Storage upgrades are Apple’s not-so-secret weapon for maintaining healthy gross margins. While the opportunity applies to all Apple products, it has special relevance for iPhones. Storage upgrades allow Apple to maintain base prices from year to year while extracting more revenue from customers. It appears these upgrades slowed in the past year, countering the impact of the introduction of a more expensive model, iPhone 16e, and increased popularity of the premium Pro and Pro Max models.

In our quarterly surveys of iPhone buyers, CIRP asks survey subjects to list the storage capacity of their newly-purchased iPhone. We use that to estimate US-WARP and to identify shifts in purchasing patterns.

This analysis is about buyers’ propensity to upgrade from the base storage available for a given iPhone. For most models, that’s 128 GB, although for iPhone 16 Pro Max base storage is 256 GB. Storage upgrades go as high as 1T on the Pro and Pro Max. In the most recent twelve month period, 48% of all US iPhone buyers upgraded from the base storage available for the model they purchased (Chart 1).

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