Apple is expecting supply constraints to have a much bigger impact on revenue during the September quarter, Apple CEO Tim Cook said today during Apple's earnings call for the third quarter of 2026.
Supply constraints will impact the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Cook said Apple is seeing less flexibility in the supply chain than normal and an issue with the availability of the advanced nodes that Apple's chips are produced on.
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.
He said the cause is not a regular supply issue, but a demand forecast issue. The iPhone and Mac are doing "remarkably better" than Apple expected.
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.
Cook also commented on memory shortages. He said Apple paid more for memory in the June quarter than the March quarter, and the company expects to pay even higher memory costs in the September quarter. He said Apple will be able to partially offset the increased costs in two ways, but memory will continue to be problematic.
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.
Apple is planning to release new iPhone models in September, including the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and its first foldable iPhone.
