- JP Morgan believes the iPhone 18 Pro price hike could be less severe than other analysts have predicted, at just $50
- Another analyst has flagged chip price increases at TSMC which will affect Apple, and its laptops are in a different situation to iPhones
- The end result could be substantial laptop price increases, while Apple's smartphones get away relatively unscathed
We know Apple's products have price hikes coming — Tim Cook has made that clear in no uncertain terms — but based on the latest spinning from the rumor mill, the iPhone could get away with a relatively mild price bump, with MacBooks potentially hit a good deal harder.
You might be surprised at the possibility that the next iPhone might not be hiked by all that much, because earlier rumors and napkin maths suggested that the incoming iPhone 18 Pro might hit $1,299 in the US, a hefty $200 increase (with a similarly step price hike for other countries). Others have theorized that there could be an even bigger jump than this.
However, as Phone Arena noticed, Max Weinbach, a tech analyst at Creative Strategies, posted on X to flag up JP Morgan's research on what the next-gen iPhone price hike might be.
Contrary to other analysis, JP Morgan thinks it might be more in line with a $50 price bump, as while memory costs will put a lot of pressure on Apple — as a Wccftech report recently underlined, noting that the firm is facing a "sticker shock heading into Q3" — the company seemingly has ways to mitigate those increases elsewhere. One such saving would be made by swapping to Apple's own modem for the new iPhone, as an example.
Another way Apple could theoretically alleviate the pressure on smartphone prices is to recoup some money by charging a premium for the rumored iPhone Ultra foldable, which will be inevitably pricey for those who want the latest and greatest tech (and it looks very much like that foldable is inbound for this year).
As for potential MacBook price hikes, there's not the same space for Apple to maneuver in terms of offsetting other component costs with its laptops. And as Tom's Hardware spotted, analyst (and former Bloomberg reporter) Tim Culpan has just delivered a rumor that TSMC is seemingly increasing chip prices for customers (from 3nm processes down to 7nm and older products) in the order of 5% to 10%.
That hits a bunch of firms who use TSMC to manufacture their chips, but notably AMD, Nvidia, and Apple. For Apple, the more heavyweight MacBook CPUs will be hit harder than mobile silicon, and on top of that, it's yet another unwelcome pressure on the affordably priced MacBook Neo.
As Culpan jokes at the end of his piece: "Maybe those red MacBook Neos will arrive after all." Puzzled as to what that means, exactly? Let's dive into that next.
Analysis: cooking the MacBooks
Arguably, Apple's biggest problem here is keeping the MacBook Neo at its tempting baseline price, in the face of these 'unavoidable' price rises as Tim Cook has called them. Mainly because the price is so low for an Apple laptop, with its popularity and demand meaning that the production of the Neo is rumored to have been massively cranked up.
Culpan has previously floated the theory that Apple will have to either apply price hikes to the MacBook Neo – and perhaps soften that blow with new colors (which is what the 'red Neo' comment refers to) – or just ditch the current entry-level variant, and offer the higher-tier Neo as a baseline instead. The latter is basically a way of applying a price hike of a hundred notes without actually having to increase prices technically, and what makes this seem more likely is that Apple did exactly that as a tactic with the Mac mini recently.
We don't know how this will play out yet, but it's looking increasingly likely that some considerable upward pricing movements will be coming to MacBooks, while the iPhone might perhaps escape the worsts.
A price hike of only $50 for the iPhone would be very much welcomed by many at this point as effectively stable pricing, given all that talk of a couple of hundred dollars or more being stuck on top of the current-gen price tag. And perhaps that's the point — with consumers fearing the worst for the iPhone 18 Pro, they'll eventually be relieved if this is the case.
At any rate — I've been saying this for a while — if you're thinking of buying a new MacBook, the time to move is very likely now, or soon, especially in the case of the Neo (unless you really, really want that red colorway, or whatever striking colors Apple may cook up to distract people from the new price tag).
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