WSJ: ‘Apple Considers Raising iPhone Prices, Without Blaming Tariffs’

Rolfe Winkler and Yang Jie, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link):

Apple is weighing price increases for its fall iPhone lineup, a step it is seeking to couple with new features and design changes, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is determined to avoid any scenario in which it appears to attribute price increases to U.S. tariffs on goods from China, where most Apple devices are assembled, the people said.

The U.S. and China agreed Monday to suspend most of the tariffs they had imposed on each other in a tit-for-tat trade war. But a 20% tariff that President Trump imposed early in his second term on Chinese goods, citing what he said was Beijing’s role in the fentanyl trade, remains in place and covers smartphones. [...]

For Apple’s most profitable, high-end phones, such as the Pro and Pro Max models, Chinese factories will continue to handle the bulk of production, people familiar with Apple’s supply chain said. While Indian factories are capable of producing Pro models, India’s infrastructure and technical capabilities aren’t yet sufficient to support mass production at the scale China can currently deliver, they said.

Even if Trump weren’t a vindictive thin-skinned angry kook, I’m sure that if this year’s iPhones have higher prices because of Trump’s tariffs, Apple would not attribute the price increases to the tariffs. At least publicly. But Trump is a vindictive thin-skinned angry kook, irritated even that Apple is shifting some iPhone production to India (which does assemble iPhones already, and has the capability of producing more) instead of the United States (which only has the capability of assembling iPhones, at any sort of scale, in the fever dreams of Trump’s addled mind). So of course no one at Apple is going to blame any price increases — if they do indeed go up — on the tariffs.

But come on. If iPhone prices go up in September, everyone who isn’t drunk on MAGA juice is going to blame it on the tariffs. Like, even if Apple had been planning for years to raise prices for the iPhone 17 lineup — if price increases were already baked-in for this year’s models since before Trump was re-elected — now that the tariffs are here, everyone would attribute the price hikes to the tariffs. Especially after the summer of tariff-driven inflation I expect we’re about to go through.

★ Monday, 19 May 2025