The new iPhone is the most expensive ever. Will people still buy it?

Apple fans across the world are lining up today to purchase the new iPhone Duo. The tech giant unveiled the foldable device last month. The Duo is a phone when it's closed and a tablet when it's open. It is Apple's most expensive iPhone ever. Now, here in Canada, prices for the Duo range between $3,000 and $4,800. Still, many Apple fans appear happy to pay. Very excited. I tried it in person, obviously. It's way thinner than I thought it would be. And it's just really cool to use and fold. It's got such a great, satisfying click. Yeah, I'm very impressed with it. The hinge looks very durable and proper. I was concerned with the videos, with the reviews, but it's actually very good. And yeah, I'm very excited. So will consumers fold for the iPhone Duo? For his insight, we've now reached Paris Marx in Montreal. He's the author of Hyperscale, the ambition and access of big tech's data empires. He also hosts the podcast Tech Won't Save Us. Paris, thank you for making time for us. Absolutely, great to join you. Now, this iPhone is being released at a time when Canadians especially are finding themselves in this affordability crisis. How do you think it's going to land with consumers with a price tag of up to just under $5,000? Yeah, I think for a lot of people, the price is kind of crazy, right? It's hard to imagine spending that much on a phone, you know, even if it is kind of like on a subsidized plan or something like that. I think for me, when I look at the iPhone Duo, it's certainly an intention of where Apple wants to go. And it's an indication of how they are trying to push up the price that people pay. But I think with this one in particular, they're not looking for it to be, you know, kind of a mass market device that everyone is going to buy, you know, one, because of the price of it. But also we've already seen availability push into like January or beyond for online orders. When we talk about the demand, what does that say about what industries might be proof from these affordability crisis times that we're in? Yeah, you know, if we look at the phones in particular, we've already seen a rise in prices. And there have been some suggestions that kind of, you know, the cheap phones, if you think about the Android phones that used to be more affordable, are becoming, you know, less available, right? But if you look at Apple over time, you know, under Tim Cook's leadership and now they have a new CEO, John Ternus, there has been this push for a long time to make sure that consumers are paying more and more for their devices. You know, if you think back 10 or so years, we just had like the one iPhone, right? And maybe you would get a different storage amount and that would be kind of what you would pay extra for. But there weren't, you know, a load of different sizes and types of iPhones that you could buy. Now you have like the cheaper e-version of the iPhone. You have the regular one. You have the bigger one. You have the pro one. You have the big pro one and now you have the duo as well. It's like they're trying to create this whole range of price points to try in the end to get more people buying iPhones and more people buying more expensive iPhones as well. You know, when we think about what consumers are saying is too pricey now, certainly you look at concert tickets, for example, and a lot of people say, oh, my goodness, the price of going to a show has increased so much. And there can be a bit of backlash or it's a plan or strategy that can backfire. Do you see any of that happening here when it is a well-known fact that many people are having a hard time making ends meet and then you've got one of the most expensive iPhones on the market now? Could this backfire for Apple? It definitely could. You know, we saw this last year when they released the iPhone Air as well, which was like a thinner iPhone that was a lot more expensive too. And people were kind of making fun of it and being like, you know, why would you pay this for an iPhone? And even with the Duo, it's the same thing, right? The notion of paying $3,000 for an iPhone is just hard to fathom for many people. And even a lot of those consumers who would never really consider buying it are just like, this is wild. This does not make any sense at all. And it could come back to hit the company, right? It has already increased prices on iPhones, on iPads, on its computers. It has pushed up the prices of its subscription services like Apple TV. If you are in the Apple ecosystem, you're paying more for virtually everything. I think the one thing that might help Apple in this moment actually is that it's not the only company doing this, right? And basically all consumer hardware is going up right now because of the price of the memory and, you know, the storage, the chips that go into these things, which is being pushed up because of all the demand coming from the AI industry and the data centers to power that. Now, that, of course, is one factor here when we're talking about increased costs. Wondering, too, what impact are tariffs, perhaps, or the, you know, very internal policy within the U.S. to manufacture in-house? what impact is that having to on cost? Yeah, it's a good question, right? And I think on the electronics, it's a bit more minimal, right? This is an industry, obviously, where a lot of what is produced gets produced in Asia already. And so if we're seeing imports coming into Canada for devices like iPhones, it's unlikely that they would be going through the United States first and then coming up to Canada from there. So it wouldn't be hit with kind of the Trump tariffs and those sorts of things. So I think that when we were looking on the iPhones and the consumer, electronics. We're looking less at the tariffs being part of that. Though, of course, I guess if you're thinking more broadly, these companies are paying more in tariffs as a whole, and they're probably looking to pass that on to consumers wholesale, right? And so there's not like a direct increase, but there is probably likely an indirect effect. And even with the iPhone Duo, I think one thing that's important to note is that if you look at the US price and then compare the Canadian price to it, even if you look at the direct exchange rate, we are paying more than what you would expect if you just did a direct conversion. Apple is charging Canadians a bit more for the phone than they are Americans. A lot of consumers feel like the affordability crisis, there's no end in sight to it. Is there an end to how high the prices for these devices will go now that we've hit almost $5,000? I mean, what lies ahead? Yeah, it's hard to imagine they can push it even further, but you can guess that they're probably going to try at some point, right? I think that the big thing when we're looking at consumer electronics prices, whether that's iPhones or laptops or anything else, is really what's going to happen in the AI market and in the data center market, right? Is there still going to be a shortage on so many of these memory chips and these other chips that go into the data centers that are also needed for so many of these consumer electronics? if that demand remains and if there's still kind of tight supply for those chips then that means that prices are going to remain elevated and that means it's going to get passed on to all the rest of us as well in the various electronics whether that's phones or laptops or game consoles or anything like that that we're buying, Paris, I want to thank you so much for joining us for this discussion. Absolutely, it's great to join you that is Paris Marx, he's a tech journalist and he joined us today from Montreal We'll be right back.