iPhone 18 Pro buyers may face an issue that even Apple won’t be able to solve for them

The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are probably not getting any groundbreaking hardware upgrades, but they’ll certainly come with a price increase. This is hardly a surprise considering the memory price crisis that has made even Tim Cook worried, but it may still raise some questions about Apple’s pricing. 

Apple is probably going to charge an unfair price for the iPhone 18 Pro

Rumors about the increase of the iPhone 18 Pro prices are still all over the place. Some sources say the increase could be as low as $50, while other estimates put it at $300 for the base models.

Whatever Apple’s actual decision is, most people are going to feel like the new price is unfair, at least according to the results of a poll we recently ran. We asked you what you would consider a fair starting price for the iPhone 18 Pro, and your answers could mean bad news for Apple.

At the time of writing, about 36% of you have said that the only fair price would be the same $1,099 as last year. If that’s not bad enough for Apple’s profit margins, another close to 22% of you think it would be only fair for the company to charge even less than last year.



While none of these options seems realistic in the current environment, it appears that over half of the people won’t take a price increase easily. How much of an issue that would be for Apple will become clear later this year when we see the sales figures for its new phones.

Some hope for Apple

There’s still a lot of people who appear to have accepted that smartphones will be more expensive this year. About 20% of you would consider a $100 price increase fair, and another 15% would accept a $200 bump. Considering that’s the most likely range of the price increase, the iPhone 18 Pro still has a chance of success.

Even more positive for Apple is the fact that over 7% of you say that even a price higher than $1,299 would be fair for the upcoming top-tier iPhone. Those are likely the people who are rarely bothered about the price of a smartphone as long as it works and feels good.

It’s a question of value

I wouldn’t worry too much about Apple’s smartphone business even when I know that half its customers won’t like its new prices. If the iPhone 18 Pro doesn’t sell well enough, we’ll see its price going down, though I’m not sure by how much. After all, the component price crisis is real, and we may need to accept that even budget phones will be expensive from now on.