Why new phones and laptops are so expensive right now (and what to buy instead)

You're not imagining it. In June, Apple raised the price of the MacBook Air by $200. Not a new model, not a new chip. The same laptop that had been on sale since March, suddenly $200 more.

Apple said why: memory and storage had become too expensive. It raised the price of fourteen products the same day.

If you were looking at that laptop a year ago it was $999. It's $1,299 now.

Nobody selling you a laptop chose this, and none of them can fix it. Two specific parts inside every device got dramatically more expensive: the memory it uses to run things, and the storage where your files and the system live. They're also two of the priciest components in the machine, so when both move at once, the whole price moves with them.

Here's the short version, if you read nothing else. Buy something two to four years old. It's still where the value is, and it's harder to find than it was a year ago. That scarcity is going to tempt you into buying something older instead. Don't.

Why the memory got expensive

Because the companies building AI bought it.

That's the short answer and it's most of the long one. Running AI systems takes enormous amounts of memory, far more per machine than anything you'd have in your house, and the companies doing it have been buying at a scale nobody has ever had to supply before. They can also pay more for it than you can.

The memory in a data center isn't identical to the memory in your laptop, but it comes out of the same small handful of factories, competing for the same production time. When one buyer will pay more, that's where the production goes.

Making more isn't quick. A memory factory takes years to build and costs billions, so nobody can just turn a tap when demand jumps.

There's something a little galling about paying more for a laptop because someone else is building a chatbot. Although we should be honest here: we build AI tools too, and the matching engine we're building for this site is one of them. So we are part of the problem. We are also standing at the same checkout as you, looking at the same price, making the same face.

The tech press has taken to calling this RAMageddon. RAM is the industry's word for the memory we've been talking about, so the joke is roughly "memory apocalypse," which tells you how the people who follow this stuff feel about it.

It isn't nearly over. Micron, one of the companies that actually makes these chips, expects the shortage to run through 2027.

Why refurbished got harder to find, too

Something else happened at the same time, and it's the part almost nobody writes about. The used market got squeezed from both ends at once.

More people started buying used

When a laptop crosses a certain price, people stop and think. Someone who would have replaced an aging machine without much deliberation looked at the new price, winced, and started looking at used instead.

Phones went the same way. Even on a carrier upgrade plan, where replacing your phone used to be close to automatic, the monthly number moved enough to change the question. It stopped being "which one" and became "do I actually want to pay this?" Increasingly the answer is no.

This one is measurable. Used phone shipments grew faster than new phone shipments through 2025, and the gap has been widening since.

Fewer used devices came in

Refurbished stock doesn't appear from nowhere. Almost all of it is somebody's old device, traded in or sold on when they bought a new one.

Which sets up something worth following through. If people are buying fewer new devices, they're trading in fewer old ones. The supply of used machines should thin out at exactly the moment more people want one.

It compounds, too. Someone trading in an old phone is now often buying refurbished rather than new. They put one device into the pool and take a better one straight back out.

We haven't found data that proves this. What we can tell you is that we check our partners' stock every day, and the machines we'd send you to are harder to find than they were six months ago.

Squeezed from both ends

More buyers, less stock. That does what it always does.

The newest used devices, the ones only a year or so old, got dragged up with everything else. They're priced against the new model, so when the new model rises, they follow it.

And the real value, the machines a few years old, got picked over. That tier was always the smart buy. The difference now is that everyone else has found it.

So what should you actually buy

Buy a device that's two to four years old.

That was true before any of this started. It's still true now. What's changed is that it's become the most fought-over shelf in the store, so you should expect to wait, and you should expect to not find exactly what you wanted on the first try.

The two edges of that band are there for different reasons, and both matter.

Two years is the floor because that's roughly how long it takes for a device to fall out of the shadow of new pricing. Anything newer is still priced against the model on the shelf next to it, and the model on the shelf next to it just went up.

Four years is the ceiling because of something that has nothing to do with prices, and it's the more important of the two.

The thing that rules out older machines

A device stops being worth buying when it stops getting security updates. Not when it gets slow. Not when the battery goes, because you can replace a battery. When the updates stop.

After that point you're running a machine that nobody is fixing anymore, doing your banking on it, and every month that passes it's a slightly worse idea.

That clock is the reason we won't send you to a five- or six-year-old machine, however good the price looks. It runs differently on Windows and on Apple devices, so here is each.

Windows laptops have a hard date, and it has already passed. Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 10 in October 2025. Many laptops from five or six years ago can't run Windows 11 at all, which leaves them stranded. Microsoft has extended free security updates for Windows 10 until October 2027 if you sign up for them. After that, nothing. So a cheap Windows 10 laptop today comes with roughly fifteen months of safety left, and then it's on its own.

