The iPhone's average selling price is now more than ever

Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
(Image credit: iMore)

Buyers of Apple's iPhones are paying more than ever according to a new report that looks at the average selling price of models sold in the United States.

As Apple gets ready to replace the iPhone 14 lineup with what will be the best iPhone to date, the iPhone 15, it appears that nobody told customers that — the average selling price of iPhones during the last quarter reached an impressive $988.

To put that into perspective, the quarter in question is normally a challenging one for Apple with customers choosing to buy cheaper models this far into a model's life cycle.

Biggest number ever

CIRP reports that the $988 figure is also the biggest since it started collecting such information back in 2015, with the March 2023 quarter's showing being unprecedented.

"Both conventional wisdom and historic data shows that later buyers of new iPhones are more value oriented, shying away from the most expensive models," CIRP's report says. "The weighted average retail price of iPhones sold in the US (US-WARP) has declined in the March quarter every year since we started calculating it in 2015."

The report goes on to note that people might not actually be handing over that much cash when they pick up their new iPhone, however. While the sticker price is closer to $1,000 than ever before, people are getting deals on the back end.

"Of course, trade-ins and other promotions allow many iPhone buyers to spend considerably less than that, but they are taking home phones with an average sticker price of almost $1,000," the report points out.

Trade-ins are a great way to save some money on a new Apple product, not just iPhones. And it also ensures that the devices don't wind up in a drawer and unused or worse, in a landfill. Apple will also accept trade-ins of devices from other companies, although the values may vary.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.