You'll want to act quickly if you're considering a fresh battery for an aging iPhone. 9to5Mac has noticed that Apple is raising the price of battery replacements for pre-iPhone 14 models by $20 on March 1st. For notched iPhones (iPhone X through iPhone 13), this will bump the price from $69 to $89. If you have an iPhone SE, iPhone 8 or a similarly classic design, the price will climb from $49 to $69. The cost of a replacement for the iPhone 14 family was already higher at $99.
It's not clear if self-repair prices will increase at the same time. However, part prices tend to roughly equal the cost of asking Apple to perform a battery swap. Don't be surprised if the do-it-yourself option costs more in the near future.
Apple didn't explain the price hike in a notice on its website. We've asked the company for comment. The tech giant last set iPhone battery service prices in 2019, when it ended a one-year $29 replacement offer made in response to the uproar over CPU throttling. The company discounted prices to help apologize for its initial approach to battery degradation. It slowed performance to prevent sudden shutdowns on iPhones with worn-down batteries, but didn't tell customers or give them the option to override the throttling.
The new prices are still low enough to justify a battery replacement instead of a whole new phone. There's no doubt the increase will sting, though, and it may be particularly painful if your device is several years old (such as an iPhone X) and may lose other forms of support relatively soon, such as major OS updates.
