No new affordable iPhone until 2027

Apple’s September event is close, and for the first time it is expected to come without a standard iPhone.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and The Information have separately reported the same plan. Three phones land in September: the iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro Max, and Apple’s first foldable, which several reports say will be called the iPhone Ultra. The ordinary iPhone 18, the cheaper iPhone 18e and a second-generation iPhone Air are held back to around March 2027.

Apple has confirmed none of it, and has not announced a date. MacRumors estimates Wednesday 9 September, worked backwards from how Apple has scheduled around the US Labor Day holiday in past years. That is arithmetic, not a leak.

If the reports hold, every new iPhone announced this September will start above $1,000 in the United States.

Why Kenyan iPhone prices move when they do

Apple does not sell iPhones directly in Kenya, and there is no Apple retail store anywhere in Africa. You buy from authorised resellers and importers who set their own prices. So what you pay here depends on local stock and local competition, and only loosely on the dollar figure Apple puts up on stage.

Prices open very high in the first weeks, when stock is thin and the people who must have the phone immediately will pay almost anything. They fall over the following months as more shops get stock and start undercutting each other. Then the next September event knocks them down again, because the phone stops being the current model.

We have the numbers for the last cycle. When the iPhone 17 series went on sale here in September 2025, iStreet Kenya was one of the few retailers publishing a full price list, and a base iPhone 17 was KES 165,000. Apple’s US price was $799, or about KES 103,000 at today’s rate of roughly 129 shillings to the dollar. We went back three months later and the same phone was KES 125,000. The steepest single fall was the iPhone 17 Pro Max 512GB, down from KES 295,000 to KES 205,000.

The prices have not moved since December

We checked iStreet’s listings again on 2 August 2026. These are the 256GB versions, the entry configuration of each model and the one most people buy.

Seven months, and nothing has come off any of them. The launch premium was gone by December and the entry prices have not moved since. iStreet is one retailer and other shops may quote less, but it is the same shop we used in September and in December, so the comparison holds.

The main thing that makes an iPhone get cheaper here is a newer version turning up. Once the replacement is on the shelf, shops cut the price of the older model to shift what is left of it.

This September, only two of those replacements arrive. The iPhone 18 Pro replaces the iPhone 17 Pro, and the iPhone 18 Pro Max replaces the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Both should get cheaper in Kenya over the months that follow, the way they always have.

Nothing replaces the iPhone 17 or the iPhone Air. They carry on as Apple’s current models until around March 2027, according to the rumors. The iPhone 17 went on sale in September 2025, so rather than being current for the usual twelve months, it will have been current for eighteen. For those six extra months there will be no newer iPhone to push its price down.

So if you were waiting for the September event to bring a base iPhone 17 down in Kenya, we would not count on it this year.

Apple’s cheap iPhone already came out

Apple did ship a budget model this cycle. The iPhone 17e was announced on 2 March 2026 at $599 with 256GB. That is double the storage of the iPhone 16e at the same price. It went on sale on 11 March in over 70 countries. Its replacement, the 18e, is the also due in March 2027.

Memory costs are pushing the other way

AI data centres have absorbed most of the world’s memory chip supply, and phone makers are paying for it.

TechInsights figures cited by The Wall Street Journal in June put the cost to Apple of 12GB of DRAM at about $39 in the iPhone 17 Pro. In an iPhone 18 Pro, the same 12GB works out at about $145. On 31 July, Jeff Pu of GF Securities told clients the iPhone 18 Pro models could cost $250 to $300 more than the current Pro models. Those start at $1,099 and $1,199. Pu cut his rating on Apple stock from buy to hold in the same note.

Tim Cook, who hands over to John Ternus as chief executive on 1 September, was asked about pricing on Apple’s 30 July earnings call and would not be drawn. Apple did raise prices in June on iPads, Macs, HomePods, the Apple TV and the Vision Pro. It left iPhones alone. Samsung, meanwhile, put up the price of every one of its new foldables in July, as we covered at the Galaxy Unpacked launch.

If you are buying

For a Pro, waiting still works the way it always has. The iPhone 18 Pro arrives in September and the iPhone 17 Pro loses its place at the top of the range. Kenyan prices on the 17 Pro should ease over the months that follow.

For a standard iPhone, we would buy now rather than hold out. The iPhone 17 has sat at KES 125,000 since December, there is no iPhone 18 coming to push it lower, and the memory shortage is pushing the other way. Holding steady is the good outcome here.

Whether Apple raises US prices in September will matter more here than anything else. Shops in Nairobi set their prices around what it costs them to bring in the next unit, so a higher dollar price feeds through to the shelf here fairly quickly. The other signal is whether Apple keeps selling the iPhone 17 at $799 through to March. For as long as it does, no shop here has much reason to go far below its current price. We will check the same iStreet listings after the event and publish what changed.

And if none of these prices work for you, second-hand is a safer bet than it used to be. The Communications Authority ordered a minimum one-year warranty on refurbished phones in July, and refurbished stock now has to be labelled as such.