Apple plots a plus-sized u-turn for iphone 18 after the air fizzles
apple is quietly rehearsing a return to the very screen size it buried six months ago. Analysts in Asia now pencil an iPhone 18 Plus for a March 2026 launch, resurrecting the 6.7-inch body that consumers once ignored.
The plus that refuses to die
Tim Long at Barclays circulated a note—seen by MacRumours—listing three spring models: a cheap iPhone 18e, an Air successor and, unexpectedly, an 18 Plus. No other supply-chain watcher has echoed the codename, yet the mere mention rattles the orthodoxy that bigger always equals Pro. apple yanked the 16 Plus from stores in favour of the 5.9-inch Air, only to watch that thinner handset miss internal sell-through targets by double digits, two retail sources in Shenzhen told TechCurrent. Inventory turns for the Air are lagging 40 % behind the 15 Plus at the same point last cycle, the data show.
The logic inside Cupertino is brutal: if buyers won’t pay a premium for thin, maybe they will settle for big and cheap. A Plus do-over lets apple recycle existing 6.7-inch chassis tooling while slotting the A18 chip and a single 48 MP camera, trimming BOM by roughly $63 per unit, according to Counterpoint estimates. The move would also plug a price gap that opened when the Air landed at $899—too close to the $999 Pro and too far from the $799 vanilla iPhone.
Fold slips, plus lifts
Long’s timeline has a side plot: a foldable iPhone pencilled for December 2025, three months after the 18 Pro duo. That stagger mimics the 2017 iPhone X playbook, but yields the foldable launch window to Samsung’s seventh-gen Z Fold in July. Sources at LG Display say foldable panel yield is still stuck at 65 %, well below apple’s 80 % threshold, making a December debut “mission improbable,” one engineer quipped.
All of which leaves the Plus as the contingency hit. apple has already shipped 43 million Plus-size LCD panels since 2022; reviving the line keeps those factories humming while the foldable matures. The risk is reputational: the 14 Plus and 15 Plus were meme fodder for TikTok reviewers who called them “Pro phones without the Pro perks.” A repeat flop could cement the perception that Apple no longer understands the middle shelf.
Inside Apple Park, product board members are debating one last variable: colour. The Air’s pastel palette bombed with Chinese male buyers, internal retail analytics show. A new Plus could return to midnight and starlight, the safest hues in the 2022-23 bestseller list. The decision lands in August, when procurement locks component orders for the spring build.
If the Plus relaunches, it will be less a triumph of innovation than an admission that Apple’s pricing Rubik’s cube still has loose corners. The company that once taught the world to crave the new is now recycling the old—and betting that a bigger battery and a lower tag can succeed where thinness failed. The market will answer in six months; Apple’s pride will feel the verdict in half that time.