At a guest lecture a senior researcher at Samsung Securities Research Center stated that the company had found it unusual when Apple didn’t increase prices for the iPhone 16 (via Jukanlosreve on X). They went on to say that Samsung was expecting Apple to increase the prices for the iPhone 17 series.
This is something that has been haunting Samsung for a while now. The Galaxy S24 phones are also more expensive than the newest iPhone 16 lineup. And now there are reports that Qualcomm is going to significantly jack up the prices of its upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite 2.
That will make future Galaxy phones even more expensive until Samsung is able to perfect its yields for Exynos production. The company can also opt for MediaTek chipsets or inferior displays and cameras instead if it doesn’t want to make its phones more expensive.
If Samsung is expecting iPhone 17 prices to go up (which they probably will) I think it’s safe to assume it’s betting its own pricing strategy on that as well. Even if somehow the Galaxy S26 lineup comes with the same price tag as S25 it will still be more expensive than its rivals unless said rivals also ship at a higher cost.
It also doesn’t help that Galaxy S25 storage and RAM listings reveal that Samsung is finally bringing back 16 GB of RAM. Samsung’s phones generally have more expensive specs inside (higher RAM and bigger batteries) and as such have to cost more.
At this point the price difference is so wide that even if the iPhone 17 is more expensive it will still probably cost less than the Galaxy phones. And with Apple shifting to another in-house component it is now absolutely critical for Samsung to figure something out to maintain cost parity.
