iPhone 18 set for a RAM upgrade, and maybe a massive one

Macworld Apple’s baseline iPhone is reportedly about to get a boost to its RAM allocation, and potentially a very substantial one. This is particularly surprising in light of the memory shortage currently afflicting the consumer tech industry and causing cost headaches for Apple and many of its rivals. The claim comes from a new research note by Jeff Pu (via MacRumors), in which the analyst predicts that next spring’s iPhone 18 will have a whopping 12GB of RAM. That’s a 50 percent jump from the 8GB on the iPhone 17, and would bring the baseline model in line with the currently top-end iPhone 17 Pro. (By that point, of course, this fall’s iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra will have taken the 17 Pro’s place at the top of the Apple range, and they may boast even more than 12GB of RAM. But that isn’t currently expected to happen, since 12GB is more than enough to run AI applications smoothly and anything more would inflate their cost to manufacture.)