The highly anticipated folding smartphone from Apple is shaping up to be the most expensive device the company has ever offered for users’ wallets.
According to a recent leak shared on the platform Weibo by the informant Instant Digital, the new mobile device could arrive on the market with three different storage options: 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB.
The estimated prices are positioned at roughly €2,134 (US$2,320) for the base model, €2,401 (US$2,610) for the mid version, and €2,668 (US$2,900) for the top-end version.
Remember that prices in the United States are always shown before applying VAT, the Italian equivalent of VAT.
iPhone Fold, prices higher than MacBook Pro’s for the larger memory configurations
The cost structure across the various memory cuts also appears rather unusual. To move from the base 256 GB model to the 512 GB one, a jump of almost €300 is expected, while an additional roughly €240 is required to reach the 1 TB version. This is a completely different progression compared with the fixed steps anticipated for the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
If you look at the direct competition in the foldable devices sector, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 is sold in the United States for $2,000 for the 256 GB configuration. Consequently, the Apple product would impose an initial premium of $320 on the base configuration, well before considering additional costs for the larger memory options.
Under these conditions, the device does not enter direct competition with Samsung’s offerings, but sits in a category of its own, orbiting in an entirely different atmosphere.
The comparison with the MacBook Pro M5
The comparison with the world of laptops makes the scale of these figures even more surprising. The most capacious configuration of the folding smartphone would cost more than $700 more than the base-tier professional laptop produced by the same company.
A base 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 starts at $1,699 (€1,949 in Italy, but the comparison was made with U.S. figures for consistency), while the variant with the M5 Pro chip and a 1 TB SSD starts at $2,199.
The company has never shied away from premium pricing, but there is a clear difference between a purely aspirational product and one that could be alienating for consumers.
The obvious risk is to follow in the footsteps of the Vision Pro, a highly engineered device that most users have not been able to justify economically.
Pricing a smartphone at a price higher than a professional laptop, regardless of how refined its hinge may be, represents an extremely challenging business challenge.
