RAMageddon: when even Apple breaks its sacred rule, we know the crisis is historic

To measure an earthquake, sometimes it is enough to watch which buildings thought to be indestructible begin to tremble. In consumer hardware, that building is Apple's pricing policy. As Allison Johnson recalls in The Verge, the company does not run sales, does not adjust prices mid-cycle and keeps those of its current models stable until they are replaced. That it has broken this unwritten rule —with increases of hundreds of dollars on Macs, iPads, HomePods and even the Vision Pro— is not just another data point: it is the seismograph confirming that the so-called 'RAMageddon' has reached an unprecedented magnitude.

The case of the MacBook Neo illustrates it starkly. Its starting price rises from $599 to $699 and, with that, it loses its reason for being: that of an affordable Mac. It is worth placing the news in context so as not to read it as a stumble by Apple, because it is not. The crisis had been working its way through the sector for months: consoles were the first to get more expensive —PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, Steam Deck—, laptops followed, and phones felt it in their own way, whether through less storage or rising prices. On that map, the Pixel 10A boasting that it has not raised its price says more about the state of the market than any spec sheet.

The irony the article underscores deserves attention: precisely in the worst year for components, several companies are launching their most ambitious and most expensive devices. It is not recklessness, but industrial physics. The sector's R&D cycles last years, and a product with so much development behind it cannot be canceled because the market shifts at the last minute. That is how a Steam Machine from Valve at double the price of the PS5, or a sky-high-cost Galaxy Z Trifold, can coexist with the memory storm at its peak.

From there emerges the most useful reading of this whole episode: the RAMageddon acts as a relentless filter between solid propositions and fragile ones. A genuinely innovative device, backed by a track record of real improvements, can ride out the storm and justify its price to the customer. A big, expensive one with a questionable value proposition is left exposed without a net. Scarcity, in this sense, does a job that marketing tends to disguise: it forces every product to prove why it costs what it costs.

Perhaps the most valuable conclusion is the one offered by Apple's own recent trajectory: it navigated its difficulties in AI only to run into a crisis of a different nature, reminding us that in technology fronts do not close, they succeed one another. The memory shortage does not discriminate by margins or by purchasing power; it affects even those with the greatest capacity to absorb the turbulence. For the consumer, the lesson is calm but firm: in 2026, the price of a device no longer depends solely on what it carries inside, but on a global competition for components that artificial intelligence has suddenly made scarce. Knowing this makes nothing cheaper, but it helps you buy better.