Due to the continued tight supply of memory chips worldwide, Apple's planned release of the new M5 chip Mac Studio will be postponed from the original summer of 2026 to October, and the launch of the new MacBook Pro equipped with an OLED touch screen will also be postponed from the end of 2026 to 2027. The report pointed out that the delay was not because the product itself was not ready, but because Apple was worried that it would not be able to meet market demand once it was launched as scheduled.
In the past period, Apple has performed better than most peers in the face of tight supply of RAM and SSDs worldwide, but it has still been forced to raise the prices of some external storage products and stop selling some high-end Mac options. The latest news is that as the memory shortage further intensifies, the release pace of many key new products, including Mac Studio and the future touch-screen MacBook Pro, has been forced to adjust.
Previous reports stated that the new Mac Studio equipped with the M5 chip was originally expected to be released in the summer of 2026, but now the time window has been pushed back to around October; and the new MacBook Pro equipped with an OLED screen and touch operation, which was previously widely expected to be released around the end of 2026, is now more likely to be postponed to 2027. The report emphasized that the core reason for this delay was memory supply issues rather than delays in product design or R&D.
In order to alleviate the risk of tight supply, Apple is believed to be "stockpiling" - locking in and accumulating memory and storage chips needed for future models in advance. There are reports that Apple has reached costly purchasing agreements with suppliers, such as it was revealed that it paid Samsung nearly twice the previous price to purchase DRAM to ensure adequate quotas in a tight market environment.
The current memory and storage shortage has rippled across the tech industry and is rooted in the surge in demand for AI servers driven by the generative AI wave. Such servers have extremely high demand for RAM and SSD, and data centers around the world are expanding at an extremely fast pace, further driving up the consumption of related components. Along with this, processor supply has also been affected, and Apple CEO Tim Cook said in January this year that processor-related supply issues are one of the company's current major concerns.
Industry analysts pointed out that the reason why Apple chose to postpone the launch of new products such as Mac Studio is largely because it hopes to avoid long-term shortages of new machines once they are released against the background of extremely tight supply chains. However, this move does not necessarily mean that Apple judges that the memory and storage market will significantly ease in the short term. With AI-related infrastructure construction still at its peak, the supply uncertainty of key components such as processors, memory, and SSDs will continue to affect the pace and configuration strategies of subsequent Mac product lines.