Apple's New iPhones Cost Over $1,000. Should You Really Spend That Much on a New Phone?
Apple has increased the prices of its new iPhone 18 Pro models to over $1,000, a trend mirrored by Google and Samsung due to rising memory and storage costs. The article argues that budget and mid-range devices are becoming more attractive as they offer comparable performance and battery life to expensive flagships. Consumer behavior is shifting away from frequent upgrades, with many users preferring to keep their current phones until they fail rather than paying premium prices for marginal improvements.
- ▪Apple's new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are priced at $1,199 and $1,299 respectively, marking a $100 increase over the previous generation.
- ▪Rising costs for memory and storage, driven by AI data center demand, have forced manufacturers like Apple and Samsung to raise prices across their product lines.
- ▪Budget devices such as the Samsung Galaxy A57 and Google Pixel 10a are gaining significant market share by offering features like satellite connectivity and fast charging at lower price points.
- ▪Recent research indicates that 73% of smartphone users plan to keep their devices until they stop working, reflecting a decline in the frequency of annual upgrades.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/apples-new-iphones-cost-over-1000-should-you-spend-that-much-on-phone |
| Publication time | Sat, 19 Sep 26 12:47:18 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-19T13:13:45.920Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-19T13:13:45.920Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | sMMGySrJ43BO · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Apple just released two new iPhones, the 18 Pro ($1,199) and 18 Pro Max ($1,299), both of which cost $100 more than last year's devices. Google recently did the same thing with its new line of Pixel phones, as did Samsung with its Galaxy Z Fold hardware. Many of these phones already cost more than $1,000, and some stretch to over $2,000 in certain configurations. This leads me to wonder, are they really worth it? Is there a better choice? I think so. Apple iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max (Credit: Eric Zeman) The "lean phone" is on track to define the moment. The fastest-growing phone category right now is the economy set. Budget devices and "accessible flagships" have become major market share holders.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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