$2,099 for the Pro, $3,499 to fold it: Apple’s September event in Australian dollars

The short version

Six things to hold onto.

• The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $2,099 and the Pro Max at $2,299, both $100 up on the phones they replace. That is the number in every headline and it is the least interesting one: the 1 TB models are $500 dearer than last year’s 1 TB, and the 2 TB Pro Max is $900 dearer than the 2 TB iPhone 17 Pro Max. Pre-orders opened at 10 pm AEST on Saturday 12 September; the phones arrive on Friday 18 September.
• The iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable, is $3,499 for 256 GB and $5,899 for 2 TB. Pre-orders open at 10 pm AEST on Friday 16 October and it ships on Friday 23 October. Australia is in the first wave of more than 70 countries.
• The phones Apple did not announce got dearer the same night. The iPhone 17e and iPhone 17 rose $150 each, the iPhone 16 and most iPhone Air models $100, and the 1 TB iPhone Air $500, to $3,099. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max were discontinued.
• The reason is memory. In late June, then-chief executive Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal that Apple could no longer absorb the rising cost of memory and storage chips being bought up by AI data-centre builders, describing the shortage as something he had never seen in more than 40 years. The steepest rises are on the highest-capacity models, which is exactly where the storage cost sits.
• The Australian premium over the US price is about 13 to 15 per cent after you allow for GST and the exchange rate. Our arithmetic, using the Reserve Bank’s rate for 16 September, puts the iPhone 18 Pro roughly $250 above a straight conversion plus GST, the Pro Max about $300 above and the Duo about $415 above.
• There is no plain iPhone 18. Apple has split its launch calendar in two; the standard iPhone 18 and the next iPhone Air and 18e are expected in early 2027. If you were waiting for the ordinary one, you are now waiting for the price of the ordinary one to be set after the memory market moves again.

What was announced

Four product lines, one software date, and one omission. Specifications below are Apple’s own claims from its press releases; none of them has been verified by us or, as at our capture date, by any Australian outlet with a retail unit.

iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. The headline change is a variable aperture on the 48-megapixel main camera: six laser-cut blades that move between ƒ/1.48 and ƒ/4, adjusted automatically or set manually from four stops in the Camera app, alongside new manual shutter-speed and white-balance controls. Underneath is the A20 Pro, which Apple says is the first smartphone chip on a 2-nanometre process, with a six-core CPU, a seven-core GPU it rates as up to 40 per cent faster than the A19 Pro, and two 16-core Neural Engines. The Dynamic Island is smaller, the vapour chamber has three times the surface area of last year’s, the cellular modem is Apple’s new C2 and the wireless chip adds Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread. Colours are black, silver, glacier and burgundy. Wired charging is quoted at 50 per cent in about 15 minutes. Battery life is the one figure to read carefully; see below. The Pro Max, several outlets noted from the spec sheet, is heavier than the 17 Pro Max but no thicker.

iPhone Duo. A book-style foldable with a 7.6-inch inner display and a 5.4-inch outer one, both with ProMotion, always-on and 3,000 nits of peak outdoor brightness, in a Grade 5 titanium body that Apple calls the thinnest iPhone ever when open. It carries the same A20 Pro, a 48-megapixel main camera with what Apple calls optical-quality 2x zoom and a 48-megapixel ultra-wide, a FaceTime camera under the inner screen, Touch ID in the side button rather than Face ID, and an IP68 rating to six metres for 30 minutes, which MacRumors pointed out the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 does not match on dust. There are two batteries, one per half, and Apple’s video-playback claims are 31 hours on the inner screen, 44 on the outer and 24 on an even split. It ships on iOS 27.1, supports the USB-C Apple Pencil later this year, and comes in star white and night sky. Ternus called it “the most transformational change to iPhone since the original”.

Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4. The Series 12 gets the S11 chip, a reworked health-sensing system for more frequent heart-rate readings, a readiness score, ceramic case options and eight new health features. Both watches lean on Siri: the Siri Recap feature GadgetGuy described recalls the last 15 seconds of conversation and produces a text summary, with Apple saying the audio is not saved to the device or its servers. Australian pricing starts at $649 for the Series 12 and $1,349 for the Ultra 4, both shipping 18 September.

