Apple Price Hike, Oil Prices Fall on Iran Agreement, and a SpaceX Bear 6/18/26

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**Christina Parsonnevelos** (0:55)
You're listening to The Exchange. Here's today's show.

**Brian** (1:02)
And that's right. The Exchange is teeing off right now. Kelly was on Squawk this morning. So you got me. I'm Brian. Hi, everybody. What a difference a day makes. From yesterday's Fed led sell off to the chips back on the table and leading stocks higher. The major averages all up. Big tech leading the way. Oil is dropping again. By the way, oil now the same price as one year ago. Intel, your big semiconductor stock story. Trump says Apple will team up with Intel to make chips in America, but that is not the only news around Apple today.
They're gonna raise prices on some items. So why don't we start there and hit both angles of that big story. We've got Mackenzie Segalos and Christina Parsonnevelos on both. Mackenzie, why don't you kick us off? What is the very latest on Apple reportedly raising prices or going to raise prices on some items?

**Mackenzie Sigalos** (1:54)
So Brian, Apple CEO Tim Cook telling customers to brace for higher prices in that Wall Street Journal interview. But he is still not saying which products get hit, when it happens, or how much the cost goes up. Now of course, this stems from the memory crunch happening now. What Cook called 100 year flood for Apple's supply chain, telling the journal that he's never seen a cost spike like this in more than 40 years in the business. Memory prices are up 4X in the last three quarters and Apple's making clear that it will not fully eat the cost on this. That's part of why shares are actually in the green. Cook said exactly what shareholders wanted to hear, that the company will use its incredible pricing power before it lets higher memory costs hit profitability. Now you have the street and research firms trying to put numbers around what these hikes could look like. Tech Insights did a physical teardown of the current iPhone Pro, literally itemizing the parts and then modeled what happens if the specs stay the same, but mom, memory costs keep moving higher and their estimate is that Apple may need something closer to a $300 increase on the base model of the upcoming 18 Pro model just to preserve margins. Now the expectation on Wall Street is that Apple protects the entry level models as much as it can and pushes more of the increase into Pro devices and higher memory configurations where buyers are just less price sensitive. And the timing here, it is perfect. Cost hikes coming right as Apple's pushing Siri AI, which is going to force a hardware upgrade cycle for a lot of the iPhone users out there, Brian.

**Brian** (3:25)
Yeah, anybody worried that these price hikes are going to scare people off? I mean, I know it's a vague question, Mackenzie, but listen, Apple's raised prices for 20 years and there seems to have been absolutely zero hit to demand for Apple products. People will pay up for them.

**Mackenzie Sigalos** (3:40)
Exactly. And that's why the street is modeling for these price hikes to happen at the higher end of the spectrum, because what's been really key to Apple kind of bucking what is on track to be the worst year for the smartphone market yet is the fact that they have these lower priced devices that for the first time qualified for national subsidies in China, its second biggest market after the US. That's why the past two consecutive quarters, you saw 38% year over year growth and then 28% year over year growth really reversing the story in China. So the expectation is if they can keep that 17E, that budget iPhone within the range of Chinese national subsidies, keep it unchanged, then they can really preserve what has become a standout narrative in a bad year for the smartphone market.