Tim Cook: Apple “Reluctantly Raised Prices” as Memory Costs Spiral Out of Control

AAPL stock trades at a 41x trailing P/E as Apple bets a $2,400 foldable iPhone Ultra can grow revenue without meaningful unit growth.

Tim Cook already raised iPhone prices by anywhere from $200 to $500 due to memory inflation, risking buyer defection to rivals like Huawei with mature foldable lineups.

Morgan Stanley projects the foldable alone drives $14 billion in December-quarter revenue, but Apple must lap the iPhone 17's 22% growth with limited supply.

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Apple's ( NASDAQ:AAPL ) product event lands tomorrow, and the story ahead of it has less to do with hardware romance than with margin arithmetic. On September 8, 2026, CNBC reporter MacKenzie Sigalos previewed a lineup she framed as a deliberate push upmarket, anchored by a foldable device reportedly called iPhone Ultra.

Apple enters the event with supportive fundamentals. The stock closed at $316.22, up 33.43% over the past year, and last quarter it reported $109.4 billion in revenue with company gross margin at 50.1%.

But those numbers arrive alongside a candid warning from Tim Cook about "a 100-year flood on the memory pricing". Read the foldable as the response, and the event becomes a test of whether pricing power can carry the P&L while unit growth stays modest.

Sigalos told CNBC viewers that Apple is expected to skip a regular iPhone 18 and lean into a foldable that would, per Sigalos, represent the first major iPhone design change in nearly a decade.

According to Sigalos, the iPhone Ultra is expected to start around $2,400 and top $3,000 at higher storage tiers. Early production is reportedly very limited, which Sigalos suggested could feed scarcity-driven demand.

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She also cited a Morgan Stanley projection of $14 billion in December-quarter revenue tied to the foldable alone, according to CNBC. That figure remains a projection that depends on Apple hitting an aggressive ramp on a first-generation product.