Up to 11% increase overnight: iPhones are soaring in Japan without official explanation. On the French side, the real threat does not come from where you think.
Apple’s Japanese customers discovered new labels on almost the entire iPhone range on July 17, with increases ranging up to 11% depending on the models. No press release, no justification: the prices have simply changed on the online store. The following question is obvious to a French reader: whose turn is it? The honest answer comes down to two very distinct mechanics, and only one of the two should concern you.
Why is Japan toasting and not yet the others?
The detail of the rises is not lacy and affects the majority of the range. The iPhone 17 Pro Max 256 GB goes from 194,800 yen to 214,800 yen, or 20,000 yen more. The iPhone Air climbs 11%, the iPhone 17 10%, and even the iPhone 16 of 2024 takes 9%. The most credible suspect is on the foreign exchange side: the yen hit its lowest level at the end of June for 40 years. Each iPhone sold in Tokyo therefore brought in fewer and fewer dollars in Cupertino, until reaching prices charged elsewhere.
The mechanism is reminiscent of a menu displayed in euros in an Istanbul restaurant: when the local currency plummets, the menu ends up being reprinted. A realignment of this type corrects a local monetary disconnection, nothing more. If the Japanese rise is indeed part of this logic, it has no reason to cross borders: the euro is not experiencing what the yen is experiencing. That’s the good news. She stops there.
France has already paid, but through another door
On June 25, Apple already raised its French prices on almost the entire catalog, except iPhone. The MacBook Air went from 1,199 to 1 399 eurosthe Mac Studio from 2,299 to 2,999 euros, the iPads followed. The justification, official this time, cited shortages “extremes” of memory and storage, the company granting “know that this is not welcome news”. The cause is an industrial shift: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, which control more than 95% of the world’s DRAM, reserve their production lines for high-bandwidth memory for AI servers. Prices for traditional memory almost doubled in the first quarter.
The iPhone remained the last product spared, and this reprieve has an expiration date. During negotiations at the start of the year, Samsung reportedly imposed an increase of around 80% on iPhone RAM, SK Hynix reportedly came close to 100%. The contracts would even have gone from an annual rate to a quarterly rate, unheard of for a customer of Apple’s size. Estimates from TechInsights are now around 51 dollars, compared to 13 a year earlierthe cost of just the 256 GB storage of an iPhone Pro. The iPhone 18 expected in September will be the first assembled under this regime, and Apple will detail its pricing policy on July 30, during its quarterly results.
👉🏻 Follow tech news in real time: add 01net to your sources on Google, and subscribe to our WhatsApp channel.
