*Image credit — Asher Dipprey
Apple is currently facing several threats to its business at once and one of the most severe ones is the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Renowned industry insider Mark Gurman made an important point in his newsletter Power On today when he said that Apple needs to start doing more going forward.The iPhone and other Apple products have been the subject of ridicule for years due to their hardware specifications. It wasn’t until the M-series of Apple silicon chips that the Mac and MacBook became the super powerful computers that they are today. Now tech aficionados often mock the iPhone and other Apple devices for the smaller amounts of RAM compared to competitors.
However that’s not really the most pressing matter now that tariffs are threatening Apple’s business model. The company has begun importing products from India and Vietnam instead of China to avoid the extreme tariff rates but the alternative production hubs have tariffs of their own.
It looks like Apple will have no choice but to increase the prices of its products sooner or later. The iPhone 17 series which will launch this year will likely be subject to price hikes because Apple cannot afford to bear the cost of tariffs. But if the company does make its phones more expensive then it’ll have to provide better value as well.
On that front there is some good news: Apple wants to upgrade every iPhone 17 model to 12 GB of RAM. However, ongoing supply chain shortages have Apple CEO Tim Cook extremely anxious and the company might be forced to equip the base model iPhone 17 with 8 GB of RAM.
But other than just RAM the iPhone itself has arguably stagnated in innovation. Consumers can buy cheaper phones — especially from Chinese manufacturers — that already come with powerful AI features, larger batteries and faster charging. Apple Intelligence was the biggest selling point for the iPhone 16 and it still remains incomplete.
Samsung’s AI features on the Galaxy S25 series are leagues ahead of Apple Intelligence, partly due to being powered by Google’s Gemini. Xiaomi phones also provide AI features that are comparable to Samsung’s offerings and, as such, better than Apple’s AI tools. Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi phones are also much faster at charging and come with higher capacity batteries.
I think that the MacBook is still in a league of its own and is safe for now but the iPhone definitely needs more innovation than just a new camera control button. The iPhone 17 series is reportedly getting a new look and a new model too: the iPhone 17 Air. But whether this will be enough to justify the inevitable price increases remains to be seen.
