Apple’s MacBook Air is getting harder to buy as the global memory-chip shortage stretches delivery times and drains store inventory during the back-to-school season, with higher-memory models facing the sharpest pressure.
One consumer, Li Mu, a pseudonym used in the report, recently placed an order on Apple’s official website in China for a 13-inch MacBook Air with an M5 chip and 24GB of memory. The order showed an estimated delivery window of Sept. 1 to Sept. 8. When he called offline authorized Apple stores, several locations told him they had no stock and could not guarantee an arrival date.
His experience is not isolated. According to Time Finance, complaints about MacBook Air shortages have spread across multiple social platforms. Delivery times on Apple’s website have lengthened, retail inventory has become difficult to find, and some orders are already scheduled for September.
On Aug. 7, an Apple official-channel salesperson told consumers that MacBook Air had been in short supply since May and that the situation became more obvious during graduation season and the back-to-school period. In first-tier cities including Beijing and Shanghai, the salesperson said, any available unit tends to sell out almost immediately.
High-memory versions are the hardest to find
After visiting several Apple Stores and authorized retailers in Shenzhen, Time Finance found that supply of the M5 MacBook Air tightened noticeably from early July. Delivery delays first showed up in higher-memory models and then spread to more versions.
For the 13-inch MacBook Air, the 24GB unified memory version was out of stock at all three Apple retail stores surveyed in Shenzhen. The 16GB base model was available in limited quantity at only one location.
A salesperson at an authorized Apple store said higher-memory MacBook Air versions were basically unavailable and that new orders would take at least four weeks to arrive. The store has had more difficulty obtaining units, and the few base models still on hand are mostly older inventory. The more memory a configuration has, the longer the wait tends to be, the salesperson said.
Apple China’s website showed as of Aug. 7 that both the 13-inch and 15-inch M5 MacBook Air had notable shipping delays. The 16GB unified memory versions had estimated dispatch times of two to three weeks, while 24GB and 32GB versions required four to six weeks.
The shortage is not limited to online orders. On social media, users have described visiting multiple Apple Stores in their cities without being able to buy the model they wanted. Others said refreshing Apple’s website for stock updates had become part of their daily routine.
Based on current delivery conditions, both 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models are seeing delays of varying degrees. Consumers who already placed orders said configurations with 24GB and 32GB of unified memory are generally taking longer than lower-memory versions.
MacBook Air has long been one of Apple’s key back-to-school products because of its relatively lower price and thin-and-light design. Unlike Mac Studio and Mac Pro, which target professional users, MacBook Air is meant to broaden the Mac user base and attract students and general consumers. Apple has described it as the world’s most popular notebook.
Back-to-school timing slips even after price increases
The persistent shortage has disrupted Apple’s back-to-school sales rhythm. In the U.S., Apple’s annual education promotion usually begins in June, but this year it was pushed back to July 16. In China, the campaign also started about a week later than in previous years. In some markets, promotional pages gave more prominent placement to the base 14-inch MacBook Pro and specifically noted that certain products were subject to supply availability.
The shortages have come after Apple already raised prices.
When Apple released the M5 MacBook Air in March, it increased the base storage capacity from 256GB to 512GB and raised the starting price from $999 to $1,099. Compared with lifting the price of the same configuration directly, the combination of more storage and a higher price softened the perception of a price hike, but it also increased flash-memory consumption per device.
In June, Apple again adjusted prices for several products including MacBook and iPad models, with increases of about 18% to 25%. A price adjustment notice obtained by Time Finance from an authorized Apple retailer in Shenzhen showed starting prices for the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and MacBook Neo rose by 3,000 yuan, 1,500 yuan, and 900 yuan, respectively. Starting prices for the iPad Pro and iPad Air rose by 1,800 yuan and 1,200 yuan. That pushed the MacBook Air further away from the entry-level position it had long occupied.
Cook says constraints hit Macs most and will worsen in the September quarter
On Apple’s fiscal 2026 third-quarter earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said the company did face supply constraints in the quarter ended in June. The impact mainly hit Macs and, to a lesser extent, iPhones and iPads.
