Apple Is Raising Streaming Prices and the Next iPhone Could Cost You $500 More

Apple Is Raising Streaming Prices and the Next iPhone Could Cost You $500 More

David Moadel

Wed, September 9, 2026 at 5:29 PM GMT+3 5 min read

Quick Read

• Apple raised Apple TV+ to $14.99/month in its fourth hike in four years, and new iPhones are expected to cost up to $500 more than iPhone 17 models.

• Netflix posted $12.56 billion in Q2 revenue as price hikes landed well, while Disney and Spotify also grew through subscription rate increases.

• New CEO John Ternus inherits execution risk as investors watch whether a $200 to $500 iPhone price jump cools upgrade rates and pressures Apple's 41x P/E.

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Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is asking customers to pay more on two fronts inside a fortnight, and the second raise arrives today. Apple stock trades at $316.06, down 0.1% in Wednesday morning trading, and it's up 17% year to date.

Two broad benchmarks are drifting alongside the launch. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) trades at $763.94, down 0.3%. Meanwhile, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) sits at $718.29, practically unchanged.

Two Price Hikes in Two Weeks

Apple raised the U.S. Apple TV subscription to $14.99 a month from $12.99, per a MacRumors report dated August 28. Today's product event is expected to widen the hardware ask, with CNBC's MacKenzie Sigalos reporting the Street looks for like-for-like iPhone price increases of $200 to $500 versus comparable iPhone 17 models.

Former CEO Tim Cook had framed the hardware repricing as forced by supply-chain math on Apple's fiscal Q3 2026 call, saying Apple "reluctantly raised prices" because of a "100-year flood on the memory pricing." Apple posted revenue of $109.42 billion, up 16.4% year over year, with iPhone revenue of $54.3 billion and Services of $30.7 billion.

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The Bundle Took a Raise, Too

The streaming increase didn't travel alone. Apple One Individual went to $21.95 a month from $19.95 on the same day, since the bundle carries Apple TV inside it. Apple One Family and Apple One Premier held steady that day, but only because both had already been raised in July alongside an Apple Music increase. Read across the summer and the count isn't two price increases in a fortnight. It's a rolling sequence that started well before the September event, with Apple One Individual the last plan to get pulled up to the new line.

The Apple TV ladder is steeper than the single step suggests. The service launched in 2019 at $4.99 a month. It moved to $6.99 in 2022, to $9.99 in 2023, to $12.99 in 2025, and now to $14.99, with the annual plan going to $119 from $99. That's four increases against one launch price, and the U.S. wasn't alone: Brazil, Chile and Mexico were repriced the same day, while every other market was left untouched.

The revenue lands on a delay, which matters for how fast any of this reaches the Services line. New subscribers pay the higher rate immediately, while existing subscribers are notified roughly a month before their renewal bills at the new price. That gap is also the window in which cancellations happen, so the increase gets tested by subscribers before it gets counted by Apple. Whether it holds is Ternus's problem, not Cook's.

Streaming Peers Face the Same Playbook

Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) says its own hikes are landing well. Netflix Q2 2026 revenue reached $12.56 billion, up 13.4%, and Greg Peters stated "our recent price adjustments are going well on the pricing side." Netflix stock is down 18% year to date.

Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS) leaned on the same lever, with Entertainment SVOD subscription revenue growing 15% in fiscal Q3 2026 on rate and volume. Spotify Technology (NYSE:SPOT) crossed 300 million Premium subscribers with ARPU up 7% to $5.63. Disney shares are down 8.27% year to date, and Spotify shares are down 8.93%.

What Ternus Inherits

John Ternus stepped in as Apple's chief executive on August 31, which means the streaming raise and the memory-cost reasoning both belong to Cook. What Ternus owns is execution: whether customers absorb a second increase inside two weeks or hold their current iPhone for another cycle.

Apple stock carries a P/E ratio of 41x and a market cap near $4.61 trillion, so pricing follow-through matters for the multiple. Investors can size their positions with room to add if the hardware bump sticks and its gross margin holds inside the guided 47% to 48% September-quarter range. Shareholders may want to keep an eye on whether iPhone upgrade rates cool after a $200 to $500 like-for-like step up.

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