Last year’s iPhone just got a £100 price hike
Key Points
- Apple's iPhone 17, 17e, and iPhone Air devices just got a quiet £100 price increase in the UK.
- Price increases are likely the result of supply constraints on storage, memory, and chips caused by the AI boom.
- With AI and data centre companies scrambling to outpace each others' compute capabilities, consumers are being squeezed as older tech appreciates.
- The price rises for the previous generation of iPhones came as Apple announced its new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max devices, together with its foldable iPhone Duo.
Apple has quietly raised the price of its iPhone 17 range, with last year’s device now priced at £100 higher than before the launch of the iPhone 18 Pro.
When the iPhone 17 first launched in the UK last year, the base model was priced at £799 from the Apple store. Traditionally, the launch of a new iPhone generation sees the price of the previous range drop somewhat, making older flagships more accessible to buyers.
The every-hungry AI industry, however, has officially buried this trend through causing a global shortage of memory, chipsets, and other components involved in smartphone manufacturing.
High-throughput memory, storage, and graphics hardware have been in increasingly short supply, as AI companies use the same hardware to train and power their models, leading to a global shortage that has had a knock-on effect across the computing, smartphone, and gaming industries.
For this reason, although Apple has not officially justified its increase, the previous-generation iPhone 17 is now more expensive than it was at launched, and today is priced from £899 on the Apple Store in the United Kingdom.
Even the lower-end iPhone 17e saw its price rise by £100, sorely disappointing those who might have been waiting to pick up a discounted previous-generation device following the iPhone 18 Pro launch.
The iPhone Air was also hit by the same hikes, with the base 256GB model now priced at £1,099 from the Apple Store and the top-end 1TB model at a whopping £1,699.
Below are the old and new prices of the iPhone 17 range on the Apple Store:
| Model | Old Price (Sep 2025) | New Price (Sep 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone 17 256GB | £799 | £799 |
| iPhone 17 512GB | £999 | £1,099 |
| iPhone 17e 256GB | £599 | £699 |
| iPhone 17e 512GB | £799 | £899 |
| iPhone Air 256GB | £999 | £1,099 |
| iPhone Air 512GB | £1,199 | £1,299 |
| iPhone Air 1TB | £1,399 | £1,699 |
New iPhone 18 Pro and Duo announced
These price hikes come on the back of Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro launch event, where it announced its new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max smartphones.
The new smartphones were launched alongside Apple’s first production foldable – the iPhone Duo.
The Duo sports a book-style design with a 5.5-inch cover screen and 7.8-inch inner OLED display.
Higher prices were not relegated to older iPhones, with the newer iPhone 18 Pro devices being markedly more expensive than the previous generation.
The iPhone Duo was easily the most expensive handset of the range, sporting a hefty price tag of £3,199 for the model with 2TB of internal storage.
