‘Not constructive’: Tim Cook blames Micron for Apple’s $300 price hike.
Micron suggests Apple helped cause the shortage On June 25, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) announced sweeping price increases across its MacBook and iPad lineups — along with Apple TV, HomePod and Vision Pro — with CEO Tim Cook laying the blame on the companies that supply the memory chips inside its products. “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook had told (1) The Wall Street Journal the week before, calling the increases “unavoidable” and the situation “unsustainable.” Must Read Apple said the growth of AI data centers had “created an extraordinary surge” (2) in demand for memory and storage, and that it had never seen a component price rise this far this fast
But hours earlier, one of those “memory guys” had pointed back at Apple. Micron’s version of events In a Wall Street Journal interview following a blockbuster earnings report, Micron (NASDAQ:MU) Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana suggested that aggressive buyers, without naming Apple, helped create the very shortage now squeezing consumers. When memory prices collapsed during the last industry downturn in 2023, he argued, big customers used the slump to negotiate rock-bottom prices, gutting suppliers’ margins at the exact moment they needed cash to build new capacity. “We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” Sadana told the Journal. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.” Micron’s gross margin had in fact turned sharply negative (3) that year, bottoming at minus 17.8% in its fiscal third quarter.
Sadana never said “Apple.” He didn’t have to. Apple has a well-known reputation for extracting favorable terms (4) from suppliers through long-term purchasing contracts, and it is one of Micron’s customers, buying…