Screenshot by ZDNETNine years ago, I covered Apple’s launch of its first $999 iPhone, which was not only the most expensive iPhone up to that point, but a product that broke a psychological barrier and paved the way for where we are today — being sold an iPhone 18 Pro that starts at $1,199, and a foldable Duo that tops out at an eye-watering $3,199.
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The image above, from 2017, still represents everything Apple wants people to walk away with from a product launch — the product name, slick pictures, and a price. Don’t worry about gigahertz and gigabytes, just trust that everything on the inside is up to the job.
And it’s a sales tactic that continues to work for Apple in 2026.
What, no specs? Well, some specs
I’ve covered this industry long enough to remember when the big-name tech companies were obsessed with tech specs. PC OEMs in the 1990s, such as Compaq, Dell, and Packard Bell, focused on how many megahertz and megabytes they could cram into a beige box taking up acres of desk real estate. But as mega gave way to giga, one company that had faced significant challenges came up with a plan that turned its fortunes around.
That company was Apple.
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In the 1990s, the company’s revenues slumped as businesses and consumers saw Windows PCs as the better, cheaper, more versatile option. Apple responded by launching its “Think different” ad campaign, and the start of a period that gave us the iMac, iPod, and, ultimately, the iPhone, products that launched the Cupertino-based giant toward the top of the Fortune 500 in 2005, where it has remained ever since.
One way Apple chose to think differently was to deprioritize tech specs. Or, more accurately, it became spec-selective, deprioritizing the specs where it wasn’t leading, choosing instead to focus on select big numbers or how its products could improve the owner’s life.
Rather than listing a bunch of specs, Apple tells a story: how the product can be used, what it can do, and how it can transform lives.
Head over to the iPhone Duo pitch page, and you’ll see this echo of the late Steve Jobs’s “Reality Distortion Field” at work right now. Scan down the page and notice that the first spec that jumps out at you isn’t RAM or CPU speed, but screen brightness: 3,000 nits.
Most people have no idea about screen brightness or what a nit is, or what 3,000 of them look like. But it doesn’t matter. 3,000 is a big number, and it’s an area where Apple is leading the pack.
And this number floats in a sea of superlatives: Super Retina, ultrathin, excellent viewing.
These are comforting words that reassure potential buyers that they’re making the right choice.
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Think Apple has gone into as much detail about the battery, offering juicy details on its capacity? You’re out of luck. Instead, it opts to hypnotize you with talk of space-saving designs and the thought of watching videos for over a day.
When it comes to chipset speeds things get fluffier and more vague. “20% faster” this and “50% more” that, but nothing concrete.
Does Apple tell you that the Duo has 12GB of RAM? No. Because that’s boring, and you can find no end of mid-range Android handsets that have 12GB of RAM.
Rather than rattle off camera specs, Apple shows you a small video of people filming a movie with an iPhone. Instead of discussing RAM and CPU speeds, the company demos a high-end game running effortlessly.
And that lack of prioritizing the spec sheet is now paying off in a big way.
RAMmageddon
Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ll know that the current data center building frenzy has driven RAM prices through the roof, and this has had a knock-on effect on everything silicon-related, including RAM, SSDs, CPUs, and GPUs.
The demand for high-end components is also saturating manufacturing capacity, since any company that can make hardware is building tech for AI data centers because the margins are better than making chips for consumer devices.
Everything is more expensive compared to a year ago — even the humble Raspberry Pi — and there’s no sign of prices coming down any time soon.
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Apple isn’t immune to this either; it used the iPhone 18 launch to quietly slap an additional $100 on the iPhone 17’s price.
But because Apple focuses on what a product can do rather than what is in the box, combined with the fact that not every new release is a complete revamp of the old product, the company can do what a lot of businesses can’t get away with easily — adding perceived value rather than having to add more silicon.
This situation doesn’t mean lots of silicon hasn’t gone into the new iPhones, but it does mean that Apple isn’t pushed to add more tech every year.
It’s now paying off
All this has put Apple in a good place to weather this AI-induced price craziness. Instead of cramming more hardware into its phones, it can rely on modest hardware improvements, make innovations that don’t involve more CPU power, and getting software — both on the device and in AI data centers — to work harder.
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A good example that Apple continues to think differently is what it has done with the camera in the iPhone 18 and the Duo.
The company has chosen to sidestep the megapixel war its competitors are caught up in and has innovated in a different area — variable-aperture lenses. This isn’t new technology — Xiaomi’s 15 Ultra uses a variable-aperture lens — but it’s new to iPhone users, and it gives Apple a new consumer-focused angle to the product, rather than a number.
Also: Why I use an Android phone with a 200MP lens instead of my $3,500 Sony camera
Apple conditioned buyers to focus on the story rather than the minutiae of the tech specs. It spends its time weaving a narrative around a handful of features before closing with a simple graphic that shows the name, a pretty product picture, and its starting price — which is all you need to know. Oh, and preorders are open now.
