Your next iPhone is going to cost you.
On Tuesday, Apple unveiled the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max — with price tags $100 higher than the previous Pro models. Apple has yet to announce the entry-level iPhone 18.
The announcement illustrates how the global memory shortage has stretched a company as dominant as Apple.
In his final earnings call as CEO, Tim Cook said that Apple had “reluctantly raised prices” of iPads and MacBooks due to the memory shortage.
“We did it because we’re in what I would characterize as a 100-year flood on the memory pricing with exponential increases in memory prices,” Cook said.
The memory shortage is largely driven by the AI revolution as chipmakers shift production away from chips designed for consumer products to the more specialized chips required for the data centers that power AI models.
In June, Apple increased the prices of iPads by up to 25% and Mac computers by as much as 20%. At the time, the cost of existing iPhone models remained unchanged.
Other companies, including some of Apple’s competitors, have also hiked device prices.
Officials at Samsung and Google have said they raised prices on some of their smartphone models in part due to rising memory costs.
“There’s never been an increase in memory prices like the world’s going through right now,” Google’s vice president of devices and services, Shakil Barkat, said in July ahead of the release of the Pixel 11.
Ultimately, Google tacked $100 onto the Pixel 11, though it also doubled the storage of the baseline edition as Google discontinued the 128GB model.
This is a developing story…
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