- The iPhone 18 Pro goes on sale today from £1,199 – but four older iPhones have just gone up by £100 with no hardware changes[1]
- AI data centres are buying up the memory chips inside every handset, and Apple has stopped absorbing the cost[2]
- The same iPhone 16 is £306 cheaper professionally refurbished – £492.48 against Apple's £799[3]
- All four handsets are cheaper on contract than direct from Apple, by £19 to £67, with two years of airtime included[4]
- AI comes last when households pick a phone – chosen by fewer than one in 20 (4%), behind price (58%) and battery life (48%)[6]
- Uswitch mobiles expert, Ernest Doku, is urging shoppers to compare refurbished and contract prices before paying Apple's new price
As the iPhone 18 Pro goes on sale today from £1,199, shoppers are being urged to look further down Apple's range. Four older iPhones have risen by £100 without a single hardware change, and the same iPhone 16 can be bought £306 cheaper refurbished, reveals new analysis by Uswitch.com, the comparison and switching service.
The iPhone 17e is up from £599 to £699, the iPhone 16 from £699 to £799, the iPhone 17 from £799 to £899 and the iPhone Air from £999 to £1,099.[1] For almost two decades, last year's iPhone got cheaper the moment a new flagship landed. This year it went the other way - the iPhone 16 has instead gone back to the £799 it cost at launch two years ago, after a year at £699.[1]
The phones are the same, they just cost more to build. The memory chips inside them are being bought up by AI data centres, which now account for around 70% of global memory production, and Apple has stopped absorbing the difference.[2] J.P. Morgan estimates DRAM prices will have risen more than 400% between the start of 2024 and the end of 2026.[2] A refurbished phone was built before that happened, which is why its price has not moved: the cheapest iPhone 16 is £492.48, and refurbished prices rose just 0.9% on a like-for-like basis in the week after Apple's increase.[3]
Table: Three ways to buy an iPhone 16 (128GB), September 2026
| How you buy it | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| New, direct from Apple | £799 | Handset only, Apple warranty |
| New, on contract (Vodafone network)[4] | £739.79 | Handset plus 24 months' airtime, 30GB, no annual price rise |
| Professionally refurbished[3] | £492.48 | Handset only, 12-month warranty from the retailer, 30-day returns |
Apple and refurbished figures are for the handset alone. The contract figure is the total cost over 24 months. The refurbished warranty is provided by the retailer, not by Apple.
Buying direct is now the most expensive way to get a new iPhone. On all four models that went up, the cheapest two-year contract comes in below Apple's SIM-free price – £59 less on the iPhone 16 with 30GB a month included, and £67 less on the iPhone 17 with 100GB – and that total already covers two years of calls, texts and data.[4] The trade-off is a 24-month tie-in, so households already paying for a SIM-only deal should add that cost before comparing.
The squeeze is coming from AI infrastructure rather than from anything new on the phone. The rise landed five days before Apple released Siri AI, which handles many requests on Apple's own servers rather than on the handset.[5]
Price comes first when people choose their next handset, at nearly six in 10 (58%), and battery life second, at almost half (48%). AI features come last, picked by fewer than one in 20 (4%).[6] More than two-thirds (68%) would pay nothing extra for them, and almost a third (31%) of people with an AI-capable phone have never used a single AI feature on it.[7][8]
Ernest Doku, Uswitch mobiles expert, says: "This already happened to the Xbox – an almost six-year-old console that now costs £220 more than the day it launched. Now it has reached phones. Apple has been upfront about why: it can no longer swallow the cost of memory chips while AI firms buy them up for data centres, and those costs are real. The awkward part is that most people wouldn't pay more for AI on a phone if you asked them first.
"For almost two decades, waiting for last year's flagship to get cheaper worked every time. This month it went the other way, and the way round it is a phone built before the shortage. A refurbished iPhone 15 is still supported by Apple, comes with a 12-month warranty, and costs less than half the price of a new iPhone 16."
Visit Uswitch.com to compare the latest mobile deals.
-ENDS-
For more information
Harriet Atkinson | Telecoms PR Manager
harriet.atkinson@rvu.co.uk
Twitter: @UswitchPR
Notes to editors
Research conducted online by Opinium, 8–11 September 2026, among 2,000 UK adults, weighted to be nationally representative. Fieldwork straddled Apple's 9 September price announcement; responses collected before and after the announcement showed no material difference on the questions reported here. Full daily splits are available on request.
1. On 9 September 2026, alongside the announcement of the iPhone 18 Pro, Apple increased the price of four existing iPhone models on its UK online store, none of which received hardware updates: iPhone 17e from £599 to £699; iPhone 16 (128GB) from £699 to £799; iPhone 17 (256GB) from £799 to £899; iPhone Air from £999 to £1,099. The iPhone 16 (128GB) launched in September 2024 at £799 and was reduced to £699 following the launch of the iPhone 17 in September 2025. Increases apply to entry storage configurations; some higher-storage variants rose by more. The discontinued iPhone 17 Pro range was not affected. The iPhone 18 Pro goes on sale on 18 September 2026 from £1,199 (256GB), with the iPhone 18 Pro Max from £1,299. Source: Apple UK online store, checked 16 September 2026; corroborated by MacRumors, Stuff, Trusted Reviews and TechRadar, 9 September 2026.
