this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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The Iphone is a luxury commodity and like all luxury commodities it marketed for people with little sense and lots of money who are easily separated from the ladder with shiny trinkets. Before the Iphone there was the Rolex and the super-secret clothing designer brands only 1%er yuppies think they know about. Before that people ground up egyptian mummies for medicine/taste and bought expensive jar of nutmeg spice from halfway across the world imported via boat. These kind of people were always going to spend 2000$ on trinkets whether its a 2000$ pocket computer or a 800$ wrist watch is a difference in taste. The real question is why humanity can't shed this consumerist prone archetype what is it about people constantly wanting new shiny things that they don't need and for which the money can go to a better place? Why do modern consumerist not have the ability to tell corporations to fuck off? Why is it that after a quarter century of time to get used to the concept of a computer and an email people tantrum and shriek when their tappy button gets moved 2 inches to the left without knowing how to fix it? Why do we consider this an acceptable baseline for human intelligence and emotional volatility?
And the $2k Galaxy Folds are for discerning consumers?
No, the 100-200$ Galaxy S mid range android phone with half decent RAM, screen size, actual specs and features that enable practical work, social communication, or entertainment consumption with a reasonable price to lifespan cycle ratio is.
You know, something you can actually buy outright, calculate approximately how much value you got by how many years it lasted before breaking, and not get stuck into a never-ending cycle of slowly frog-boiling raising contract rates.
So wheres the brand new retail sold 200$ Iphone budget entry for the plebs to access the IOS ecosystem on the cheap?
Yeah, I thought so. its called market segregation and Apple knows the exact crowd they made a billion dollar industry pleasing.
Any phone thats >500$ and doubley so for >1000$ are for the people who spend hundreds of dollars a month on contracts renewing them continuously every two years convinced its somehow a deal and don't think twice about it. Different flavor of luxury good gotta get that tribalism social posturing in after all.
If you were a true professional in an industry making complete use for videography, audio recording and editing, music production, I could maybe see it.
But lets be real, thats the statistical outlier for apple users you know exactly what 99% of people do with their phones. Check emails, shit posting on the internet, watch youtube, MAYBE record a quick video or picture without knowing how to manually balance anything or even knowing what an ISO is.
They used to have the iPhone SE series, which was significantly cheaper than the standard ones. Prices went up on those each generation, though, and they discontinued it for the "e" variants for the mainline iPhones, which are much more expensive than even the most expensive SE.
I would argue it is premium, not luxury.
Premium like a flagship Samsung, offering extra features and quality for the buyer, usually for a disproportionately higher price. Luxury is where there is no extra value offered beyond brand recognition, signaling to yourself and the world that your can afford it (like the obscure clothing brands you mention).
Not many luxury phone brands exist, maybe Vertu with gold and diamond set phones. Cars are an easier comparison, premium is e.g. MB, Audi or BMW, while luxury is Bentley, RR or Ferrari.
Rolex is also more of a premium product within the watch market, it is machine made and mass produced to a very high quality level, offering additional value (like better accuracy, less steel corrosion, longer service intervals) compared to other automatic Swiss watches. On the other hand, luxury hand made watches like Patek Philippe or FP Journe are not competing with others by offering better technical parameters, but dominate due to their brand recognition, making rich people beg salespeople to get a chance to buy them.
This of course doesn’t really make a difference beyond marketing, as most people cannot afford a 10k Rolex or a 200k FP Journe either - but they do hold a very different position in their market.
To answer your question, I think most humans are very social, and always seek to stand out with status and personal brand within their group. Capitalism offers the easy way to do this - buy this thing, and show the world what you are worth. It unfortunately works, as it targets our strong primal instincts.