Apple already hit you with a $100 price increase on every single iPhone this year. Now it looks like they’re lining up to do it again. And the reason is a memory deal with Samsung that costs Apple a whole lot more starting next year.
According to Android Headlines, Apple has agreed to pay Samsung close to $2.00 per gigabyte of LPDDR5X RAM and $0.33 per gigabyte of NAND storage, kicking in from Q1 2027. Compare that to the $1.56 and $0.26 per gigabyte Apple was paying in Q3 2026, and you’re looking at a 22% jump across both RAM and storage. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a real cost increase that flows straight down to consumers.
To put some actual numbers to this: a base iPhone with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage would cost Apple roughly $24 for the RAM and $84.48 for the storage under the new pricing. That’s over $108 just in memory components, before you factor in the display, the processor, the cameras, manufacturing, shipping, and every other cost that goes into building a phone. Apple’s margins are famously healthy, but there’s only so much cost the company absorbs before it passes the rest to buyers.
Samsung, for its part, has been renegotiating memory prices with multiple smartphone makers. Korean publications flagged this trend weeks ago. Apple apparently explored alternatives, including some Chinese DRAM suppliers, but those companies are currently banned in the US market. So Samsung it is.
This matters beyond just Apple. When memory prices rise across the industry, every Android flagship feels it too. Samsung, Google, OnePlus, and others source similar components. If Samsung is pushing higher prices on Apple, it’s doing the same with everyone else. So while this story is framed around iPhones, the ripple effect hits the whole smartphone market.
The iPhone 18 lineup already took the hit this year. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max each went up $100. So did the iPhone 17 and iPhone Air, which didn’t even get replaced with new models. Consumers paid more simply because Apple raised prices. The speculation now is whether the next round of increases hits the iPhone 18 and Air 2 in the Spring, or waits for the iPhone 20 series in the Fall.
And the driving force behind rising memory costs isn’t just Samsung being greedy. AI is the bigger story here. The explosion in on-device AI features demands faster, denser, more capable RAM and storage. LPDDR5X is expensive because it’s genuinely powerful, and demand is only going up as every phone maker races to cram more AI capability into their hardware. That demand pressure keeps prices elevated, and there’s no sign of it cooling off soon.
So if you were hoping smartphone prices would level out or even drop, that’s probably not happening for a few more years. Apple will very likely raise iPhone prices again in 2027. The components cost more, the features require better hardware, and the company has already shown it’s comfortable charging more. At this point, expecting anything different is just wishful thinking.