Are we getting a first and second division of phones?
Apple opened pre-orders for the iPhone 18 Pro this week. Prices start at DKK 10,999, the Pro Max at 12,999, and the foldable iPhone Duo, available for pre-order from 16 October, reaches around DKK 30,000 at the top end. The Pro model is DKK 1,000 dearer than last year's.
That raises a question bigger than Apple: are we heading for a first and a second division of phones?
What a DKK 11,000 phone is, measured against the Danish economy
Every year Statistics Denmark asks Danes whether they could cover an unexpected expense of DKK 10,000 without borrowing. In 2025, 20 percent said no. One in eight - 12 percent - found it hard or very hard to make ends meet, and 6 percent had had unpaid bills within the past year.
In other words: the cheapest iPhone 18 Pro costs more than the expense one in five Danes can't handle.
It should be said straight away that almost nobody puts DKK 11,000 on the counter. Phones are bought on instalments or bundled with the subscription, and then it becomes a few hundred kroner a month. But instalments aren't free, and they aren't equally available to everyone either: those with a poor credit record or a tight budget are either refused or get the most expensive financing. The price of being squeezed is that you pay more for the same thing.
What really creates two divisions is happening at the other end
The interesting movement in 2026 isn't that the top has become more expensive. It's that the bottom is disappearing.
The shortage of memory chips has made cheap phones unprofitable to make. Memory used to account for 10-15 percent of the cost of building a phone. In the first quarter of 2026, according to the analyst firm Omdia, it accounted for almost 60 percent for phones under 400 dollars - and over 64 percent for those under 99 dollars. The share nearly doubled in two quarters.
The consequence is that manufacturers are scrapping the cheapest models. Shipments of budget phones are expected to fall 22 percent this year, while sales of phones over 400 dollars are expected to grow 5.7 percent - in a market shrinking around 12 percent overall. OnePlus has pulled out of Europe, the US, Canada and India entirely.
And the cause is the same one that ran through our other articles today: the AI data centres. Memory manufacturers earn markedly more selling to data centres than to phones, and have redirected around 70 percent of production that way. Analysts expect relief in 2028 at the earliest - and not a return to the old prices.
That means the gap isn't just growing because expensive phones get dearer. It's growing because the cheap ones vanish.
Why it matters more in Denmark than in most places
In Denmark the phone isn't just entertainment. It's the key to society. MitID, Digital Post, the Rejsekort travel card, the health card and the driving licence all live in apps. Communication with the public sector is digital by default, and self-service is the rule.
The Danish Agency for Digital Government estimates that 15-20 percent of the population struggle in their encounters with the digital public sector, and 19 percent feel partly or wholly unable to be digital in their dealings with the authorities. At the same time, trust is under pressure: the share who think digitalisation benefits citizens to a high degree has fallen from 58 to 42 percent in two years.
In November 2025 the Western High Court upheld a ruling that a lack of digital skills can, depending on the circumstances, count towards whether there are excusable grounds for a missed deadline in a digital self-service system. The case concerned a person who couldn't log in to e-Boks on their own.
When access to the public sector goes through an app, the age and capability of your phone becomes a question of civil rights - not of consumer habits.
So are we getting two divisions?
There are good reasons to say no.
A phone lasts longer than it used to. Security updates run for many years, and the market for refurbished phones works well, with several years' warranty. A five-year-old phone runs MitID, Digital Post and Rejsekort without trouble. For the basics, the second division's phone works fine.
And there are good reasons to say yes.
What separates the new phones from the old is increasingly the AI features - assistants that can read, sort, fill in and reply. If that kind of help is where the value ends up, and it requires new hardware or a subscription, then the difference is no longer about who has a nice phone. It's about who has an assistant to deal with the paperwork - and who has to sit with it themselves.
It's the same pattern as in the labour market: technology doesn't remove access, it shifts how much help you get. And those with the least to spare get the least help.
Nothing in the numbers says a second division is inevitable. But something says the cheap alternative - the one that used to be the safety net - is being taken off the table, and that it's happening for reasons that have nothing to do with Danish consumers.
Sources: Statistics Denmark on material deprivation, Agency for Digital Government on digital inclusion, Danish iPhone prices at Mobilsiden, on the memory crisis and budget phones.