So iPhone 18 prices could go up this year. Tim Cook said price rises for Apple products were "unavoidable," to the Wall Street Journal this week.
He didn’t say when, nor how much and he didn’t say which products specifically. But he didn’t need to because Samsung Electronics co-CEO TM Roh said almost exactly the same thing before the Galaxy S26 launched in February.
The wording was different but don’t be surprised if the strategy is identical: prepare customers for pain, then deliver it in a way that's less brutal than feared. And (hopefully) earn a bit of goodwill in the process.
Samsung’s price rise playbook is likely the best guide to what Apple will do next. Read on for more and don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter for more iPhone price news and instant deal alerts.
The Apple iPhone 18 Pro is going up according to Tim Cook, but by how much? (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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Before the Galaxy S26 launch, Samsung executives warned that the memory chip crisis would make price increases across the lineup "inevitable". The language was careful and the detail was thin. Sound familiar?
When the S26 arrived, here is what actually happened. The base Galaxy S26 Ultra 256GB held at $1,299, identical to the S25 Ultra. But move up the storage ladder and the increases arrive. The 512GB model rose from $1,419 to $1,499, an $80 increase. The 1TB model jumped from $1,659 to $1,799, up $140.
It wasn't just the Ultra, either. The base Galaxy S26 rose $40 to $899.99 and the S26+ jumped $100 to $1,099.99. Samsung raised prices across the lineup while keeping its flagship headline number for the Ultra untouched.
Samsung's strategy was to protect the number people see in headlines and raise the tiers where buyers are less price-sensitive. The Galaxy S26 Ultra 256GB held firm, but the buyers who wanted more storage paid for it.
Warning buyers beforehand of unnamed price rises made all of that more palatable. I suspect Apple will do something similar this September and Cook's warning is straight out of Roh's playbook.
Research firm TechInsights and the Wall Street Journal have run the numbers on what the memory chip crisis means for the iPhone 18 Pro specifically. Apple paid approximately $39 for DRAM in the iPhone 17 Pro and $13 for flash storage. But those numbers could reach $145 and $51 respectively.
Apple's total component cost for the iPhone 18 Pro base model is estimated to jump 25%, from around $582 to $726.
ForbesCan Apple Keep iPhone 18 Prices Flat In 2026?To maintain its current 47% gross margin, Apple would need to charge $1,371 for the iPhone 18 Pro. TechInsights puts $1,299 as the more likely round number, which means Apple takes a small margin hit to stay competitive.
Add in a new camera system that Ming-Chi Kuo estimates will cost Apple 50% more than previous models, and the fully margin-protected price edges toward $1,399 or higher. Either way, that's a significant jump.
That is a giant leap and far outstrips price hikes we've seen in the Android market. The TechInsights figure assumes Apple maintains its current margins at all costs. It doesn't have to.
Revenue from Apple’s services business—the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud and Apple TV+—rose to $30.98 billion in Apple’s Q2 2026 results, up 16% year over year, and accounted for 27.9% of total quarterly revenue.
iPhone still brought in the most money at $56.99 billion, but services remain enormously profitable, with margins that are far higher than hardware. That gives the company a cushion to work with if it wants to take a hit on hardware profit margins in a way Samsung doesn’t.
Cook called the iPhone 17 the most popular launch in Apple's history, with overall sales growing 17% to $111 billion in Q1 2026. That's not a company that needs to scare off millions of loyal customers with a brutal price rise.
The most likely outcome, based on Samsung’s playbook, is that Apple follows the same split: hold the headline iPhone 18 Pro base price at $1,099 or raise it modestly to $1,199, while increasing the 512GB and 1TB tiers meaningfully. The headline number holds and the news headlines are forgiving, but the real cost lands further up on higher storage buyers.
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