"Waiting for the next model" consumers may be disappointed this time. At 1 a.m. Beijing time on September 10, Apple's fall event went ahead as scheduled — but this time, price was the star: every new iPhone went up, and even the tradition of "old models drop when new ones launch" was broken, with existing models rising instead.
This was new CEO John Ternus's first event since taking over. He brought the iPhone 18 Pro (starting at 9,999 yuan / $1,199), iPhone 18 Pro Max (10,999 yuan / $1,299), and the long-anticipated foldable iPhone Duo (from 15,999 yuan / $1,999 in China, with the 2TB max at 26,499 yuan). All three run on the industry's first 2nm A20 Pro chip, with graphics performance up to 40% better and the main camera gaining variable aperture for the first time. But prices also hit record highs — the Pro series costs about 1,000 yuan more than last generation's equivalent storage.
Even rarer is how Apple treated the old models. Convention says previous-generation products should drop to clear inventory after a launch — but this time the iPhone 17 rose from 5,999 to 6,799 yuan, the iPhone 16 jumped back to its launch price, and the iPhone Air rose up to 2,300 yuan. Apple's stated reason is blunt: memory chip prices have become unaffordable.
Behind this price surge is AI's "capacity hoarding." AI data centers' exploding demand for DRAM and NAND flash has drained nearly all of manufacturers' capacity — Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron have prioritized higher-margin enterprise products, while chips left for consumer electronics have surged in price. Analysts call it a "once-in-a-century" supply-demand mismatch, with DRAM and NAND at their highest prices since 2016. Cook previously said Apple had "reached its limit of absorbing" the costs — Macs and iPads already rose in June, leaving the iPhone untouched at the time, which now looks like a temporary reprieve.
The impact extends far beyond Apple. IDC predicts that, driven by surging component costs and on-device AI hardware demand, global average smartphone selling price will jump 27.6% to $581 in 2026, hitting a historic peak of $622 in 2027. From TSMC to Nintendo, from phones to game consoles, the entire consumer electronics chain is absorbing the spillover of AI hoarding capacity. Analysts expect supply tightness to last into 2027 and even early 2028.
For consumers, the practical question is: where does the end of phone price hikes lie? As AI's appetite for compute keeps pushing chip prices up while consumer electronics passively absorb costs, "waiting for the next model" may become a long wait. Unless the AI boom cools or memory capacity expands dramatically, every next-gen flagship may simply be more expensive than the last.