let me stress again. This isn’t a partner or supplier issue… It’s an incredibly strong iPhone and Mac product cycle that has really yielded a demand beyond our expectation.
Then there are the issues with memory shortages. Cook said Apple paid more for memory in the June quarter than the March quarter, and expects to pay even higher memory costs in the September quarter. Cook said Apple can partially offset the increased costs in two ways, but memory will continue to be a problem.
His comments: The first is, as you would expect, we have benefited from some carry-in inventory in the September quarter. However, we believe we will see decreasing benefit of this over time beyond the September quarter. The second is we’re expecting lower cost on certain non-memory components. Then if you look beyond September, we see the market pricing for memory continuing to increase and have an increasing impact on our business.
The DRAM market has three suppliers. Obviously, if there were more suppliers, that would be good, and it would help us on the supply side and perhaps the pricing side. It’s unclear on the pricing side, but it could help on the supply side. And so we’re evaluating all options.
As for the recent price hikes by Apple, Cook said the company didn’t want to do this, but had to because of significant increases in memory costs.
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