Does Apple Actually Raise iPhone Prices Every Year?

The idea that Apple raises iPhone prices every year does not hold up when you look at the entry-level model in nominal dollars. The base iPhone 7 launched at $649 in 2016, and it took until 2017 for that number to move, to $699 with the iPhone 8. From there the number didn't hold steady so much as bounce: it rose to $749 for the 2018 iPhone XR, then actually dropped back to $699 for the 2019 iPhone 11 - a rare year-over-year decrease at the entry tier. The first jump to $799 came with the iPhone 12 in 2020, and that figure has not budged since.

From 2020 through 2025, the base iPhone price has sat at exactly $799 across six consecutive generations: the 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. That is half a decade without a single nominal increase at the entry tier, even as Apple introduced new chips, cameras, and materials each year. The pattern undercuts the common assumption that a new iPhone automatically means a higher sticker price.

The 2025 iPhone 17 makes the case even more directly. Apple kept the price at $799 while doubling the base storage tier to 256GB, a configuration that previously would have cost more. On a per-gigabyte basis, that is a real price cut for buyers, not just a freeze. Whatever pricing pressure shows up elsewhere in the lineup, the base iPhone has not been the vehicle for annual increases that popular perception suggests.

Three things set what an iPhone costs: the tier a model sits in, the storage it ships with, and what its parts cost Apple. In this post's record the tier does the most work, because a new model added at the top moves the lineup further than any repricing of an existing one. Storage is the quieter lever: the 2025 iPhone 17 kept its $799 price and doubled base storage to 256GB. Parts are the newest pressure. The Wall Street Journal, citing TechInsights, estimated memory and storage chips at about $196 in an iPhone 18 Pro, against roughly $52 in an iPhone 17 Pro.

Look closely at the year-over-year record and a pattern emerges: it's new tiers at the top of the lineup, not steep repricing of the phones people already know, that do the real work. In 2017 the base and Plus tiers moved only modestly - iPhone 8 to $699, a $50 increase on the iPhone 7, and iPhone 8 Plus to $799, a $30 increase on the iPhone 7 Plus - while Apple introduced an entirely new tier above them: the iPhone X at $999, the first iPhone ever to cross the four-figure mark. That new $999 tier, not the modest bump on the base and Plus tiers, is what pulled the lineup's average sharply higher that year.

This is the mechanism in its clearest form: the biggest price move in a lineup rarely comes from repricing a phone that already exists - it comes from inserting a new tier above it. The base and Plus tiers absorbed only a small, incremental increase in 2017; the iPhone X's $999 debut is what actually dragged the lineup's average sharply upward that year. Anyone drawn to the new design, screen, or camera system paid a real premium for a genuinely new product - that premium, not a hike on the familiar models, is where most of the year's price growth actually happened.

The 2020 iPhone 12 generation is the exception that proves the rule: this is the one year the base tier itself was directly repriced, from $699 in 2019 to $799, a straightforward $100 increase rather than a new tier absorbing the difference. The Pro ($999) and Pro Max ($1,099) held at exactly what the iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max had already reached the year before - and that three-tier Base/Pro/Pro Max structure wasn't new in 2020 either; it dates back to the iPhone XS Max in 2018. What actually changed in 2020 was Apple finally moving the entry price after three years of the base tier drifting between $699 and $749. Tier creation is Apple's most-used lever, but 2020 shows the company will also move an existing sticker price directly when it decides to.

The ladder has kept growing since 2020. The iPhone Air arrived in September 2025 at $999, a new slim tier above the $799 iPhone 17 and $100 over the $899 Plus it replaced in this dataset. The iPhone 17e followed in March 2026 at $599 with 256GB of storage, a rung below the base model. On September 9, 2026, Apple unveiled iPhone Duo, its first foldable, at $1,999, far above the iPhone 18 Pro Max's $1,299. Each one added a tier instead of nudging the price of an existing phone.

Memory and storage chips are why that ladder is getting steeper. On Apple's July 30, 2026 earnings call, Tim Cook said the company was in "a 100-year flood on memory pricing" and had "reluctantly raised prices" on Macs and iPads. Six weeks later, on launch day, Apple raised the online-store prices of the iPhone 16, iPhone 17, iPhone Air and iPhone 17e by $100 each, as MacRumors reported, while pricing the iPhone 18 Pro at $1,199 and the Pro Max at $1,299, each $100 above its predecessor. Where Apple sets the price, it still decides by tier; where it does not, the pressure comes from memory and storage chips.

Nominal price tags flatten a decade of change into a single number, but inflation adjustment tells a different story. In 2025 dollars, the 2016 iPhone 7 actually cost $878, and the iPhone 7 Plus cost $1,041 - both figures sitting well above the $799 that buys today's base iPhone 17. The Plus model's real cost even lands in the same range as the current iPhone 17 Pro's $1,099 price point, despite the two devices occupying entirely different tiers nine years apart.

This isn't about Apple slashing prices; it's about Apple simply not raising them fast enough to keep pace with inflation. The base and Plus tiers have largely held their nominal sticker prices year over year, which sounds like stability but functions as a quiet discount once general price levels are factored in. A number that looks frozen on a spec sheet is, in real terms, worth less every year it stays the same.

Viewed this way, the last decade of iPhone pricing looks less like relentless price hikes and more like flat-to-declining real prices at the base and Plus levels, with the Pro and Pro Max tiers the main exception in select years - including the 2023 and 2025 increases at the top of the lineup. The popular narrative that Apple raises prices every year doesn't hold up once inflation adjustment enters the picture; it's the entry-level buyer, not the flagship shopper, who has arguably gotten the better deal over time.

Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro at $1,199 and the iPhone 18 Pro Max at $1,299 (U.S.) on September 9, 2026, each $100 above the iPhone 17 Pro ($1,099) and iPhone 17 Pro Max ($1,199). Pre-orders opened September 12, and both phones went on sale September 18, according to Apple Newsroom.

The analyst forecasts that circulated before launch overshot. Jeff Pu had projected increases of $250 to $300 for the Pro and Pro Max, and Counterpoint Research had put the Pro Max rise closer to $200. The actual increase was $100 on each.

No base iPhone 18 was announced at the event: Apple's release covered only the Pro and Pro Max, with the foldable iPhone Duo as the other new model.

That makes September 2026 another entry in the pattern this data already shows: the top of the lineup is what moves, while the base tier waits for its own launch.

Apple does not raise iPhone prices every year, at least not at the tier where most people actually buy. The base model spent six straight years pinned to $799, and it was $50 cheaper in 2019 than the year before it. What looks like relentless annual inflation from the outside is, at the tier that matters most to most buyers, closer to a decade of restraint.

Where the myth holds up is at the top of the lineup. New tiers like the iPhone X in 2017 and Pro Max in 2018 set new ceilings, and the Pro and Pro Max lines have each taken a real price hike when Apple decided the moment called for it, in 2023 and 2025. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max each launched $100 higher in September 2026, one more data point for the same pattern: it's the top of the lineup that moves, not the phone most people actually buy.