Every iPhone Got $100 More Expensive. The 1TB Models Went Up $300.

Price rises on new phones are normal. You expect them, you grumble, you move on.

What Apple did on September 9 was different. Alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, which arrived $100 above last year’s equivalents, the company quietly raised the price of iPhones that had been sitting on the shelf for a year. The iPhone 17, the iPhone Air, the iPhone 17e and the iPhone 16 all went up $100 on the same day. Not one component changed. Not one feature was added. The same phone simply cost more that afternoon than it had that morning.

And if you want storage, the number gets considerably worse than $100.

What actually changed on the Pro models

Start with the headline number, because it is the one that is least interesting. The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 and the iPhone 18 Pro Max at $1,299, each $100 above where the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max started a year ago. That is a real increase and roughly what most analysts had penciled in over the summer. Some of the gloomier summer forecasts had suggested considerably more, so in a narrow sense Apple undershot expectations.

Now look at what happens as you climb the storage ladder, which is where the actual damage sits.

The first two rows behave the way a normal price rise behaves. The third does not. Moving from 512GB to 1TB used to cost $200 and now costs $400, which means the upgrade itself doubled in price rather than simply inheriting the $100 increase applied to everything else.

The Pro Max follows the same shape. A 1TB iPhone 17 Pro Max was $1,599 and a 1TB iPhone 18 Pro Max is $1,899, again a $300 jump. At the very top, the 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max was Apple’s first $2,000 phone at $1,999. Its replacement, the 2TB iPhone 18 Pro Max, is $2,499. That is a $500 year over year increase on a single configuration.

The rest of the lineup went up without changing at all

The Pro price rises came with new phones attached, so there is at least something to point at. The rest of the increases came with nothing.

The iPhone 17e is the one to sit with for a moment. It was Apple’s answer to the argument that iPhones had drifted out of reach, a $599 phone that did the important things. At $699 it is still the cheapest iPhone and still $200 below a full iPhone 17, but the floor itself moved. The cheapest new iPhone you can buy from Apple got about 17 percent more expensive in an afternoon, and that is the number that matters to anyone for whom $599 was already a stretch.

This is also the part that breaks a familiar piece of buying advice. The standard move when a new flagship lands has always been to buy last year’s model at a discount. That still works through carriers and resellers, but it no longer works at Apple’s own store, where last year’s model went up in price on the same day the new one arrived.

Memory is the whole story

None of this is Apple being opportunistic in isolation. The memory market has done something genuinely extraordinary over the past year, and every device maker is dealing with the same arithmetic.

TrendForce, which tracks contract prices between chipmakers and the companies that buy in volume, recorded conventional DRAM contract prices rising roughly 90 to 95 percent quarter on quarter in the first quarter of 2026. NAND flash rose 55 to 60 percent over the same period. The second quarter added another 58 to 63 percent on DRAM and 70 to 75 percent on NAND. The third quarter finally slowed to 13 to 18 percent and 10 to 15 percent respectively, which counts as relief only because of what came before it.

Stack those quarters and the compounding is the point.

The cause is not phones. It is AI data centers, which buy memory in quantities that make the entire consumer electronics industry look like a rounding error, and which are willing to pay far more per gigabyte than a phone maker can. When a supplier can sell the same wafer capacity into a hyperscale order at a better margin, consumer allocations get squeezed and consumer prices follow.

Tim Cook said as much in late June, telling investors that Apple could no longer absorb the increased cost of memory and storage chips. That was the moment Apple raised Mac, iPad and home product prices while explicitly leaving iPhones alone. September is when the iPhone exemption ended.

TrendForce estimates the iPhone 18 Pro costs Apple around 38 percent more to build than its predecessor, with memory and the new camera hardware doing most of the work. Against a build cost moving that much, a $100 increase at the base tier is Apple eating a substantial share of the difference rather than passing it along.

Everyone is doing this

It would be easy to read the last few paragraphs as an Apple story. It is not. Samsung and Google both added roughly $100 to their most recent flagships for the same reason, and the pressure has been visible further down the market for months.

Some manufacturers have been unusually blunt about it. When Poco shipped the F9 Ultra, it kept the previous generation’s chipset and said out loud that memory prices were the reason, which is not the sort of admission that normally makes it into a launch presentation. The broader pattern shows up in spec sheets rather than price tags: 2026 is on track to be the worst year for phone sales since 2013, and a lot of manufacturers chose to quietly trim RAM and base storage instead of raising numbers customers actually compare.

Apple took the other route. It kept the specification and moved the price, which is more honest and also more visible, which is why it generated headlines that the quiet downgrades did not.

Worth separating out one figure that has been circulating this week. DDR5 memory for desktop PCs is now running around five and a half times its pre crisis price, a number that sounds apocalyptic next to the tripling above. Those are different markets. Phones use LPDDR, bought on long term contracts by companies with enormous purchasing power, while DDR5 DIMMs are sold into a retail channel with no such protection. Phone buyers are insulated from the worst of it. They are not insulated from all of it.

Next year is the part nobody wants to talk about

The third quarter slowdown invites a comfortable conclusion, which is that the worst is over and prices drift back down. The people who make memory are saying something different.

SK Hynix’s chief executive has described 2027 as potentially the worst year for memory supply in the industry’s history, with demand outrunning production capacity well into the back half of the decade. Gartner expects undersupply to persist through 2027. New fabrication capacity takes years to build and the AI orders currently absorbing it are not slowing down.

If that holds, the iPhone 18 Pro’s pricing is not a spike to be corrected next September. It is a new floor.

What this means if you are actually buying one

A few practical consequences fall out of the numbers above.

Buy the storage you need rather than the storage you might want. That advice was always sensible and is now worth real money, because the premium for guessing high has roughly doubled at the 1TB tier. For most people, 256GB plus an iCloud plan costs less over three years than the jump to 512GB, and considerably less than the jump to 1TB.

Check carriers and resellers before Apple’s own store. Apple raised its own prices on year old inventory, but the channel is full of stock bought at the old cost, and that stock has to move.

If you were waiting for the price to come back down, the supply forecasts suggest you will be waiting a while. That is not a reason to buy something you do not need, but it does remove the specific argument that patience will be rewarded here.

And if the camera is what is pulling you toward the Pro, it is worth understanding what you are paying for. The variable aperture system with six moving blades is the genuine hardware story of this generation, and it is a meaningful part of why the build cost moved as much as it did.

The bottom line

Apple raised the price of every iPhone it sells, including four that had not changed in any way, and raised the price of high capacity models by three times as much as the headline figure.

The reason is real. Memory contract prices roughly tripled in nine months because AI infrastructure is consuming the supply, and Apple absorbed a build cost increase far larger than the increase it passed on. Blaming Apple specifically misses that Samsung, Google and most of the Android market are all navigating the same shortage, some by raising prices and some by quietly shipping less memory.

What makes this worth paying attention to is the timing. September was not a company deciding its phones were underpriced. It was a company that had spent nine months absorbing a cost it had publicly said it could no longer absorb, finally reaching the end of that. And the forecasts for next year suggest the pressure gets worse before it eases.

Sources and further reading

• MacRumors: iPhone 18 Pro 1TB storage costs $300 more
• TechRadar: Full list of every iPhone price increase

See every configuration, the monthly payments and the current carrier offers in our iPhone 18 Pro Max price guide.

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