The iPhone 18 Pro Starts at $1,199. Let's Not Get Used to It.

Robert wrote this post with the assistance of Claude Fable 5.1.

Apple held its fall event on September 9, the first with John Ternus as CEO, and introduced the iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the iPhone Duo, its first folding phone. The Pro starts at $1,199 for 256 GB and climbs to $2,399 for the new 2 TB tier. The Pro Max runs from $1,299 to $2,499. The Duo opens at $1,999 and tops out at $3,199. The Pros reach stores September 18; the Duo takes pre-orders October 16 and ships October 23. There is no standard iPhone 18 this year. Apple has pushed the base model to spring 2027, so for the holidays the new-iPhone menu starts at $1,199.

The Pro’s starting price is up $100 from last year’s iPhone 17 Pro, which had already added $100 to the $999 that held from 2017 through 2024. Part of the increase is real cost. The same day, Apple raised prices on phones it already sells: the iPhone 17 went from $799 to $899, the iPhone 17e from $599 to $699, the iPhone Air from $999 to $1,099, and the two-year-old iPhone 16 from $699 to $799. Older phones do not usually get more expensive. Apple’s explanation, delivered by Tim Cook to The Wall Street Journal in June when Mac and iPad prices went up, is that memory and storage chips have been bid up by the AI data-center buildout and the company can no longer absorb it. He called the shortage a “hundred-year flood.” I believe that part. Memory prices have been climbing since January, and relief from new fabs is not expected before late 2027. But a $100 component problem does not explain a phone that starts at two thousand dollars.

The phone I already own

I carry an iPhone 16 Pro. It started at $999 when it launched in September 2024, and I bought it for one reason: Apple sold it as the phone built for the new Siri, the one that would understand what was on my screen, search my messages and photos, and take actions across apps. That Siri did not ship. Apple confirmed the delay in March 2025 and pulled the ad. A class action followed, alleging that people bought iPhone 16s for features that did not exist. This summer a federal judge in California gave preliminary approval to a $250 million settlement covering roughly 37 million devices, worth $25 to $95 apiece, with a final hearing set for February 2027. The rebuilt Siri, now running on a Google-built model, was announced again this June and arrives September 14 as a beta with iOS 27, English only, two years after the ads that sold me the phone. I am not a fan of lawsuits, but I would still be happily carrying my iPhone 14 Pro if not for the promise of something new. Live and learn.

A fair salary, and still pinched

Some context on where I’m coming from. I’m a technology guy with a fair amount of responsibility at work, and it pays a very fair salary. I have no children or other dependents counting on a share of it. And even I feel pinched. I was better off financially a decade ago than I am now, despite raises of about 3 percent most years. The index agrees with the feeling. Consumer prices are up 39 percent since August 2016; ten years of 3 percent raises compound to 34 percent. A decade of doing everything right leaves you a few points behind where you started, before you count the things that outran the average, like health insurance and housing. I honestly don’t know how families raising children do it.

What I’m doing instead

So I won’t be buying an iPhone 18 Pro in this economy. I would never consider an iPhone Duo at $1,999 or more. A hinge is a moving part, and those fail before slabs do. Apple’s materials describe a titanium hinge with more than 100 components and an IP68 rating, but no fold-cycle rating anywhere; Samsung publishes 500,000 folds for its competing Fold. Paying a staggering price to take on a shorter expected life is not a trade I understand.

My plan is to keep my 16 Pro for as long as it lasts. When it finally needs replacing, I’ll go down-market to a non-Pro iPhone or an e model, assuming blue bubbles still matter to me then. They do today. I text with physicians and executives throughout the day, and staying inside iMessage keeps those threads working the way everyone expects. That is the one thing holding me in Apple’s ecosystem, and it is a habit, not a feature worth $1,199.

Who the Duo is actually for

Here is my opinion. Apple’s Pro pricing has drifted out of touch with how most people are living. A four-figure phone was once the top of the range; now it is the floor, and the company has removed the cheaper new model from the fall lineup entirely. The Duo is a product for the top one percent, plus the tech influencers who will earn back $1,999 to $3,199 with a couple of well-viewed unboxing videos. It is not for regular people, and we shouldn’t talk ourselves into believing it is.

Prices become normal when enough of us pay them without complaint. I’d rather complain. Keep the phone you have. Buy the cheaper one when you must. Let Apple find out what the hundred-year flood looks like from the demand side.

Addendum

Macworld’s editor, David Price, opened his Monday column with the headline “Apple’s ‘Surprise’ event was a parade of unobtainable luxuries”. His comparison is a car showroom stocked with nothing but McLaren F1s. He likes the hardware more than I do, and says he can’t wait to try the Duo, but he lands where I did on the prices: the $1,199 entry point is, in his words, not a reasonable number, and building the year’s biggest event around products many Americans can’t afford was tone-deaf while so many are struggling with the cost of living. He also extends the argument one product over. Apple launched no new Apple Watch SE this year, so the cheapest new watch went from $249 in 2025 to $399, while a ceramic Series 12 arrived at $899. The lone price cut of the day went to the AirPods 5, which now include noise cancellation at $129. I wrote about a phone. Price’s watch math says the same thing is happening across the lineup, which makes the point above less one man’s complaint and more a pattern: the entry price keeps climbing, and the products for the rest of us keep slipping out of the spotlight.

The phone I already own

A fair salary, and still pinched

What I’m doing instead

Who the Duo is actually for

Addendum

Sources

Security Scorecard