Apple is facing tighter supply conditions for the MacBook Air as a global memory shortage ripples through its hardware lineup during the back-to-school season. Chinese consumers and retailers are reporting longer delivery times, scarce in-store inventory, and especially severe shortages for higher-memory M5 MacBook Air configurations. Apple CEO Tim Cook said on the company’s fiscal third-quarter earnings call that supply constraints in the quarter ended in June mainly hit the Mac business, while also affecting the iPhone and iPad to a lesser extent. He warned that the impact is expected to worsen in the September quarter as supply-chain flexibility declines. The supply crunch has also pushed Apple to look for additional DRAM sources. A report cited by Zhongxin Jingwei said Apple is testing memory chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, in product lines including the iPhone and MacBook. At the same time, rising AI infrastructure demand has driven up prices for DRAM, NAND, HBM, DDR5 and enterprise SSD products, tightening available capacity across the memory market. Apple said it is evaluating all sourcing options, even as its latest quarterly revenue and Mac sales remained strong.

Apple reported quarterly results that topped market expectations on both revenue and earnings, posting $109.4 billion in total revenue, up 16% year over year, and diluted EPS of $2.02. The stronger headline numbers were not enough to calm investors. Apple said revenue growth for the next quarter, which runs through September, is expected to come in at 9% to 11%, below Wall Street expectations of more than 12%, and the stock fell about 6% in after-hours trading. The company pointed to component shortages and sharply higher memory costs as key constraints. CEO Tim Cook said tight processor supply and rising memory prices were weighing on the business, with shipping delays already affecting products including the Mac mini and Mac Studio. Apple said the disruption is likely to extend into the fourth quarter and touch the iPhone, Mac, and iPad lines. Within the quarter, iPhone and Mac were the standouts, while iPad, services, and Greater China came in below expectations. The earnings release also arrives ahead of a leadership transition, with hardware chief John Ternus set to take over as CEO on Sept. 1.

Bitget UEX’s July 23 market note pointed to a risk-off tone spreading across assets after U.S.-Iran tensions pushed crude higher and lifted expectations for a Federal Reserve rate hike in September. CME’s FedWatch tool showed the probability of at least one hike before the September meeting nearing 80%, a backdrop that supported safe-haven demand for gold and, to a lesser extent, the dollar while weighing on risk assets. In commodities, WTI and Brent both advanced sharply, and spot gold and silver also firmed. In crypto, BTC slipped to about $66,199 and ETH held near $1,937, while total crypto market capitalization fell to roughly $2.33 trillion. Bitcoin spot ETFs still recorded a seventh straight day of net inflows, though the pace slowed. The report also highlighted a liquidation cluster above current BTC prices, suggesting a move through $66,500 could trigger short covering. U.S. equities closed mixed to lower, with the Nasdaq under the most pressure. Semiconductor names outperformed, but software and parts of consumer tech lagged. Bitget UEX said strong revenue from Alphabet and Tesla did not settle investors, as higher capital spending and negative free cash flow sharpened concerns about the pace of cash burn. The note also reviewed earnings from Texas Instruments, ServiceNow and IBM, and flagged several market catalysts on the calendar, including Intel earnings, comments from Trump, and AMD’s Advancing AI event.

A broad set of market, security, regulatory, and infrastructure developments emerged between late July 22 and early July 23. Binance said it will add 10 tokenized bStocks securities as eligible collateral and open margin trading for their related pairs, while Upbit designated Zilliqa’s ZIL as a closely watched asset and suspended deposits and withdrawals after security concerns tied to its wallet or distributed ledger. Zilliqa then disclosed a serious Ledger app nonce flaw affecting native, non-EVM ZIL transactions, saying private keys could be recovered from around five affected signatures. Security incidents also hit B² Network and an AFX-operated bridge in the Arbitrum ecosystem. Elsewhere, Payward said xStocks is expanding tokenized equities beyond U.S. names, Sui launched the Hashi Bitcoin interoperability testnet, BNY Mellon outlined plans for round-the-clock Treasury settlement, and several firms including OpenAI, Alphabet, Revolut, Tesla, and Samsung disclosed major product, spending, or financial updates. The flow also included U.S. legislative movement on the Clarity bill, SEC commentary on on-chain vaults and lending strategies, whale ETH purchases, and fresh market views from Grayscale and Bitwise.

Apple lifted prices across several MacBook and iPad models after AI data center demand pushed memory and storage costs sharply higher. The stock fell 5.22% on the news.

Apple is preparing new versions across its current Mac lineup from this fall into next year, according to a market report cited by BlockBeats on July 22. The planned refresh is said to cover both desktops and laptops, pointing to one of the company’s widest Mac update cycles in the period described. Products mentioned in the report include an entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro equipped with a new M6 chip, a new iMac, and higher-end 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook models featuring a redesigned chassis and OLED touch displays. Apple is also said to be planning updates for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lines more broadly. The report added that new Mac mini and Mac Studio models with upgraded chips are also in the pipeline. At the same time, release timing for some of these devices may be affected by supply challenges tied to memory chips. No more specific launch dates were provided beyond the window spanning this fall to next year.

A new zero-knowledge recovery tool from Project Eleven offers a possible escape route for some Bitcoin holders before practical quantum attacks become a reality, but it does not solve the hardest part of the problem. The tool works only for HD wallets created after 2012, leaving older coins in early pay-to-public-key, or P2PK, addresses outside its reach. That includes roughly 1.1 million BTC widely associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, spread across about 22,000 addresses. According to the article, the real debate is no longer just about when quantum computers will become capable of breaking elliptic-curve signatures. It is about what the Bitcoin community should do with legacy coins that cannot be migrated through modern cryptographic methods. Several paths are on the table, including doing nothing, freezing vulnerable coins under proposals such as BIP-361, throttling spending from old addresses, or even redistributing dormant coins through a hard fork. Each option cuts against a different part of Bitcoin’s value proposition, from property rights to immutability. The report also says markets are starting to price in this governance risk. It cites Jefferies’ decision in January 2026 to remove a 10% Bitcoin allocation from its pension model portfolio, not because a quantum breakthrough had already happened, but because of uncertainty over how Bitcoin would handle early vulnerable coins.

A PANews summary of a Limitless Podcast episode argues that investors may be reading the AI memory trade the wrong way. The discussion says Samsung posted $58.5 billion in quarterly profit, above Nvidia’s $53 billion for the same period and ahead of analyst expectations of $55 billion, with the vast majority of earnings tied to AI memory. The episode centers on HBM, or high-bandwidth memory, which the hosts describe as a bottleneck for AI chips and one of the most concentrated segments in semiconductors, with only Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron able to supply it globally. The hosts say AI workloads are driving unusually strong demand because each inference requires models to reload weights, while newer models need 10 to 20 times more memory than prior generations. They also argue that HBM production is crowding out conventional DRAM supply, citing an example that 1 GB of HBM consumes wafer capacity equivalent to 4 GB of standard DRAM. Even with prices and margins still rising, memory stocks have sold off: Samsung fell 9% on its earnings day and SK Hynix dropped 15%. The hosts attributed that move to a sell-the-news reaction and cyclical fears rather than a change in underlying fundamentals. The episode also points to SK Hynix’s planned Nasdaq ADR listing, which it says seeks roughly $30 billion and is reportedly 4x oversubscribed.