When Tim Cook stood before investors earlier this year and called Apple's pricing "unsustainable," he was not describing a company in crisis — he was describing an industry-wide reckoning that consumers are only beginning to feel. The 16-inch MacBook Pro rose by $300. The 11-inch iPad Air climbed from $599 to $749. Even the modest HomePod Mini added $30 to its price tag.

Apple, however, is far from alone: the Xbox has seen price increases of nearly 25 percent depending on the model, and the British startup Nothing cancelled an entire phone launch rather than sell a device it could no longer price competitively. The mechanism driving these changes has been given an unglamorous nickname — RAMageddon. Tim Derdenger, an associate professor of marketing and strategy at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, describes the underlying logic as "basic economics." Memory manufacturers have systematically redirected their production lines away from the consumer DDR5 chips that power laptops and gaming consoles, and toward the high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, that feeds AI data centres.

When the supply of a critical component shrinks, its price rises — and companies pass that cost along. What makes this moment genuinely different from an ordinary supply disruption is that it is a choice, not an accident.