When Will Mac Prices Come Back Down?

If you've been holding off on selling — or on buying — a Mac in the hope that prices will settle back to where they were, it's worth knowing what the people who track the memory market are actually forecasting. The short version: don't hold your breath. The pressure pushing Mac prices up isn't a passing supply hiccup, and the timeline for relief is measured in years, not months.

That's frustrating if you're a buyer. If you're sitting on a Mac you might sell, it's the opposite — it means the favorable conditions have a long runway. Here's what the forecasts say and how to think about the timing.

Why prices went up in the first place

The cause is memory. The build-out of AI data centers has soaked up an enormous share of the world's DRAM and NAND production, and the supply simply hasn't kept pace. Wccftech's explainer lays out the mechanism plainly: the 2026 RAM shortage is being driven by AI demand crowding out ordinary consumer memory, tightening supply for everything from laptops to phones. Because a Mac's memory is built into Apple's silicon rather than added as a separate module, there's no cheaper aftermarket path around the higher chip cost — it flows straight into the price of the machine.

The severity is what makes this different from a normal cycle. Early in the year, The Register reported that DRAM prices were expected to double as AI pushed memory fabs to their limit. When a core component roughly doubles in cost, the effect ripples through every device that relies on it, and it doesn't unwind overnight.

What the timeline actually looks like

Here's the part that matters most for planning. Analysts don't expect meaningful relief before late 2027. The reason is structural: adding memory-manufacturing capacity takes years — new fabrication plants are enormous, slow-to-build, capital-intensive projects — and AI demand is still climbing while that capacity comes online. The analysis of the global memory-shortage crisis and its impact on the PC and smartphone markets frames it as a sustained condition shaping 2026 and beyond, not a blip that corrects itself in a quarter or two.

What this means depending on where you stand

If you are...	What the timeline suggests
Thinking about selling a Mac	The strong-price window is wide, not fleeting — but waiting for it to get "even better" is a gamble against your machine's own aging
Waiting to buy a new Mac cheaper	Relief isn't expected soon; waiting a few months is unlikely to help
Deciding between new and used	Used stays the value play as long as new prices remain elevated
Just holding a spare machine	Firm prices don't stop an idle Mac from slowly losing relevance

The catch for sellers: the market helps, but your Mac still ages

It's tempting to read "prices stay high until late 2027" as "I can wait until late 2027 to sell." That's the wrong lesson. Two things move independently:

• The market is holding used-Mac prices up, and looks set to keep doing so for a while.
• Your specific machine keeps getting older regardless — a new macOS release can leave it behind, a battery keeps degrading, and newer models keep arriving to sit above it in buyers' minds.

The net effect is that a strong market softens the blow of your Mac aging, but it doesn't cancel it. The best value you'll realize is generally the intersection of "market still elevated" and "machine not yet too old" — and for most people, that intersection is closer to now than to some hoped-for peak down the road. Trying to time the exact top usually costs more in the machine's quiet decline than it gains from the market.

The low-effort way to act on it

If the takeaway is "the conditions are good and waiting mostly benefits the market, not your particular Mac," the sensible move is to check what your machine is worth today rather than guess at a future peak. Encore makes that quick: an instant online offer in about 30 seconds, a free prepaid, insured shipping label, and payment once the Mac arrives — the offer you accept is the offer you're paid, with no downgrade on receipt. It buys broken and damaged units too, so a machine you'd otherwise struggle to sell still has a clear route. You can start with a MacBook Air offer or any other family and see a real number in the time it takes to read this paragraph. It won't always beat a flawless private sale on headline price — but in a market that's likely to stay elevated for a while, locking in a firm offer now, without the waiting or the risk, is a perfectly rational way to play the timeline.