Camera phones look set to for major price increases in 2026

Prices of camera phones are forecast to soar in 2026, but not for reasons like tariffs, supply chain anomalies or simple brand greed. No, the price hike on your next camera phone could be due to our dear friend AI. This isn't due to phone manufacturers directly investing extra money into AI itself though. Rather, the connection is a bit less obvious: the huge explosion of AI into our lives requires immense data processing behind the scenes, from raw number crunching power, to astronomical amounts of flash memory and storage capacity. And it's the latter which has a knock-on effect on our trusty camera phones. With AI tech giants like Google, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia and OpenAI all scooping up global memory supplies, manufacturers of consumer electronics like camera phones have to fight for the remaining stock. These tech powerhouses have huge bulk buying power and are happy to pay top dollar to fuel their AI monster machines with all the RAM they can devour. That then puts consumer electronics companies at a disadvantage, as they're bound by much tighter cost constraints. Hence to compete for the limited supply of DRAM and NAND flash, phone manufacturers will have to pay more for it, and that means passing this extra cost on to consumers.

And we're not talking about a few cents per phone here, either. Estimates suggest DRAM prices have shot up by as much as 80%, with some reports even quoting incredible increases closer to 170%. It's not uncommon for DRAM prices to fluctuate, but these skyrocketing prices are exceptional. What's more, it's not just the surge in DRAM demand from AI datacentres that's making things tough for camera phone manufacturers: phones themselves also need more DRAM in order to run the next generation of on-device AI processing. So not only will the same capacity of DRAM in a camera phone cost substantially more in 2026, you're going to need even more of it, pushing up the device cost still further.

Of course in an ultra-competitive market like camera phones, manufacturers will be pained to push up device prices for fear of losing market share. Cost-cutting in other areas will likely be a more favourable approach to offsetting the additional DRAM costs. While it's unlikely manufacturers would roll back any major hardware element of a camera phone to an older/inferior specification, we wouldn't expect many major hardware upgrades, with key components like screens and, sadly, cameras, likely to be carried over directly from 2025 handsets. We've seen brands like Samsung use the same 200MP primary camera sensor in several consecutive Galaxy S Ultra phones, and it would seem that trend is probably going to continue. As we've come to expect for the last few years, phone companies will probably lean on new AI features to set their 2026 phones apart from their predecessors. And who can blame them? With AI's ever-increasing prevalence seemingly about to send camera phone prices spiralling, we should darned well get our money's worth from it.

Story credit: Android Police