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Same iPhone, Dh400 more: Why phone prices are rising everywhere
Apple, Samsung and Google have all put prices up this year, and the same component is behind every one of them — the ever-increasing cost of memory
- PUBLISHED: Tue 22 Sept 2026, 6:00 AM UPDATED: Tue 22 Sept 2026, 7:40 AM
The iPhone 17 went on sale in the UAE a year ago at Dh3,399. Apple still lists it today, but at Dh3,799. Nothing about the phone has changed. It has followed the rise in prices that hit PCs first and has now reached phones. The iPhone 17 is hardly a special case. The new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max cost more than last year’s models. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra costs Dh400 more than the Galaxy Z Fold7 it replaces, and Google put up the price of every phone in the Pixel 11 lineup.
Phones normally get cheaper as they age. The discount on last year’s model is how a lot of people time a purchase, and this year that pattern broke. It broke for the same reason a new iPhone, a new Galaxy and a new Pixel all cost more than the phones they replaced: memory prices have climbed so high that manufacturers have passed the cost on.
What is happening to phone prices?
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Apple’s rise was unusual in that it hit devices already on the market. Along with announcing the new iPhone 18 Pro models on September 9, the company raised prices for the iPhone 16, iPhone 17, iPhone Air and iPhone 17e by $100 each in the United States. In the UAE the iPhone 17, iPhone Air and iPhone 17e each went up Dh400. None of the four was redesigned or relaunched. Normally these models see their prices cut at this time of year, so the rise has an even bigger effect.
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Elsewhere, the specifications shifted along with the price. Google charged $100 more for the Pixel 11 Pro and cut the base model from 16GB of memory to 12GB, blaming what it called a severe, supplier-driven shortage of RAM. Samsung is reported to be weighing a rise on the Galaxy S26 in Korea from 1 October, though it says nothing has been decided.
Counterpoint Research counts phones already on sale rising about 15 per cent globally this year, and 18 per cent across the Middle East and Africa. New models are launching about 25 per cent above the ones they replace. More than four in ten of the phones it tracks have taken a price rise, which it says has never happened before. It is worse at the budget and mid-range end, where memory is a bigger share of what the phone costs to build.
So what is causing it?
The reason is memory. DRAM and NAND costs are up over 300 per cent year on year, and IDC says vendors are running out of options to absorb them. A year ago the memory and storage in an iPhone Pro were about a tenth of what the phone cost Apple to build. This quarter they are about a third, and TrendForce expects them past 40 per cent by mid-2027.
RAM prices are soaring because the chips are going somewhere else. Memory makers have shifted capacity to high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM that sits beside AI accelerators in data centres, where it earns them far more than it would in a phone. HBM uses more silicon for every usable bit, so capacity that moves across cuts the supply of ordinary RAM twice over, while demand for memory is as high as it has ever been. Tim Cook, then Apple’s chief executive, called it “a hundred-year flood” in a Wall Street Journal interview in June.
Not everyone accepts that prices are rising solely on supply and demand. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, which together hold about 90 per cent of the DRAM market, were sued in California in June by consumers and small businesses who allege the three used the AI boom as cover to keep ordinary memory scarce. The manufacturers deny colluding, and courts threw out a similar claim in 2022.
How long will this last?
There is no relief on the horizon, and the shortage is likely to outlast the phone you are holding. SK Hynix, one of the three big memory makers, expects 2027 to be worse than 2026 and says demand will run ahead of what it can produce past 2030. Intel’s chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, put a date on it earlier this year: nothing eases until 2028.
Adding manufacturing capacity could, in theory, fix this, but it is not that simple. A new memory plant costs upwards of $15 billion (Dh55 billion), and takes at least 18 months to come online. Micron’s Singapore fab starts in 2027, Samsung’s Pyeongtaek expansion in 2028, SK Hynix’s Indiana site at the end of 2028. This is a change of pace compared to the underinvestment in 2024 and 2025, but the effects are unlikely to materialise soon.
Will phone prices ever come back down?
Unlikely, and the test has already been run. Memory prices collapsed in 2022 and 2023. Phone prices did not follow them down: the global average selling price was still climbing two years later. When component costs fall, the saving rarely reaches the shelf.
The bottom of the market takes this hardest. FDM CCS Insight says some entry-level phones have already risen more than 50 per cent on this time last year. IDC now describes the segment below $100, about Dh370, which shipped 173 million phones in 2025, as facing an existential crisis, and Gartner expects buyers at that end to leave the market five times faster than premium buyers. The cheap phone may not come back.
So if the phone in your pocket still works, this is a bad year to replace it, and next year looks worse. If it does not, buy the storage tier you need rather than the one you might grow into. That is the part of the bill you can still control.