Apple drops the starting prices of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 mini to $599 and of the iPhone 13 to $699, and stops selling the iPhone 11 and the iPhone 12 mini
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Apple's annual post-launch repricing, and the corpus frames it as a repeating move: back in 2017 Apple cut the iPhone 6s/7 generation by $100 and dropped the SE to $349 (the last big pre-holiday price slash), and today's cuts follow the same script — demote last year's phones, retire the oldest ones.
What makes this cycle notable is what gets retired alongside the discounts: the iPhone 11, which set the $699 mainstream anchor when it launched in 2019 (at that exact price), and the iPhone 12 mini, which arrived in 2020 as a $729 compact flagship. With both gone, the $599 mini tier is now carried only by discounted stock rather than a current product.
First-order effects
- Buyers lose two options outright — the iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 mini disappear from Apple's lineup — while the surviving discounted models give the iPhone 13 the same $699 entry point the iPhone 11 had at launch.
- The effective price of entry drops below $600 for the first time since the discounted XR era, but only via the mini form factor Apple is simultaneously winding down.
Second-order effects
- Cutting both minis to $599 while killing the 12 mini reads as a clearance path for the small-phone experiment: if the 13 mini also exits the lineup next cycle, Apple's compact option disappears entirely rather than getting a successor.
- Carrier partners like AT&T and Verizon, whose 'special offers' already made advertised iPhone 12 prices $30 lower than real cost, now compete against Apple's own direct price cuts on year-old hardware.
Third-order effects
- The long arc in this corpus points one way: the sub-$450 tier keeps shrinking — from the $349 SE of 2017 to the $429 SE, and eventually to a 2025 lineup where the cheapest new iPhone starts at $599 — so today's $599 discounts look less like affordability and more like the future floor.
- If every generation retires the previous budget anchor instead of preserving it, Apple's entry price ratchets upward annually regardless of how aggressively old models are discounted.
The trend: Apple's iPhone entry price is structurally ratcheting upward, with aggressive discounts on aging models masking the steady disappearance of genuinely cheap tiers.