Ternus puts iPhone at the center of Apple's AI era as Pro prices jump $100

John Ternus used his first keynote as Apple's chief executive to argue that the iPhone is not a fading platform in need of a successor, but the natural hub of the AI era. The event, held on Wednesday according to TechCrunch, also carried news that buyers will feel directly: a $100 price increase on the iPhone 18 Pro line and the return of a black Pro model, both reported by The Verge.

Ternus revives the digital hub playbook

According to TechCrunch, Ternus positioned the iPhone as the centerpiece of an "intelligent personal assistant" strategy that could define Apple for years. "There's no product in the world better designed to be your intelligent personal hub than iPhone," he said, before asking how an ideal hub would be built from scratch and answering with a list of ingredients: a powerful processor, high-resolution cameras, persistent networking and on-device AI.

The framing is a deliberate echo of Steve Jobs. As TechCrunch recounts, Jobs used a 2001 Macworld New York keynote to rebut pundits who declared the PC dying, unveiling a "digital hub" vision in which the Mac would connect and add value to the era's proliferation of gadgets, from camcorders to MP3 players. Less than ten months later, Jobs pulled the iPod from his pocket, and that device went on to anchor Apple's growth and, eventually, the iPhone itself.

Ternus is answering a version of the same question as the iPhone approaches its 20th anniversary. Where Tim Cook repeatedly tried to convince Wall Street that Apple was more than the iPhone, TechCrunch notes, Ternus is leaning into the device instead. His bet rests on the iPhone's combination of compute power and portability: many owners leave home without a laptop, but almost no one leaves without a phone, and rival attempts to displace it with wearables have so far failed.

Pro prices climb across the board

The strategy speech came with a steeper bill. The Verge reports that the iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 and the Pro Max at $1,299, a $100 increase over their predecessors. Skipping to an older model does not help, according to The Verge, because Apple also raised prices on previous iPhones by $100.

Apple is also not alone. The Verge points to an industry-wide pattern of $100 hikes this year: Google's Pixel 11 starts at $899, up from $799 for the Pixel 10, and Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra launched at $2,099, $100 more than the Fold 7 it replaced. Sony's Xperia 10 VIII costs £150 more than its predecessor, and Motorola's new Razr phones are each $100 dearer, in several cases without meaningful upgrades to justify the difference.

The reported cause is AI itself. According to The Verge, component shortages driven by AI data center buildouts are pushing up the price of nearly every part that goes into a phone, with RAM among the worst hit and no signs of relief for years. Nothing CEO Carl Pei said memory costs for the Nothing Phone 4A had doubled by launch, and Qualcomm raised prices on its chips earlier this month. Sales data cited by The Verge suggests the market for phones under $100 may be disappearing entirely.

Black is back on the Pro line

On the cosmetic front, The Verge confirms that the iPhone 18 Pro lineup once again includes a black model, alongside burgundy, blue and silver. The previous iPhone 17 Pro had dropped black and dark gray for the first time since the Pro line debuted in September 2019 with the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max, offering instead an orange, a silver and a dark blue. The Verge's Jay Peters, a committed black-iPhone buyer, welcomed the reversal and half-jokingly asked Apple to extend it to a black iPhone Duo next.

Why it matters

This keynote sets the terms of the Ternus era. Rather than treating the iPhone as a mature business to be eclipsed by some post-smartphone device, Apple's new CEO is betting the company's AI future on the product customers already refuse to leave behind, in a direct rerun of the argument Jobs made for the Mac in 2001. The risk lands on pricing: if AI infrastructure demand keeps inflating components, the cost of that strategy gets passed to buyers, and the hikes Apple held out on are now aligned with the rest of the industry. How well an iPhone-centered AI pitch sustains a $1,199 entry price for the Pro line is the question the next few quarters will answer.