The memory shortage shaking Apple and Microsoft is 'existential crisis' for smaller players

Apple CEO Tim Cook looks on during an event with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Aug. 6, 2025. Win Mcnamee | Getty Images Earlier this year, Mono Technologies assembled and shipped nearly 1,000 units of its flagship product, a $600 router development kit. Co-founder Tomaž Zaman, who started Mono in 2024, found early traction with networking aficionados, who use the product to speed their internet connections. Then came the memory crunch , which has driven up the cost to produce practically every electronic device on the planet. Now, Zaman isn't sure what to do, especially for the 1,300 prospective customers who put down a $100 deposit for his next production run. Mono's cost for 8 gigabytes of a type of DRAM from Micron shot up from $35 when he was first developing the product to $300 today. At his three-person company, Zaman said he hasn't decided if he'll go ahead with a second batch and increase the price by at least one-third, or introduce a new model with 75% less memory. "Even a router of our class, it's a poor value if you make it at $900, $1,000," Zaman told CNBC in an interview. "But we have to, or we trim it down to the bare minimums." Zaman's experience is becoming common across the consumer electronics market, from iconic devices like iPads and Xbox consoles, to niche products that are barely past the testing phase. …