AirPods 5. Active noise cancellation is now standard on both variants: $219 for the base model and $249 for the version with swipe controls and a wireless charging case. GadgetGuy notes that is $80 less than the ANC AirPods 4 they replace, the one price at the event that went down.

iOS 27 arrived as a free update on 14 September. Apple Intelligence now covers 15 languages; the new Siri, still in beta, launches in English with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish to follow in October, and MacRumors reports daily usage limits with a paid “Expanded Access” tier.

Not announced: the standard iPhone 18, any Mac, Apple TV or HomePod. EFTM’s Trevor Long and GadgetGuy both report the base model has been pushed to early 2027, alongside the next iPhone Air and an 18e, which splits the traditional single September launch into two seasons.

What it costs here, tier by tier

The table sets Apple Australia’s store prices for the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, captured 16 September, against the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max recommended retail prices as WhistleOut recorded them in May. All prices include GST.

Read down the right-hand column and the pattern is the whole story. The step from 256 GB to 512 GB is $400 on both phones, as it was last year. The step from 512 GB to 1 TB is now $800, where it was $400. The step from 1 TB to 2 TB is $1,200. Our arithmetic: last year the second 256 GB cost about $1.56 a gigabyte and the next 512 GB about $0.78; this year both steps cost about $1.56 a gigabyte, and the final terabyte about $1.17. Apple has not invented a new premium so much as removed the discount the bigger tiers used to carry. Whatever memory costs Apple, the high tiers are where the increase has been recovered.

The foldable, for which there is no predecessor to compare:

The Duo’s storage steps are $400, $800 and $1,200 — identical to the Pro’s. A 1 TB Duo costs the same $4,699 as a 2 TB Pro Max. Reasoning beyond the sources: the $3,499 entry price puts the Duo about $1,400 above the 256 GB Pro of the same chip and camera, which is the price Apple has put on the hinge, the second screen and the titanium; and the $5,899 top model is, as far as we can find, the most expensive phone Apple has ever sold in this country.

The phones that got dearer without a keynote

While the event was still running, Apple’s Australian store repriced the phones it was keeping on sale. WhistleOut’s Alex Choros tallied them the next morning:

One note on the table: WhistleOut lists the 512 GB iPhone 17 at $1,849, while GadgetGuy and Apple’s own Australian store, captured 16 September, both show $1,949. We have used Apple’s figure. The 1 TB Air is the standout: a 19 per cent rise on a phone that is a year old, and the same $500 jump the 1 TB Pro models took. In the US the equivalent moves were a flat US$100 across all four models, per MacRumors, so the Australian rises on the 17 and 17e are proportionally larger than the American ones once converted.

Reasoning beyond the sources: the practical effect is that the cheapest new iPhone in Australia is now $1,149, up from $999 a week ago, and the gap between the iPhone 17 and the 18 Pro has narrowed from $600 to $550. Apple has made the mid-range less attractive at exactly the moment it has nothing new to sell there until 2027.

Why: the memory shortage, in Apple’s own words

Apple did not put a reason in any press release. Its leadership had, however, already given one. MacRumors’ report of the price rises cites Tim Cook’s late-June interview with The Wall Street Journal, in which he said Apple could no longer absorb the increased cost of memory and storage chips being bought in bulk by AI and so-called neocloud companies for data centres, and likened the shortage to a hundred-year flood: “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.” WhistleOut’s account uses the same framing, describing a component crisis in which generative-AI demand has driven up the price of memory and storage.

Cook made those remarks as chief executive. He is not one any more: he stepped down on 31 August after 15 years and became executive chairman, and John Ternus, until then the head of hardware engineering, took over on 1 September, a succession Apple had announced in April. Reasoning beyond the sources: the first pricing decision of the Ternus era was therefore to pass on a cost his predecessor had spent the winter warning about, and the shape of the increases — small at 256 GB, large at 1 TB and 2 TB — is consistent with a company pricing to the component rather than to the customer.

We covered the same shortage from the other side of the counter in our August snapshot of RAM and SSD prices, when it was hitting laptops and desktop upgrades. The iPhone was always going to be next; it just took a launch cycle to arrive.

The Australia tax, calculated

Every year someone divides the Australian price by the American one and declares a rip-off, and every year they forget GST. Here is the sum done properly. Apple’s US prices exclude sales tax; Australian prices include 10 per cent GST. The Reserve Bank’s published rate for 16 September 2026 is US$0.7133 to the Australian dollar. All of the following is our arithmetic on those inputs, rounded to the nearest dollar.

