- JP Morgan thinks the iPhone 18 Pro price hike may be less severe than other analysts predicted, at just $50.
- Another analyst reported a chip price increase at TSMC that will affect Apple, and its laptops are in a different situation than iPhones.
- The end result could be a substantial increase in the price of laptops, while Apple’s smartphones escape relatively unscathed.
We know that Apple products will see price hikes coming – Tim Cook has made this clear in no uncertain terms – but based on the latest rumors, the iPhone could get away with a relatively mild price hike, with MacBooks potentially being hit much harder.
You might be surprised at the possibility that the next iPhone won’t be priced up that much, as previous rumors and napkin math suggested the incoming iPhone 18 Pro could hit $1,299 in the US, a whopping $200 increase (with a similar price hike for other countries). Others have speculated that there could be an even bigger jump than that.
However, as noted by Phone Arena, Max Weinbach, a technical analyst at Creative Strategies, posted on
Unlike other analyses, JP Morgan thinks this might be more in line with a $50 price hike, because while memory costs will put a lot of pressure on Apple – as a recent report from Wccftech pointed out, noting that the company faces “sticker shock heading into the third quarter” – the company apparently has ways to mitigate these increases elsewhere. Such a saving would be achieved by replacing the new iPhone with Apple’s modem, for example.
Another way for Apple to theoretically alleviate pressure on smartphone prices is to recoup money by charging extra for the so-called foldable iPhone Ultra, which will inevitably be expensive for those who want the latest and greatest technology (and it looks like that foldable is inbound for this year).
When it comes to possible MacBook price increases, Apple doesn’t have the same flexibility to offset the costs of other components with its laptops. And as Tom’s Hardware noted, analyst (and former Bloomberg reporter) Tim Culpan just delivered a rumor that TSMC appears to be raising chip prices for customers (from 3nm processes to 7nm and older products) in the range of 5% to 10%.
This affects a number of companies that use TSMC to make their chips, but notably AMD, Nvidia and Apple. For Apple, the heavier MacBook processors will be hit harder than mobile silicon, and on top of that, it’s yet another unwanted squeeze on the affordable MacBook Neo.
As Culpan jokes at the end of his article: “Maybe those red MacBook Neos will come after all.” Not sure what that means exactly? Let’s see that next.
Analysis: MacBook cooking
Arguably, Apple’s biggest problem is keeping the MacBook Neo at its attractive base price, in the face of these “inevitable” price increases, as Tim Cook called them. Mainly because the price is so low for an Apple laptop, and its popularity and demand means production of the Neo would have been massively increased.
Culpan has previously theorized that Apple will either have to implement price hikes on the MacBook Neo – and perhaps soften that blow with new colors (which is what the “Neo red” comment is referring to) – or simply abandon the current entry-level variant and instead offer the higher-tier Neo as a baseline. The latter is essentially a way to implement a price hike of a hundred tickets without having to technically raise prices, and what makes this more likely is that Apple did exactly that as a tactic with the Mac mini recently.
We don’t know yet how this will play out, but it seems increasingly likely that considerable upward price movements will occur on MacBooks, while the iPhone could perhaps escape the worst.
A price hike of just $50 for the iPhone would be very well received by many at this point, as they see the price as effectively stable, given all the talk of a few hundred dollars or more being locked in above the current generation’s price. And maybe that’s the point: with consumers fearing the worst for the iPhone 18 Pro, they’ll end up feeling relieved if that’s the case.
Either way – I’ve been saying this for a while – if you’re considering buying a new MacBook, the time to move is most likely now, or soon, especially in the case of the Neo (unless you really, really want that red colorway, or any other striking color Apple might concoct to distract people from the new price).
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