The iPhone just got a lot more expensive to build. Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal on June 17, 2026, that price increases for the company’s upcoming iPhone 18 Pro are “unavoidable,” pointing to a global memory chip shortage that has driven component costs to levels the company can no longer quietly eat.
Analysts now expect the base iPhone 18 Pro to land somewhere between $1,299 and $1,399 in the US.
What’s actually happening with memory chips
DRAM and NAND flash memory have seen prices surge between 63% and 75% year-over-year. The culprit isn’t another pandemic-era logistics meltdown. This time, artificial intelligence is the bottleneck.
AI data centers are vacuuming up memory chips at an extraordinary rate. Training and running large language models requires massive amounts of high-bandwidth memory, and the companies building AI infrastructure are willing to pay a premium to secure supply. That leaves consumer electronics manufacturers like Apple competing for what’s left.
