You'll never be able to buy the OnePlus 9 Pro 128GB in North America
Ever since OnePlus went live with the launch of their new flagship series on March 23, we've been seeing the standard OnePlus 9 variant in a variety of styles all over stores and mobile providers—but what about the variety that's supposed to come with its higher-tier variant, the OnePlus 9 Pro?
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The OnePlus 9 Pro with the "base" 128GB of storage appeared as one of the possible choices on American sellers' webpages from the start, but it seemed you could never actually buy the thing. It was always either "coming soon," or "not currently available" no matter where you looked.
This began to seem pretty odd as the months went by, as it shouldn't take that long for even a newly released handset to be stocked up in stores. OnePlus finally gave us some answers—or to Android Police, in particular, in a solicited statement from the company.
It was originally supposed to be launched in the US right alongside the other variants.
At least, that was OnePlus' plan: sell the lighter base model for $969, which would get you 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage (as opposed to 12GB RAM and 256GB of Storage for the OnePlus 9 Pro). The storage variant the buyers bought would be the storage they were stuck with, as neither phone has an additional SD card slot.
In an earlier statement to Android Authority, OnePlus had said that the base OnePlus 9 Pro had simply been delayed, for undisclosed reasons. However, in their latest reply, the revealed that it would, contrary to the original plan, never find its way into the American (or Canadian) market after all.
The OnePlus 9 Pro 8x128 GB variant was originally set to be sold in North America for $969. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen supply constraints specific to North American devices, we recently concluded that it is no longer possible to bring this configuration to the United States and Canada. In North America we are prioritizing the 12x256 GB version to ensure our users have access to the highest spec device.
Now we know for sure that the base model of the OnePlus 9 Pro will never see the light of day in North America, simply due to a lacking parts supply stream to this part of the world. It seems OnePlus had to choose only one of the two Pro models to be able to support and sell continent-wide, and they simply chose the higher-spec device to make available to us.
Apart from the smaller number of gigabytes of memory and storage, there is no other difference whatsoever between the "base" and "max" models of the OnePlus 9 Pro. The price difference between the two would also have been exactly $100.
While the OnePlus 9 Pro 128GB is permanently out of the picture in the U.S., it has long been available for purchase in Europe and in some parts of Asia.
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