Apple Blinks on iPhone Pricing

livemint.com:

Apple won’t be jacking up the price on its faithful iPhone buyers. That could cost it. The world’s largest company by market value updated the key product line of its largest business on Tuesday.

The new iPhone 15 family turned out to be mostly as expected, with enhanced camera features and USB-C charging ports on all models and titanium casing with a new central processing chip on the Pro devices. One surprise, though, was Apple avoiding an across-the-board price hike. Prices on the different memory configurations of the iPhone 15 family are identical to last year’s iPhone 14 lineup, with the only exception being the removal of a 128GB version of the Pro Max—the lowest priced phone in that lineup.

That trick raised the average selling price of the Pro family by less than 2%. Numerous leaks ahead of the event suggest Apple was planning a more significant bump, leading several analysts to project an increase of $100-$200 across at least the new iPhone Pro family. That would have resulted in the average selling price of that crucial lineup rising by at least 8%.

Apple shares closed down nearly 2% Tuesday following the event. That alone isn’t unusual; the stock has fallen after seven of the last 10 iPhone introductions. But the shares had already slid nearly 6% over the past week on growing worries about Apple’s business in China, where the iPhone might be facing a ban among government workers as well as a resurgent local competitor in Huawei, which has launched a new phone that is reportedly delivering performance specs close to Apple’s premium devices.