For Macs, the chip matters more than the age, and there's a change coming this fall. Right now, Apple's current system, macOS 26, still runs on a handful of older Macs with Intel chips inside. The next version, due in the fall, drops them all. From then on, new versions of macOS will only run on Macs built with Apple's own chips, which means late 2020 onward. So if you're buying a used Mac, check for an Apple chip rather than an Intel one. It's the difference between a machine with years of updates ahead of it and one that's about to stop.

iPhones last longer than most people expect. Apple's current system, iOS 26, still runs on the iPhone 11, which came out in 2019. The version due this fall drops no phones at all, so the iPhone 11 gets another year.

An older phone will generally feel slower than a newer one, and iOS 26 struggles on the oldest phones that can run it. That's mostly down to the chip inside, and chips don't get faster with age. The fall release is being described as focused on performance rather than new features, which is also the reason nothing is being dropped. Whether that actually makes an old iPhone feel quicker is something we'll find out in September, not something we'd buy a phone on the strength of.

The catch is the part you can't plan around. When a phone does eventually fall off the list, it happens without warning, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Why this matters more when stock is tight

Here's the trap.

You'll go looking for a three-year-old laptop, you won't find one at the price you wanted, and there will be a six-year-old one sitting right there for two hundred dollars less. In that moment it will feel like the sensible, thrifty choice.

It isn't, and the reason is that the two problems are not the same shape.

High prices and thin stock are temporary. Supply recovers. It costs you a few weeks and some irritation, and then it's over.

Running out of security updates is permanent, and it runs on a clock that has nothing to do with any of this. A Windows 10 laptop stops getting updates in October 2027 whether chip prices crash tomorrow or keep climbing for another two years. That date doesn't move because the market moved.

Scarcity is going to push you to trade a temporary problem for a permanent one. That's the single worst move available to you right now, and it's the one the market is quietly steering you toward.

The second check, once you've found the right age

Getting the age right puts you at the correct shelf. It doesn't guarantee what's on it.

When stock is tight, what's left is disproportionately the version nobody wanted when it was new. The unpopular color, the small storage, and above all the low memory configuration.

There's a neat irony in this. The M1 MacBook Air is a good buy and sits right in the band we'd point you to. But the configuration that tends to still be sitting around is the 8GB one, and 8GB is exactly the thing this whole article is about being in short supply. Right shelf, wrong machine.

So check the memory and the storage before you check anything else. A four-year-old laptop with enough of both will outlive a two-year-old one without. If you want the models that hold up, our guide to the best refurbished laptop for everyday use walks through them, and there's a phone equivalent too.

When it isn't there

It often won't be. Three things to do, in order.

Wait. Genuinely. Stock moves. If your current device still works, a few weeks is cheap.

Widen the net. Availability differs a lot between sellers, and the machine that's gone in one place is often sitting in another.

Take a different model in the same band. This is the one people resist and it's usually the right answer. You are far better off with a different make, the same age, than with the exact model you had in mind at six years old.

What not to do is solve a stock problem by reaching for an older machine. That's not patience running out. That's buying a shorter clock.

Let us do the looking

Working out which two-to-four-year-old machine has enough memory, enough storage, and enough support runway left is exactly the sort of thing that's tedious to do yourself and quick for us to do for you.

That's what we're building. You'll answer a few quick questions, and we'll find the laptop or phone that fits how you actually use tech, at the lowest price we can find across our partners. We're building that now. Get notified when it's live → (email capture)

And it will be free. You won't pay us anything, and the device won't cost you a cent more for coming through us. When you buy, the marketplace pays us a small finder's fee for the introduction. That's the whole model, and it also means we have no reason to push you toward a pricier machine, because we're not the one charging you. We'll earn the same whether you spend a little or a lot, so we're free to just find you the one that fits.

If you'd rather do the vetting yourself first, our guide to what refurbished actually means covers the label, and is a refurbished laptop safe? covers how to judge a seller.

Common questions

What is RAMageddon?
It's the nickname the tech press gave the 2026 shortage of memory and storage chips. Demand from AI data centers outran what the factories could make, prices climbed sharply, and the cost fed through into phones, laptops, and consoles.

Should I just wait for prices to come down?
For new devices, not soon. Micron expects the shortage to run through 2027. For used devices, waiting a few weeks for the right machine to come back into stock is often worth it.

Is a refurbished device safe to buy?
Yes, with the usual checks on grading and warranty. The safety comes almost entirely from who you buy from: a seller who tests the machine, wipes it, installs legitimate software, and stands behind it with a warranty.

How old is too old?
Once security updates stop. For Windows, that means October 2027 for anything still on Windows 10. For Macs, avoid anything with an Intel chip inside, because the next version of macOS drops them. For iPhones, the iPhone 11 and newer are still supported.

Heads up: Savvoo earns a commission when you buy through our partners. It never influences which products we pick. You can read how we work here.

Related: What does refurbished mean? · Best refurbished laptop for everyday use · Best refurbished phone for everyday use · Is a refurbished laptop safe?