As higher prices driven by a shortage of memory supply hit the global digital device industry, Apple is moving to expand market share with an aggressive pricing policy. It is drawing attention by putting forward entry-level products with price competitiveness.

Apple this week introduced its entry-level smartphone iPhone 17e and an entry-level MacBook product, the MacBook Neo.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that both products start at $599. The iPhone 17e is priced the same as the model released last year, but the MacBook Neo is lower than some analysts had expected. The iPhone 17e keeps the same price as the previous model, but doubles storage. That improves its value for money.

Given rising memory prices, Apple's pricing strategy could hurt the company's profit. It could be positive in terms of attracting consumers who had avoided buying expensive Apple devices because of price. It is becoming more likely that Chinese smartphone makers that have targeted the entry-level market with midrange smartphones will raise prices.

Apple could deploy the iPhone 17e in China as a rival to midrange Android phones sold by Xiaomi, Oppo and Honor. An analysis says the gap with the iPhone 17e is narrowing as the prices of Chinese companies' products rise. Looking at the previous version, the iPhone 16e, the iPhone 17e could also do well in other countries including the United States and Japan, the WSJ reported.

Francisco Jeronimo (프란시스코 제로니모), a vice president at market research firm IDC, was quoted by the WSJ as saying, “Apple is switching to attack mode. It sees the memory crisis as an opportunity to expand market share.” He said, “Every other smartphone in the same price range will not be able to avoid a price increase. This will open opportunities for consumers to switch from Android to iOS, and from Chromebooks and PCs to Macs.”

Apple's recent moves show its pricing policy is clearly split between high-end and low-end. It previously raised prices for the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models. The MacBook Air is priced at $1,099 for the 13-inch model and $1,299 for the 15-inch model, up from the previous model. The MacBook Pro is priced at $2,199 for the 14-inch M5 Pro model and $3,899 for the 16-inch M5 Max model, up $400 from the previous model.

Analysts believe that if Apple applies a similar strategy across smartphones, the prices of some iPhone 18 models due to be released this fall could rise, the WSJ reported.

MacBook Pro and MacBook prices have risen, but many assessments say competitiveness has strengthened in terms of value for money. Some also say the potential of MacBooks has increased as so-called local AI devices that run AI directly on hardware rather than in the cloud.

As the open-source AI agent tool OpenClaw has drawn attention, Apple Mac Mini sales have surged. The new product launch could further increase Apple's heft in local AI, according to the report.

In the case of the MacBook Pro M5 Max, AI performance improved 4 times from the previous model and 8 times from the M1. Apple has made its own chips based on a unified memory architecture in which the CPU, GPU and neural processing unit (NPU) share a huge memory pool. In AI workloads where memory bandwidth is a bottleneck, this design is being rated as innovative.

In the M5 chip, Apple also applied a fusion architecture. For the first time, Apple chose a method of combining two dies into a single chipset. The CPU, scalable GPU, media engine, unified memory controller, neural engine and Thunderbolt 5 are configured in a multi-die structure.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max eliminated efficiency cores and instead introduced “super cores.” They can be configured with up to 18 cores, comprising 6 super cores and 12 performance cores. Apple says this configuration can boost performance for professional workloads by 30 percent.

The GPU scales to up to 40 cores. Apple stressed that by embedding a neural accelerator in each core to increase unified memory bandwidth, peak GPU performance based on AI compute is more than 4 times that of the previous generation, and ray-tracing processing speed is 35 percent faster than the M4 Pro and Max.