Blog
iPhone 18 Pro price tease gives us a hint at how much you will pay
Apple could raise the iPhone 18 Pro’s starting price to $1,199 as component costs climb.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman floated that figure and said it would follow the roughly $100 price increases Samsung and Google already applied to their own flagship phones this year, both citing rising memory costs across the industry.
Apple has kept its iPhone starting price frozen for several years even as it raised storage tiers and shifted other costs elsewhere, a restraint that has left base models with specifications increasingly behind rival phones at the same price point.
Behind that pressure sit sharp increases in RAM pricing driven by AI data centre demand, alongside the higher per-unit cost of the 2nm process TSMC will use for the A20 Pro chip inside the iPhone 18 Pro compared with the 3nm process behind the A19 Pro.
Apple has already applied similar increases across most of its non-iPhone lineup and raised prices by an average of 23%, with a $200 jump for the MacBook Air and a $500 jump for the Mac Studio.
Gurman estimates that a matching $100 increase would put the iPhone 18 Pro at $1,199, a 9% rise over the iPhone 17 Pro‘s $1,099 starting price, with the larger iPhone 18 Pro Max expected to start closer to $1,299.
Historical jumps of that scale remain rare, since only the iPhone X‘s rise to $999 in 2017 was a steeper 54% increase over the iPhone 8, a leap tied to an entirely new device category much like the first iPhone Fold, expected to cost over $2,000 when Apple announces it on 9 September.
Apple has generally preferred to protect its headline pricing by raising base storage tiers or trimming its own margins instead, an approach it reportedly took with the iPhone 17 rather than adjusting the sticker price outright.
Gurman notes that Apple has already warned investors about margin pressure this quarter, a signal that the company may absorb part of the higher component costs rather than pass the full amount on to buyers.
New payment plans are also said to ease the impact of any price rise for customers upgrading their handsets, though Apple has not confirmed final pricing ahead of the iPhone 18 series launch expected in September.