「We’re facing some very severe constraints right now, and there’s limited flexibility in the supply chain, making this hard to solve,」 Cook said, according to the report.
He added that demand has not weakened. Instead, end-market orders are running beyond what the supply chain can handle, while both advanced-process in-house chip capacity and DRAM supply are constrained.
Cook described the current memory-pricing environment as a 「once-in-a-century flood」 and said prices had risen exponentially, leaving Apple to raise prices 「very reluctantly.」 Before Apple announced price increases in June, he had already made similar remarks, saying he had not seen anything like it in any field in more than 40 years.
Looking past September, Cook said Apple expects memory prices to keep rising and that the trend could have a growing effect on the business. For the September quarter, he said the impact of supply constraints is expected to increase significantly from the June quarter because supply-chain flexibility has declined.
Apple is testing CXMT memory chips
The pressure has pushed Apple to speed up its search for additional DRAM sources.
On the night of Aug. 9, Zhongxin Jingwei, citing a report, said Apple is testing memory chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, in product lines including the iPhone and MacBook to ease memory shortages tied to the AI boom.
On Aug. 10, Time Finance sought comment from Changxin Technology, listed as 688825.SH, but had not received a response by press time.
The global DRAM market is currently dominated by Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology. Cook said on the call that having more suppliers would help improve availability, though it remains unclear whether that would relieve pricing pressure. Apple is evaluating all sourcing options, he said.
AI demand is driving the broader memory squeeze
The roots of the global memory shortage trace back to 2023. After the rise of generative AI, companies including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta accelerated AI data-center construction, driving a surge in demand for Nvidia GPUs and high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. HBM was the first category to run short.
Supply and demand pressures kept building after that. In the second half of 2025, Nvidia’s Blackwell platform ramped at scale, pushing HBM demand higher still. AI servers also require large-capacity DDR5 and enterprise SSD products. As cloud service providers built AI clusters in concentrated waves, shortages spread across the broader memory market.
HBM is essentially made by stacking multiple DRAM chips, which means it competes with DDR5 for DRAM wafer capacity. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron prioritized expansion of HBM and high-capacity server memory because of higher profit potential, which further squeezed supply of other DRAM products.
Supply-side adjustments take time. Building a new wafer fab involves facility and clean-room construction, equipment installation, process verification, and yield ramp-up. Micron expects tight supply conditions to improve only gradually by 2028, while it still cannot determine when supply will finally catch up with demand.
A Morgan Stanley study released in June 2026 said prices for memory chips including DRAM and NAND had climbed to about six times their earlier level over the past year, driven by surging demand from hyperscale cloud operators. Citi Research estimated that average selling prices for DRAM and NAND rose 44% and 53% quarter over quarter in the second quarter of 2026. TrendForce expects conventional DRAM and NAND Flash contract prices to rise another 13% to 18% and 10% to 15%, respectively, in the third quarter of 2026.
Revenue is still growing, but guidance points to more pressure ahead
Apple still has massive purchasing scale and bargaining power, but those advantages are weakening in the current fight for memory supply. In the past, Apple could lock in components early through prepayments, long-term procurement agreements, and a multi-supplier system. Now, cloud giants also have deep cash reserves and are willing to pay more for AI infrastructure.
So far, the shortages have not clearly damaged Apple’s results. For the fiscal third quarter ended June 27, Apple reported revenue up 16.4% to $109.42 billion, above the market’s prior expectation for 15.5% growth. iPhone sales rose 21.7% year over year to $54.25 billion, the highest ever for Apple’s fiscal third quarter, while Mac revenue increased 28.7% to $10.35 billion.
Still, the downside could become more visible if shortages persist. Chief Financial Officer Kevin Parekh said supply constraints are expected to have a significantly larger impact in the September quarter than in the June quarter and will affect iPhone, Mac, and iPad products. Based on that outlook, Apple expects total revenue growth in the September quarter to be between 9% and 11% year over year. The top end of that range is below Wall Street’s consensus expectation of 12%.
The original Chinese report was published by the WeChat account Time Finance APP, ID: tf-app, and written by Pang Yu.