You Can't See Apple's Most Lucrative iPhone Feature

The new 512GB storage chip could make the company $134 more per phone than the 256GB option

In the latest iPhones that went on sale on Sept. 21, the biggest upsell isn’t the wide-stereo speakers, the dual-lens camera, or the stainless steel accents. It’s the tiny Nand storage chip that lets you save all those photos in Portrait Mode.

The high-end XS and XS Max models unveiled earlier in September come with a 512-gigabyte storage option, twice as much as the previous maximum and enough to hold a couple hundred thousand photos or dozens of high-definition movies. That’s up from a maximum 256GB on last year’s flagship iPhone X, and 64 times as much as what the original iPhone had a decade ago. Apple Inc. charges customers a lot more for this storage than it pays suppliers, and it hasn’t reduced the markups for higher-capacity options or provided a way for customers to add storage later, even though component prices are falling sharply.