iPhone 15 Pro duo to have 256GB base storage, go up to 2TB

2023-08-07

As you may have heard, the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max are expected to be $100 pricier than the 14 Pro pair. This may not be a straight price hike, though, as sources are reporting that Apple will also be increasing the storage capacities of the Pro models.

The iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max start at 128GB, go through 256GB and 512GB and offer 1TB maximum. According to Weibo poster Red Lotus Technology, the 15 Pro models will start at 256GB instead and get a new top tier of 2TB storage. Korean blogger yeux1122 confirms the new 2TB max, but not the increase in base storage.

If you go into an Apple Store right now you will see that the 128GB iPhone 14 Pro is $1,000, while the 256GB one is is $1,100. If the two rumors above are true, a 256GB 15 Pro will costs the same as a 256GB 14 Pro. Which is good, unless you were hoping to not spend over $1,000 for a new Pro.

Apple plays this sort of shell games, e.g. the cheapest iPhone (non-SE) in 2020 cost the same as the cheapest iPhone (non-SE) in 2019, $700 in both cases. But there was a catch – in 2020 you were getting an iPhone 12 mini, not the larger iPhone 12, which was now $100 more than its 2019 predecessor.

So there was a price increase, except if you look at it from just the right angle, the prices stayed the same. It will be interesting to see how this price hike, combined with the predictions that demand for iPhone 15 will be lower than for iPhone 14, will affect Apple’s sales.

Note that there is a lot of guesswork involved at the moment and the storage rumor or the price hike rumor might prove to be false (or even both of them). But if prices do go up, they will go up by different amounts in the different regions and some regions will be affected worse than others.

Source 1 (in Korean) | Source 2 (in Chinese) | Via