Apple didn’t just introduce new iPhones this week, it quietly made every older model in its lineup more expensive too. As first reported by MacRumors, Apple raised prices by $100 across the iPhone 16, iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17e shortly after unveiling the iPhone 18 Pro and its new foldable iPhone Duo.
The new pricing landed the same day as Apple’s “Surprise and Shine” event. The iPhone 16 now starts at $799, up from its previous $699 price. The iPhone 17e climbed from $599 to $699, while the standard iPhone 17 moved from $799 up to $899. The iPhone Air took the biggest symbolic hit, crossing into four-digit territory for the first time at $1,099, up from $999.
None of these four models received any hardware changes alongside the price bump, which makes the timing stand out even more. Apple also used this same event to discontinue the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max entirely, clearing the way for the new iPhone 18 Pro lineup to take their place at the top of the range. The base iPhone 16 Plus disappeared from the lineup as well, leaving Apple’s phone lineup slightly more streamlined even as prices climbed across the board.
Apple has pointed to rising component costs as the reason behind the increases, a message CEO Tim Cook has repeated in recent months. Back in June, Cook told The Wall Street Journal that Apple could no longer fully absorb the growing expense of memory and storage chips, both of which remain in extremely high demand as AI companies and data center operators buy up supply. Cook has also described the current chip shortage as a “hundred-year flood,” a phrase that’s stuck in coverage of Apple’s pricing decisions ever since.
Speculation about a price hike had been building for weeks before this announcement, especially after Apple already raised prices on Macs and iPads back in June without touching the iPhone lineup at the time. Many analysts expected Apple to hold off until its new iPhone 18 Pro models arrived before adjusting prices on the rest of its catalog, and that’s exactly the path Apple ended up taking.
For now, shoppers looking at anything other than the brand-new iPhone 18 Pro lineup will pay more than they would have just a day earlier, even for phones that haven’t changed at all since their original release.
