The rumors expect prices for Apple’s iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus to remain unchanged from those of the iPhone 14 line: $799 and $899 respectively. That means, in the face of historic inflation, the 6.1-inch iPhone 15 will be the most affordable base model since the original 3.5-inch iPhone was released in 2007.
The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max prices are expected to climb higher in select markets.
Wally Nowinski for PerfectRec:
While the price increases for the iPhone Pro have gotten a lot of attention, the perhaps more remarkable story is the lack of price increases for the base iPhone during a period of high inflation. If the rumors are true, the iPhone 15 will have the same starting price as the iPhone 12, released in 2020, despite the fact the U.S. has experienced 18% inflation since then according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s inflation calculator. It is typical for Apple to go three or four years without increasing its retail prices, but in the past that has occurred in a low inflation environment.
We decided to take a look at the inflation-adjusted price of every iPhone. What we found is that if the rumors are true:
• The iPhone 15 will be the most affordable base model since the original iPhone was released in 2007.
• The iPhone 15 Plus will be the most affordable large iPhone ever.
• Despite the fact the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max will see their prices increase this year, the overall trend for Apple’s premium phones is that they are getting cheaper in inflation-adjusted terms.
MacDailyNews Take: iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max buyers, rejoice, you got the best Pro iPhone prices ever!
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And this is going to be my wife and I first Pro’s. 🥲🥲🥲. We have 13 ‘s and we paid the same price as the 13 Pro because we got the 256. Now the 15 Pro will start at 256 and we thought it would be cool. But I don’t care I will get the Pro anyway. 😆😆😆
While it’s nice to know in terms of inflation that the new phones will be ‘less expensive’, for the average joe, it would be a lot more informative in the face of lagging pay raises to keep up with inflation to show what percentage of income would go towards the purchase which would show ‘affordability’.
Apple is now selling a wide range of affordable iPhones at this point. iPhone SE is $400. Not to mention the refurb market. It’s pretty easy to get an iPhone that will fit into any budget. Way easier then when they first came out.
Does that graph in this story show the $599.00 price early adopters paid or the $399.00 price reduction to boost holiday sales that Steve Jobs had to apologize and issue a $100.00 credit to irate customers, who two months earlier paid the higher price?
The $499 (not 599) was the subsidised price for the base model. That model was discontinued a few months later.
The idea that the price reduction was in order to boost the holiday sales doesn’t make sense. They were selling everything they could possibly build, and had no need to reduce the price; heck, at that point, they could have hiked the price up by $200 and would have still sold out every single one (it was the single fastest-selling consumer product in history, by far).
This is at least the second post today that opens with a reference to “historic” inflation. In the words of Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
In the years after WWI, inflation was somewhere between 15% and 20%. In the years after WWII, inflation peaked at 14.4%. In the 1970s, following the Arab Oil Embargo, inflation peaking at 13.5% in 1980.
Last year, with the economy dealing with effects of both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, inflation peaked at just 8% — hardly historic. And the current inflation rate is actually less than half of that, down to 3.2$ this month, with steady declines over the past 14 months.
That’s why Apple is able to hold the line on prices — they know that inflation is no longer at crisis levels, plus the strong dollar (reflecting the resurgent US economy) lowers the cost of imports like the iPhone.
Stats here: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/