2. Tim Cook, then Apple chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal in June 2026 that Apple was no longer able to absorb the increased cost of memory and storage chips, demand for which has been driven by AI and cloud companies building data centres. J.P. Morgan estimates that DRAM prices will have risen by more than 400% between the start of 2024 and the end of 2026. Smartphone memory prices rose by more than 80% in Q2 2026. Data centres are estimated to account for around 70% of global memory chip production. John Ternus became Apple chief executive on 1 September 2026, with Tim Cook becoming executive chairman. Sources: Wall Street Journal, June 2026; J.P. Morgan Global Research, 2026; IDC, 2026; Apple Newsroom, 21 April 2026.
3. Uswitch price figures are drawn from refurbished Apple handset listings shown to Uswitch visitors. They are advertised prices – what customers were shown, not what they paid – and availability varies by storage, colour and condition. Refurbished-on-contract deals are excluded, as these are priced monthly and are not comparable with SIM-free handset prices. Comparing 9 August – 8 September 2026 with 9–15 September 2026: average price £574.71 to £575.08 (+0.1%); median price £518.39 to £508.00 (−£10.39); like-for-like average £576.28 to £581.70 (+0.9%). The like-for-like measure holds the basket of model, storage and condition constant so that changes in the mix of handsets shown cannot distort the comparison. 15 September is a partial day of data. Summer comparison of average advertised prices, 128GB models: iPhone 14 £248 (June 2026) to £239 (September 2026); iPhone 15 £353 to £339; iPhone 16 £503 to £503. Lowest advertised prices as at 16 September 2026: iPhone 16 128GB £492.48 (£306.52 below Apple's new price of £799); iPhone 15 128GB £333.99 (£365.01 below Apple's £699). All refurbished listings referenced include a 12-month warranty, provided by the retailer rather than by Apple, and 30-day returns. Source: Uswitch.com refurbished handset listings. Separately, the iPhone 15 (2023) runs Apple's current iOS release, and Apple has historically provided major iOS updates to iPhone models for at least five years from launch (source: Apple).
4. Contract prices are the lowest total cost over 24 months for the same handset and storage shown on Uswitch.com on 16 September 2026, including upfront cost and all monthly payments, and include airtime from the network named: iPhone 17e 256GB £679.79 (Vodafone network, 30GB, £13.95 a month, £345 upfront, no annual price rise) against £699 from Apple, a difference of £19.21; iPhone 16 128GB £739.79 (Vodafone network, 30GB, £13.95 a month, £405 upfront, no annual price rise) against £799, a difference of £59.21; iPhone 17 256GB £831.79 (Vodafone network, 100GB, £15.95 a month, £449 upfront, no annual price rise) against £899, a difference of £67.21; iPhone Air 256GB £1,051.96 (Three network, unlimited data, £29.99 a month, £289 upfront) against £1,099, a difference of £47.04. Apple prices are for the SIM-free handset alone, with no airtime included. Contracts run for 24 months and cannot be exited early without charge; households already paying for a SIM-only deal should factor in the cost of cancelling or running it down. Deals change daily.
5. Apple released Siri AI on 14 September 2026 as part of its 2027 software releases (iOS 27), rolling out in beta in English and available in the UK. Users must opt in and may be placed on a waitlist. Apple states the underlying Apple Foundation Models were "custom-built in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models" and run both on device and on Apple servers using Private Cloud Compute, with no user data shared with Google. Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone 16 models or later and iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. Siri AI is not available in the EU or China at launch. ] Source: Apple Newsroom, 14 September 2026.
6. "Which, if any, of the following will be most important to you when choosing your next phone?" Base: 1,893 smartphone owners; respondents could select more than one option. Price 58% (iPhone owners 52%, Android owners 62%), battery life 48%, camera quality 28%, storage space 27%, brand 27%, durability 24%, screen quality 16%, compatibility with existing devices 12%, AI features 4%.
7. "How much more, if anything, would you pay for a smartphone that had integrated AI features such as Clean Up, Genmoji, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence, Notification Summaries and ChatGPT integration?" Base: 1,893 smartphone owners. £0 – I wouldn't pay anything extra: 68%. Mean: £7.20. Median: £0. Means calculated on the 1,689 respondents who gave a figure, excluding "don't know" (11%). The features named in the question are Apple features and were asked of all smartphone owners, including Android owners who may not have encountered them; the ranking question at note 6 is the more directly comparable measure across operating systems.
8. "When, if ever, did you last use an AI-powered feature on your smartphone?" Base: 754 owners of AI-capable smartphones. Never 31%; used at some point (NET) 58%, rising to 71% of Gen Z; within the last week 28%; longer than three months ago 9%.
9. "You mentioned there are some AI driven features on your smartphone that you don't use regularly. Why is this?" Base: 1,814 smartphone owners who do not regularly use AI features on their phone. Don't need them 43%; prefer to do it myself 30%; don't trust them with my data 21%; didn't know they existed 19%; don't know how to use them 17%.
10. The Xbox Series X (1TB disc edition) launched in the UK on 10 November 2020 at £449.99. Following a worldwide price increase announced on 25 June 2026 and effective 1 August 2026, it is priced at £669.99, an increase of £220. Microsoft stated that console storage and memory prices had increased by more than 2.5 times. Source: Microsoft; Pure Xbox, August 2026.