So the honest version of the complaint is not the 75 per cent gap between $1,199 and $2,099 that a raw comparison produces. It is a 13 to 20 per cent gap that survives after tax and currency are stripped out, wider at the top of the range than the bottom. Some of that is hedging against a currency Apple sets prices in once a year; some is the cost of doing business in a market with mandatory consumer guarantees and a smaller volume; some is that Apple can. We cannot apportion it and neither can anyone outside Cupertino. What we can say is that it is not new: the iPhone 17 Pro carried a similar premium last year, and the interesting movement this year is in the storage tiers, not the exchange rate.

The battery number depends on where you buy

Apple’s press release quotes “up to 36 hours” of video playback for the iPhone 18 Pro and “up to 45 hours” for the Pro Max. Read the footnote and both figures are for the eSIM-only models sold in the US, Canada, Japan, Mexico, the Gulf states and a handful of other markets, where removing the SIM tray frees space for a slightly larger battery; Apple itself says the eSIM-only design is worth about two extra hours. Australia is not on that list, so the Australian phones keep a physical SIM slot and the Australian claims are lower. GadgetGuy’s figure of up to 43 hours for the Pro Max is consistent with Apple’s two-hour adjustment; EFTM’s launch-night write-up quoted “30+ hours” for the Pro Max and 24 for the Pro, which we read as Apple’s real-world-usage numbers rather than video playback. When you see a 45-hour claim in an Australian advertisement, that is the wrong phone.

We explained why Australia still has SIM trays, and what the eSIM-only transition means for your number, in our eSIM guide.

What we could not establish

Five gaps, in order of how much they matter.

We could not find Australian pricing for the iPhone Duo Case and Folio; Apple’s US release quotes US$79 and US$129 and the local store had not listed them when we captured it.

We could not find an Australian figure for the Duo’s weight or its thickness open and closed; Apple’s “thinnest iPhone ever” claim is unquantified in the material we could reach.

We could not reach TechRadar’s full price-rise list, which reportedly puts one iPhone Air model at a 21 per cent rise, nor The Wall Street Journal interview itself; Cook’s remarks are as quoted by MacRumors.

We could not confirm the Australian pricing of the ceramic Apple Watch Series 12 models, only the $649 starting price.

And we could not verify a single specification. Nobody in Australia has published a test of a retail unit as at 16 September; the first will appear after the 18 September release, and the Duo’s crease, hinge and battery, the three things that decide whether a foldable is worth $3,499, are untested by anyone outside Apple’s launch demos.

What to do with this if you are buying

• Buy the storage you need, not the storage you might. The 512 GB step is priced as it was last year; the 1 TB and 2 TB steps are where this year’s increase lives. An extra $800 for the third half-terabyte buys a lot of iCloud.
• If you want a 17 Pro, move quickly. Apple has discontinued it. Retailer stock at the old $1,999 will not be replenished, and once it is gone the only 17 Pro is a used one.
• Do not judge the mid-range by last month’s price. The iPhone 17 at $1,549 is a different proposition from the iPhone 17 at $1,399, and the plain iPhone 18 that might have replaced it is not coming until 2027.
• Wait for a review before you pre-order the Duo. Pre-orders do not open until 16 October, which is a month of other people finding out what the crease looks like. There is no prize for being first to a $3,499 first-generation product.
• Read the battery footnote. The Australian iPhone 18 Pro is a physical-SIM phone with a smaller battery than the American one Apple’s headline numbers describe.
• Check the trade-in before the price of your old phone catches up. Reasoning beyond the sources: if new iPhones are dearer, used ones follow, and a 17 Pro traded in this month may be worth more than the same phone traded in after the market reprices.

The bottom line

Apple’s first launch under a new chief executive is a good camera, a genuinely new kind of iPhone, and a price list that tells you more about the state of the memory market than the state of Apple. The $100 headline rise on the Pro is real but modest; the $500 and $900 rises higher up the range, and the $150 quietly added to the iPhone 17 the same night, are the actual news, and they are the same story we told about laptops in August, six weeks later and in a smaller box. The Duo is priced to be admired rather than bought this year, which for a first-generation foldable is probably right. And the ordinary iPhone 18, the one most Australians would have bought, does not exist yet. When it does, in early 2027, its price will be set by whatever memory costs then. On the evidence of this week, plan for more.

