Apple’s “Surprise and Shine” keynote brought the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, the company’s first foldable in the iPhone Duo, plus the Apple Watch Series 12, Watch Ultra 4 and AirPods 5. It also brought the most aggressive iPhone price reset Apple has attempted.
Start with the Pro. In the US, the iPhone 18 Pro moves to $1,199 and the Pro Max to $1,299, each $100 dearer, or about 9 percent. In India, the 18 Pro starts at Rs 1,64,900 against the 17 Pro’s Rs 1,34,900. That is Rs 30,000, or 22 percent, with the Pro Max at Rs 1,79,900. The iPhone Duo opens at Rs 2,99,900 for 256GB and runs to Rs 4,49,900 for 2TB, against prices that start at $1,999 in the US. There is no standard iPhone 18 this year; it arrives in spring 2027 alongside the 18e and likely a second-generation Air.
Some of this was priced in. Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal in June that Apple could no longer absorb memory and storage costs, with AI datacentre buildouts squeezing supply. A dearer Pro was coming whichever way you cut it.
What nobody priced in was Apple raising prices on phones already sitting on shelves. The same evening, the iPhone 17, iPhone Air, iPhone 17e and even the two-year-old iPhone 16 all went up $100 in the US, without a single specification change. The 17 Pro and Pro Max, as is the norm, were quietly discontinued.
India got the sharper end again. The iPhone 17 goes from Rs 82,900 to Rs 99,900, a 20.5 percent jump. The 17e climbs from Rs 64,900 to Rs 79,900, up 23 percent. The iPhone Air takes the worst of it, moving from Rs 1,19,900 to Rs 1,49,900, which is Rs 30,000 or 25 percent, with the 1TB variant up a startling Rs 65,000. The iPhone 16 adds Rs 10,000.
The irony is that these are increasingly Indian-built phones. All four iPhone 17 models were assembled here from day one, Foxconn and Tata began iPhone 18 Pro production locally ahead of launch, and Counterpoint expects India to account for 26 percent of global iPhone output this year. Local assembly sidesteps the 20 percent basic customs duty on imported handsets. None of that has reached the buyer. The gap between what an Indian and an American pay for the same iPhone widened this week, it did not narrow.
