Despite the severe DRAM and NAND shortages, Apple will supposedly keep the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro’s price unchanged. The company wants to use current chaos to its advantage and increase its market share.
The memory shortages have already forced several smartphone and PC makers to raise prices.
iPhone 18 Pro may avoid a price increase
With hyperscalers snapping up much of the available DRAM and NAND supply, consumer device makers have been left scrambling for components. This imbalance has driven memory prices sharply higher, in some cases by over 200%.
As a result, many companies have raised the prices of their smartphones and laptops to offset the rising component costs.
Apple has been the only outlier, sticking to the same price point for its devices. It sells the iPhone 17e for $599 — the same price as its predecessor — despite doubling its base storage to 256GB. Reports suggest the company is taking a margin hit to keep iPhone and Mac prices flat.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, in a post on X, says that Apple will follow the same strategy for the iPhone 18 Pro lineup. It will keep the phone’s price unchanged at $1,099, as it looks to capture an even bigger slice of the market share.
The move will help Apple further expand the growth of its services business, which has a high profit margin and brings recurring revenue.
Plus, the launch of the first foldable iPhone this year will help boost Apple’s ASP and profit margins.
Apple offset price hikes with bigger storage
Even when Apple raised the prices of some of its devices, it softened the impact by upgrading the base storage. With the new M5 MacBook Air and M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro models, the company increased prices by $100 to $200 while doubling the base storage across the lineup.
The M5 MacBook Air now starts at $1,099 with 512GB of storage, while the M5 Pro MacBook Pro begins with 1TB. These models also feature faster SSDs that deliver twice the read and write speeds of the previous generation.
Rajesh has been writing about consumer technology for over a decade, with a strong focus on iPhones, Macs and Apple’s ecosystem. He enjoys digging into Apple software updates, hardware changes, and discovering new Mac apps that make work faster and more enjoyable.