Sources

Figures and quotes above are drawn from these sources, captured 16 September 2026:

• Apple Newsroom — Apple debuts iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max (9 September 2026, US): the A20 Pro process and core counts, the 40 per cent GPU claim, the ƒ/1.48 to ƒ/4 six-blade variable aperture, the C2 modem and N1 wireless chip, the vapour chamber, the colours, the 36-hour and 45-hour eSIM-only video playback figures and the two-hour eSIM adjustment, the charging claims, the US$1,199 and US$1,299 prices, the 5 am PT 12 September pre-order time (10 pm AEST), the 18 September availability including Australia, the iOS 27 date, and Greg Joswiak’s quote.
• Apple Newsroom — Apple unveils iPhone Duo (9 September 2026, US): the 7.6-inch and 5.4-inch displays, 3,000 nits, Grade 5 titanium, IP68 to six metres, the hinge description, the A20 Pro, the camera and Touch ID details, the 31, 44 and 24-hour battery claims, iOS 27.1, Apple Pencil support, the US$79 case and US$129 folio, the US$1,999 starting price, the 16 October pre-order and 23 October availability in more than 70 countries including Australia, and John Ternus’s quote.
• Apple Australia — Buy iPhone 18 Pro: the eight Australian storage-tier prices from $2,099 to $4,699 and the “available starting 18.9” date.
• Apple Australia — Buy iPhone Duo: the four Australian tier prices from $3,499 to $5,899, the star white and night sky colours, and the 10 pm AEST 16 October pre-order and 23 October availability.
• Apple Australia — Buy iPhone 17: the current $1,549 and $1,949 prices used to resolve the 512 GB discrepancy.
• GadgetGuy — Every major announcement from Apple’s September 2026 event (Chris Button, 16 September 2026): the Australian AirPods 5 prices of $219 and $249 and the $80 comparison, the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 starting prices of $649 and $1,349, the Siri Recap description, the 43-hour Pro Max figure, the iPhone 17 and 17e rises and their 15 per cent framing, the Air and iPhone 16 rises, the “up to $900” year-on-year figure, the memory-shortage attribution and the early-2027 timing for the base iPhone 18.
• EFTM — iPhone 18 Pro revealed: Australian pricing starts at $2,099 (Trevor Long, 10 September 2026): the launch-night Australian starting prices, the 18 September release, the 24-hour and “30+ hours” usage figures, and the delay of the entry-level iPhone 18 to early 2027.
• WhistleOut — Some older iPhones are now as much as $500 more expensive (Alex Choros, 10 September 2026): the old and new Australian prices for the iPhone 17e, 17, Air and 16 by tier, the percentage rises including 19.3 per cent on the 1 TB Air, the component-crisis explanation, and the $500 and $900 comparisons at 1 TB and 2 TB.
• WhistleOut — Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max: best plans, prices and deals (updated 7 May 2026): the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max Australian RRPs at every tier used as last year’s column in the comparison table.
• MacRumors — Apple raises prices of iPhone 16, iPhone 17, iPhone Air and iPhone 17e (Tim Hardwick, 9 September 2026): the flat US$100 rises, the discontinuation of the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, and Tim Cook’s June remarks to The Wall Street Journal including the “over 40 years” quote.
• MacRumors — Everything Apple announced at the September 2026 event (Juli Clover, 9 September 2026): the smaller Dynamic Island, the Apple Reference Image feature, the heavier-not-thicker Pro Max observation, the Duo’s IP68 comparison with the Galaxy Z Fold8, the Siri usage limits and Expanded Access tier, and the list of products not announced.
• MacRumors — Tim Cook steps down as Apple CEO tomorrow (31 August 2026): the 31 August departure, the 1 September start for John Ternus, Cook’s move to executive chairman and the April announcement of the succession.
• Reserve Bank of Australia — Exchange rates: the US$0.7133 per Australian dollar rate for 16 September 2026 used in our conversion arithmetic.
• New Technology — Memory is now the most expensive part of your next laptop (15 August 2026) and eSIM in Australia in 2026: our earlier snapshots of the memory shortage and the eSIM transition referred to above.