The Iphone 18 Is NOT Coming This Fall (Buy Iphone 17 Instead)

For the first time ever there is not going to be a new base iPhone this year or this fall. Let that sink in for a second because it really is a break from everything that Apple has done since the very first iPhone. Every September for well over a decade you could count on a new standard iPhone showing up alongside the pro models. That streak is ending. This year Apple is splitting up the iPhone 18 lineup in two and the regular iPhone is getting pushed all the way into next spring. So here's how it's going to allegedly shake out. In September we're getting the three most expensive iPhones that Apple makes. The iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the first ever foldable iPhone which most people are now calling the iPhone Ultra and it could land somewhere around two thousand plus dollars. Then everything else, the standard iPhone 18, the cheaper iPhone 18e and possibly fingers crossed a second generation iPhone Air, all of that will be held for the spring of 2027 where we'll have another event with the base iPhone 18 expected to arrive around March. So if you're the kind of person who normally just buys the regular iPhone, the plain one, the value pick, honestly the best phone of the year in my opinion, you're not getting a new one this fall. You're going to have to wait until early next year and I want to be honest about why this matters. Apple is fairly clearly leading with its most profitable products first and saving the affordable stuff for later. The pro and the fold get the fall spotlight, they get the launch hype, they get the holiday quarter and the everyday buyer has to wait a few extra months unless you want to get one of those more expensive phones which Apple's kind of banking on the fact that you might want to. Whether that bothers you or not probably depends on which iPhone you're actually going to buy this year. So let's get into what we're hearing about that base iPhone 18 because the picture kind of shifted a little bit and there's some pretty interesting stuff here. As of very recently, analyst Jeff Pugh is claiming the standard iPhone 18 is going to jump up from 8 gigs on this 17 model all the way up to 12 gigabytes of RAM which is actually what the iPhone 17 Pro currently has and that's a real pro level bump for the cheap model. Another analyst has said the same thing back in April so now there are two voices on that 12 gigabytes of RAM side. Here's the catch and this is where I get a little skeptical. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo who has a pretty strong track record says the iPhone 18 is only getting 9 gigabytes instead of 12 which is kind of strange. Normally there's not like an odd number and that gap is not just a spec sheet number. If the base iPhone comes in at 9 gigs it will not be able to run two of the newer Apple intelligence features so it won't be able to do the option to customize Siri's voice for that extra expressiveness and pace and the improved speech-to-text dictation and because these run on device and they need at least 12 gigs to work. So depending on which analyst is right here the base iPhone 18 either matches the Pro on memory and does everything or it gets left out with a couple of these headline AI features or I mean depending on who you are they might be headline or they might not be anything that you need. Worth keeping an eye on though that's for sure. The second so-called Pro level upgrade in that same report is the dynamic island. Most of the smaller dynamic island talk has been about the Pro models but Jeff Pugh now believes the regular iPhone 18 is getting that narrower version too and leaker Ice Universe has said the same thing that the smaller dynamic island spreads across the whole lineup. So the base iPhone might actually look a lot more modern and you know kind of up to date with what the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max will get. Beyond those two the front camera is expected to move up to 24 megapixels across the 18 lineup up from the current 18 which we got last year and everyone seems to really like myself included getting more in that front selfie camera. The display is supposedly getting brighter with Apple reportedly setting brightness targets so high that at least one supplier is actually struggling to hit them and under the hood you're looking at a new A20 chip built on a 2 nanometer process which is a real step down in node size from the 3 nanometer A19 and that should mean better efficiency and better battery life without giving up speed. There's also the new C2 modem in the mix though the reporting suggests that Apple may still use a blend of its own modems and Qualcomm modems depending on the region that you live in. Now here's the part where I'm kind of pumping the brakes a little because it is not all upgrades. We're hearing the display quality could be trimmed a little bit the chip might ship with a 4 core GPU instead of a 5 core GPU and the base iPhone 18 and 18e are expected to share more components which narrows the gap between the good phone and the more budget phone. So while one set of rumors is telling us the 18 gets pro level RAM and nicer dynamic island and all that other stuff another is kind of telling us that Apple is going to be cutting corners too so I suppose both things can be true at once and that's going to be something that we're going to have to keep an eye out as well. And then there's the price Apple's already raising prices on a bunch of devices we do have the new iPhone upgrade program or the new Apple upgrade program across a lot of things not just the iPhone but the pro models alone are rumored to be as much as $250 to $300 more expensive than last year's models. Nobody knows exactly how much the base iPhone 18 will climb but the direction is pretty clearly up and not down and it very well could be that this iPhone the 17 could get a price increase as soon as right now and carry on into next year and then that would be the price of the next phone so who knows but let me now pivot into a kind of mini one year later review of this phone because when this came out last year and up until now I still think this is the best iPhone best bang for your buck value phone that you can get and I still think that holds true. Every year I tell myself I want to get a smaller phone and every year I end up with the pro max but this past year especially if you watched my last video I went with the pro size which is what you get here and this is just by far the perfect size in my opinion. It's light without feeling cheap big enough for media and multitasking and easy to use one-handed in a way that the pro max just never was and the 120 hertz pro motion display was the single biggest thing that made a standard iPhone finally feel like it was up with the rest of the phones in 2026 especially the pro models coming off years of being stuck at 60 hertz and the ceramic shield too we don't need to get into it I think it's amazing I've talked about it ad nauseam so we'll just keep it at it's very very good I have no scratches on this phone at all whatsoever and I use it for a long time switching back and forth between the pro and everything and it's just held up super well. The cameras were the other pleasant surprise especially that 48 megapixel ultrawide which is a big jump over last year's 12 megapixel ultrawide on the 16th. I'm still a telephoto guy at heart and part of me still wishes that Apple offered up maybe not the choice but at least I don't know remove the ultrawide and went telephoto and regular wide but I just have to come to terms that's just not gonna happen and honestly the ultrawide is a good camera so it serves me well. The telephoto and the display used to be the two things that dragged me back to the every single year the 17 got me so close to really not needing a pro at all honestly if I had to pick and had like a certain budget I would go with this and then spend my money in that budget somewhere else so that brings me to the real question and that's do you wait for the iPhone 18 next spring or if you're coming from something a lot older and you're looking at the 17 now before the prices rise you know you're going to be paying more of a premium when that base iPhone 18 comes the iPhone 17 is a known quantity it is excellent it has held up for me over this last year really well and is sitting at a price that I think is great so do it before it goes up or before the 18 comes out and that is much more but let me know in the comments down below how do you feel about the 18 rumors how do you feel about the 17 if you're if you've had one do you love it are you thinking about getting one let me know in those comments down below this has been Dan with Mac thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you around in the next video