A laptop review is not usually a memory-cycle datapoint. This one is. The Framework Laptop 13 Pro drew strong marks for performance, build quality, and keyboard, and was marked down on a single dimension — it is expensive, and the review attributes that expense to high RAM prices. That sentence is the cleanest publicly visible evidence to date that high-bandwidth memory wafer allocation has stopped being a datacenter accounting problem and started setting bills of materials on consumer hardware.

I’ve defended Micron against its rivals often enough that I don’t reach for the company’s press office as a source of good faith. Legacy chipmakers cry protectionism every time a customer finds a cheaper part, and most of the time the complaint is about margin, not national security. Every instinct I have says discount this warning too. I can’t. Not this time. Apple’s pitch to the Trump administration — sourcing Chinese memory for products sold outside the United States — has been framed as a carve-out, a geographic footnote that leaves the domestic industry untouched.