Malaysians who held off on a new iPhone this year, waiting for the latest models to land so last year's phones would slide to a friendlier price, have found the opposite waiting for them. Apple has quietly raised the price of the models it launched earlier: the iPhone Air, the iPhone 17 and the cheaper iPhone 17e, even as its new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max arrive.
Most of the increases are RM300. One is far steeper. The iPhone Air with 1TB of storage has gone from RM6,999 to RM8,299, a jump of RM1,300. The new prices are already live on Apple's Malaysian store, and were flagged by Malay Mail.
Here is the part that turns the usual logic on its head. Buyers often expect last year's model to become the value pick once a new one arrives. This time the new flagships held their base prices instead. The iPhone 18 Pro still starts at RM5,499 and the Pro Max at RM5,999, matching what the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max started at a year earlier, though the 1TB and 2TB Pro tiers did climb. It is the older, cheaper phones sitting beneath them that moved.
The iPhone 17e now starts at RM3,299 for 256GB, up from RM2,999, and the standard iPhone 17 begins at RM4,299 rather than RM3,999. Every storage tier of the iPhone Air rose too, with the top 1TB model taking the biggest hit of the lot. Those before-and-after figures come from Malay Mail's tally and our own launch coverage of each model (the Air and iPhone 17 from September 2025, the 17e from this spring), since Apple's store lists only the current numbers. These are list prices, and what a reseller charges on the street can differ.
Apple has not given a reason for the increases, so what follows is context rather than a stated cause. The backdrop is one Apple itself has flagged: Tim Cook, who was Apple's chief executive when he made the remark, warned investors earlier this year that rising memory and storage costs could eventually push product prices up, a warning carried in the Malay Mail report. Memory has grown more expensive as the race to build artificial-intelligence data centres consumes it, the same pressure we have tracked pushing up the price of graphics cards in Malaysia. Whether that is what moved these specific prices, Apple has not said.
Notice where the rise bites hardest. The iPhone 17e is the cheapest iPhone Apple currently sells, so a RM300 increase on a RM2,999 phone is a larger proportional jump than the same RM300 on a flagship. The 1TB Air took the steepest rise of all at RM1,300.
For anyone deciding what to buy before the first phones reach stores, the practical takeaway is plain: check the current price, not the one you remember from launch. Our running record of Apple's Malaysian prices tracks where each model sits today. The standard iPhone 17, now RM4,299, sits just RM1,200 below the iPhone 18 Pro at RM5,499, a narrower gap than before, which changes the sum on whether the older phone is still the saving it used to be.
The revised prices are already in effect on Apple's Malaysian store. The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max go on sale in Malaysia on 18 September.
Image(s) courtesy of wang binghua and Daniel Romero on Unsplash.
