With the announcement of the new iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max, and the foldable iPhone Duo, you’d think that the older models would see a slight price drop. But this is the era of the memory shortage crisis, when Moore’s Law seems to be going in reverse, so prices are going up instead. These price changes look to apply to devices that range all the way back to the iPhone 16.
Actually, let’s start from there. The iPhone 16 got a slight price drop last year, going down to RM3,499. With the price hike, it’s not going back to the old price of RM3,999, fortunately, but it is now tagged at RM3,799.
It’s a similar story for the iPhone 17 and 17e. The former used to have a starting price of RM3,999 for the 256GB storage model, but it now starts from RM4,399 instead. The same RM300 hike applies to the 512GB model as well, now costing RM5,299. As for the 17e, the options were RM2,999 and RM3,999, but they are now RM3,299 and RM4,299 respectively.
The most egregious one though is the iPhone Air. This model has the most storage options of the affected models, offering 256GB, 512GB and 1TB options. Previously, these were priced at RM4,999, RM5,999 and RM6,999 respectively. With the price change though, these have gone up to RM5,299, RM6,299, and a whopping RM8,299, making that last one a massive RM1,300 jump.
This is, unfortunately, a pretty consistent pattern for recent times. Back in June, the bitten fruit brand raised prices for just about every non-accessory product in its catalogue, with the hikes going up to RM2,000. Then CEO Tim Cook had said that the company was not planning to raise prices for its products, but the unprecedented acceleration of component prices, he deemed these changes “unavoidable”.
