Apple didn’t cut the price of last year’s iPhone. It raised it.
Across the entire lineup of older iPhones still sitting in its U.S. store, the company pushed prices up by as much as $100 per device, days after unveiling the new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo. That’s backwards from how this normally goes. The old playbook says a new generation launches, the previous one slides down a tier, and the bargain hunters move in.
Not this time.
The iPhone 16 now starts at $799. It was $699. Same phone, same silicon, same everything, $100 more than it cost before the keynote.
The 17e takes the sharpest hit
The iPhone 17e with 256GB of storage went from $599 to $699. On a device positioned as the accessible option, a $100 bump is the difference between an easy recommendation and a phone you have to think about.
The iPhone 17 starts at $899 now. The iPhone Air’s entry price lands at $1,099.
None of these phones gained anything. No new chip, no storage bump, no camera revision, no spec sheet footnote to point at. The only thing that changed is what you pay.
Why this is strange
Apple’s pattern for years has been predictable enough that you could plan a purchase around it. Wait for the September event, then buy the model that just got displaced. The discount was the reward for patience.
Anyone running that strategy this year got punished for it.
A $799 iPhone 16 is a harder sell when the iPhone 17 sits $100 above it at $899. The gap that used to make older models attractive has narrowed on the wrong end. And the iPhone Air at $1,099 is now priced in territory where you start asking what exactly the thinness is buying you.
Greek buyers, read this part carefully
Every figure above is a U.S. price. That matters more than it sounds.
These increases don’t automatically carry over to Greece. Final prices here run through VAT, currency exchange rates and whatever the official resellers decide to do with their own margins. A $100 move in Cupertino’s store doesn’t translate cleanly into a €100 move at a shop in Athens.
It’s also not a guarantee that Greek prices move at all. They might. They might move by a different amount. Watch the official reseller listings rather than converting the dollar figures yourself and assuming that’s the number.
What to do about it
If you were holding out for the post-launch discount on an iPhone 16, that discount isn’t coming from Apple. Carrier deals and third-party retailers still have inventory priced under the new official numbers, and that’s where the value is right now.
And if you’re comparing the iPhone 16 at $799 against the iPhone 17 at $899, the math has shifted. A hundred dollars used to separate a two-year-old phone from a new one. It now separates two phones that are one generation apart, which makes the newer one considerably easier to justify.
That may well be the point.
