Apple Held The Line On MacBook Pricing While Microsoft Hiked Surface Prices, But The iPhone 18 Is Where The Streak Reportedly Breaks
Publish Date: 2026-05-04 01:36:00
Source Domain: wccftech.com
When market distortions become so extreme that the underlying economics stop making sense, retreat is the only recourse. And, this is exactly what Morgan Stanley is now betting on in relation to Apple’s ongoing bid for uncontested market share supremacy via a combination of price freezes and strategic hoarding of memory resources.
Morgan Stanley believes Apple will not be able to sell the upcoming iPhone 18 variants at the same prices as those of their equivalent iPhone 17 counterparts
Apple’s emergent strategy to freeze the prices of its products amid the ongoing memory-driven turmoil first became evident when it refused to hike the prices of its MacBooks even as Microsoft embarked on a bruising inflationary spiral for its Surface laptops.
Following these ill-timed price hikes, Apple’s comparative Mac-related price advantage has only become more entrenched. For instance, the 12-inch Surface Pro now starts at $1,049, while the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air from Apple starts at $999. For context, this base Surface variant previously retailed for just $799.
At the other end of the spectrum, the 15-inch Surface laptop with 64GB of RAM, the Snapdragon X Elite SoC, and a 1TB SSD now costs $3,649. For comparison, the 16-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro from Apple with equal RAM and SSD starts at $3,299.
Apple’s implied strategy of a price freeze received another boost just last week when the Cupertino-based tech giant decided to discontinue the base 256GB storage variant of the M4 Mac mini rather than hiking its price.
Even so, this strategy is now running headlong into deteriorating economic realities. For instance, at its latest earnings call, Apple conceded that it expects a “substantial” increase in memory costs in the June quarter, and that it would resort to a number of strategies – which presumably includes price hikes – to manage the ensuing impact on its margins.
Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring expects Apple to raise…
