iPhone 18 Pro Costing Apple 38% More to Make, TrendForce Estimates
The iPhone 18 Pro is estimated to cost Apple 38% more to make than its predecessor due to rising memory prices. This increase in cost is likely to result in higher retail prices for the device. TrendForce expects Apple to absorb some of the cost increase to keep prices palatable for customers and protect shipment volumes.
- ▪The bill of materials for the 256GB iPhone 18 Pro is roughly 38% above the equivalent iPhone 17 Pro.
- ▪Memory costs have climbed five- to sevenfold since the start of 2025, accounting for about 34% of the iPhone 18 Pro's total component cost.
- ▪Apple may raise prices on older iPhone models to spread the cost recovery across the range.
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| Original publisher | MacRumors |
| Canonical URL | https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/10/iphone-18-pro-build-cost-rise/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 10 Aug 2026 03:29:52 PDT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-10T10:30:47.700Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-10T10:30:47.700Z |
| 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 | UHj44dlyypty · 3 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
iPhone 18 Pro Costing Apple 38% More to Make, TrendForce EstimatesMonday August 10, 2026 3:29 am PDT by Tim HardwickApple's iPhone 18 Pro will cost nearly 40 percent more to build than its predecessor because of soaring memory prices, according to new data analyzed TrendForce. The research firm's latest smartphone analysis puts the bill of materials for the 256GB iPhone 18 Pro roughly 38 percent above the equivalent iPhone 17 Pro, and says higher retail prices will be unavoidable as a result. Memory is said to have accounted for about 10 percent of the 256GB iPhone Pro's total component cost a year ago. TrendForce estimates that figure at roughly 34 percent in the third quarter of 2026, rising past 40 percent in the first half of 2027.
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