iPhone’s launch price held at exactly $799 for five straight years. Apple’s own Newsroom archives show iPhone 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 all launching at that figure between 2021 and 2025, and Apple’s Store pages today, in the week after Apple’s September 9 event, show both iPhone 16 and iPhone 17 priced above it for the first time since the run began.
Lined up by launch date, the streak is the story: five consecutive iPhones opened at the same number, and this year is the first time Apple’s own current pricing has broken it on more than one model at once.
Key facts
| Model | Launch year | Launch price (Apple Newsroom) |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone 13 | 2021 | $799 |
| iPhone 14 | 2022 | $799 |
| iPhone 15 | 2023 | $799 |
| iPhone 16 | 2024 | $799 |
| iPhone 17 | 2025 | $799 |
Five launches, one number
Apple’s own Newsroom releases give a launch price of $799 for every entry-level iPhone from iPhone 13 in September 2021 through iPhone 17 in September 2025. The chip changed five times in that span, the display gained a Dynamic Island partway through, and the port switched from Lightning to USB-C. The opening price on Apple’s own press release did not move once across any of it, even as iPhone 13, 14 and 15 were each discontinued in turn and dropped from Apple’s Store without their launch price ever being revised.
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The storage that $799 bought moved once during the streak, even though the price did not. Apple’s tech specs list a 128GB starting capacity for iPhone 13, 14, 15 and 16, all at the same $799. iPhone 17 raised the starting capacity to 256GB in 2025, still at $799, so the last year of the run bought twice the storage the first four years did, at the identical price Apple had charged since 2021.
The entry-level tier moved by the same amount
iPhone 16e launched at $599 in February 2025, the newest model in the lineup at the time. Apple has since discontinued it and replaced it with iPhone 17e, whose current Apple Store price starts at $699 for 256GB. The gap between the two figures is exactly $100, the same size increase Apple’s standing guidance attaches to older iPhones generally this year, even though iPhone 16 itself moved by only $30 on Apple’s own Store.
| Model | Price | Status |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone 16e | $599 | Launched February 2025; no longer sold by Apple |
| iPhone 17e | $699 (256GB) | Current Apple Store starting price |
What Apple’s Store shows today
| Model | Launch price | Apple Store price today (2026-09-10) |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone 16 | $799 (2024) | $829, 128GB unlocked |
| iPhone 17 | $799 (2025) | $929, 256GB unlocked; “From $899” with a carrier connectivity discount |
Apple’s own product pages, read today, show iPhone 16 priced $30 above the figure Apple’s Newsroom announced for it in 2024. iPhone 17 shows a larger gap: $929 unlocked against a $799 launch price, or $899 against the same figure once Apple’s carrier connectivity discount is applied. Both increases arrived without a Newsroom release of their own, visible only by comparing the price Apple announced at launch with the price Apple’s Store shows this week. Apple’s fetched Store data does not include iPhone 16’s 256GB or 512GB current prices, so the $829 comparison above holds only for the base capacity on both ends. None of the three increases on record this year, iPhone 16, iPhone 17 and the 16e-to-17e change, match each other exactly, even though the standing figure attached to this year’s changes is a flat $100.
What Apple has not said
Apple has not published a Newsroom release explaining the iPhone 16 or iPhone 17 price changes, has not said whether either figure is final for the rest of the model’s time on sale, and has not stated whether a further adjustment to iPhone 17e is coming. iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders opened Saturday, September 12, 2026, on its own separate price ladder, with the standard lineup’s current figures visible on the same Store pages. Anyone checking back after the next launch will be comparing against a streak that ran five years before it broke.
