Apple's first foldable was supposed to land just under a round number. Bloomberg reported on September 8 that the iPhone Ultra's starting price was fixed early in development at a figure chosen to sit beneath a psychological ceiling, the same trick the original iPhone X pulled, and that the memory shortage has since pushed the internal target higher. Several steeper options were still on the table in the weeks before the September 9 keynote, and a fully loaded configuration would cost more than any iPhone Apple has sold.
The squeeze has a date. On June 25 Apple raised prices across Macs, iPads, its home devices, and Vision Pro, blaming memory and storage chip costs driven by AI data-center demand, and said it was leaving the iPhone alone for now while hinting that more adjustments could follow. Apple's statement at the time: "The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage."
The Ultra is the first iPhone to absorb that hint, and it's the one Apple can afford to absorb it on. A first-generation folding phone sells to people who decided months ago that price wasn't the objection.
The same report fills in how long this took. Apple's hardware group studied folding screens for years before Samsung shipped the first Galaxy Fold in 2019, and the formal project started under Dan Riccio. Around 2020 Tim Cook came back from a trip to Asia unusually energized by the Samsung and Huawei foldables he'd seen selling, pushed the effort forward, and steered it away from an early concept, an iPad mini that unfolded into a larger tablet, toward a phone. Four problems ate the years since: the crease, the hinge, a cover glass that bends, and a camera that hides under the display.
For everyone not buying a folding phone, the question is the iPhone 18 Pro. Apple's June move showed it will pass memory costs through rather than eat them, and the Pro line is where that lands for most people. If the Pro pricing holds on September 9, the Ultra is carrying the shortage for the whole lineup; if it doesn't, the foldable's number stops being an outlier. The rest of the Ultra picture hasn't moved since the last iPhone Ultra leaks: the specs are settled, and the price is the one unknown Apple hands over at 10 a.m. Pacific.
