Is Apple's iPhone X A Luxury Phone?
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Posted on 09/22/2017 12:04:12 AM PDT by Swordmaker
At least not in the derogatory sense that many are using to label a phone that costs $1000.
I started a conversation on Twitter last week trying to separate what is expensive and what is a luxury. And as the comments continued, I realized that explaining the nuances of what luxury means in tech would take longer than 140 characters so here I am. Please don’t think I am neglecting to understand the privileged position from which I am discussing what a luxury is and what it is not. The focus here is on establishing what the true value of the iPhone X is. What I am not discussing is the much broader and critical impact that the higher cost of technology has on society.
Expensive and luxury are very much intertwined, and they are labels that change slightly depending on what item you are referring to. If you look up the definition of luxury in the Webster dictionary you find that Luxury is:
When you look up expensive you find:
I look at these definitions, and I seem to be doing a good job at gathering evidence against my point. After all, when I think of the iPhone X I do believe it is adding to my pleasure, and it is not necessary – the iPhone 8/8Plus could do the trick. Well, my current iPhone 7Plus does a darn good job at being a smartphone. The iPhone X is also characterized by a high-price, and it is beyond many buyers’ means fitting both the luxury and expensive definition.
Luxury Phones are Mostly Bling
When I think of luxury phone there is one brand that comes to mind first: Vertu. Vertu had a somewhat troubled life that ended this past July when the current owner, Turkish businessman Murat Hakan shut it down after failing to pay creditors. Vertu opened in 1998 as part of the Finnish phone maker Nokia. At that point, the phones were running on Symbian and were handmade with luxury materials from gold to rubber from F1 tires. Starting price: $5,000. Vertu was sold in 2012 to private equity company EQT when the phones started to run Android and were still hand-made in the UK. In 2015, the company was sold to Chinese company Godin Holdings and finally to Mr. Hazan in 2016.
In its glory days, Vertu was the mother of all luxury phones not only it was hand-made like an haute-couture dress and used the most expensive metals and materials, but it also came with a concierge service that will help you do whatever you needed to do from booking a taxi to shopping online.
In a less extreme sense, luxury phones have been about designer brands and bling. A quick search brings up a top ten charts with names from the fashion and car industry or unknown brands that took mainstream phones and covered them in gems.
So what happens when the Price goes up cause the Tech is better?
None of the phones you see associated with a luxury tag brings cutting-edge technology to the plate. Their price is merely defined by the materials used and the power of the brand name on them. And this very point is why I do not think the iPhone X deserves to be lumped into the luxury phone bucket.
Now, I would not go to the extent of saying that the iPhone X has a “value price” like Apple CEO Tim Cook did on Good Morning America. But I do agree with his underlying point which is that the iPhone X has a lot of tech packed into it.
Let’s pretend there was no iPhone X and that the iPhone 8Plus was the flagship product. Although starting at $799, $50 more than the launch price of last year’s iPhone 7Plus, nobody, as far as I am aware, called it a luxury phone. For some reason, there is something about getting to the $1000 price point that gets people to think differently. But let’s compare the features and see what the iPhone X has over the iPhone 8 Plus:
If we are ok with $799 for the iPhone 8Plus and we add all this technology do we honestly think that the price should not increase? Some people argue that this is all Apple tax, but while of course, the Apple brand commands a premium it does so across devices. This means that the Apple premium equally impacts other iPhone models too.
Is a $1000 too much for a Phone?
A genuine question to ask is whether a $1000 for a phone is just too much even when that phone is an iPhone, and the answer is once again not a straightforward one. Not so much because most consumers don’t pay $1000 straight up but because the value they get from a phone as well as the tolerance they have for tech is different from user to user.
The return of investment that most people get from their smartphone is way bigger than what they ever got from a PC (outside of work), and this is more so with iPhones. There is also a much stronger emotional bond with a phone than any other gadget we own. Lastly, software updates delivered to these phones lengthen their life although the draw of the latest upgrade will try and make what you own feel inadequate.
So who is the iPhone X for? If you want the best product there is in the lineup – not just the most expensive, but the best tech – then the iPhone X is for you. If you want to indulge in tech that is adding pleasure but that is not necessary the iPhone X is also for you. But if you see smartphones as a utility device or are overwhelmed by how much technology these little rectangles have packed in then you better look elsewhere.
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My wife and I both got our Samsung phones free with switching our Cricket line to Metro PCS over a year ago now... we pay $60 a month for service on both phones, she has 3gb data and I have 1gb... Just made a 2700 mile road trip and had service every time I wanted or needed it. There is no need for expensive phones or service.
Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 has a price tag of $930.
A coworker told me a tale of woe tonight — he and his girlfriend got the same model of phone, from LG. They kept having it die, and kept taking it, and their vendor just kept replacing the phones. Finally his girlfriend got wound up about this, called the LG hotline, they referred her to Verizon, Verizon gave her another one of the same model, plus they refunded her purchase price (!). The new one arrived DOA, so she used the refund money to get a different LG model.
That’s perserverance. :^)
Somewhere in the mid 90s, I think my x86 286 with a math co-processor and extended memory of 1 megabyte cost me $2k.
I'm glad that meets your needs. For me that amount of data on the road would be used up in about a week of using the phone as a hotspot for connecting my computer. Which model Samsung did you get for "free?"
In 1986, an IBM Clone AT 640K RAM, with a 10MB HD, 12" green screen Monitor, 2 floppies, set us back $$4250.00 An equivalent IBM set up was about $5995.00, but only had a 5MB HD.
So why are you paying so much? For what you paid for 5 months ($60/month times 5 equals $300), I got my iPhone 5s from TracFone for $199 plus $100 for 1yr service ($9/mo) with no contract, that's $300 total for a year and the phone is mine at $9/mo thereafter. Screw the $60/month you're paying! No contract, and the iPhone 5s does everything I need and integrates with all my devices (iPads, Macs, Watch, iCloud and TV).
I was really excited when I got my first 20 MB hard drive!
I was really excited when I got my first 20 MB hard drive!
My first THREE cars cost 1000 dollars combined!!!
2 chevy novas and the dreaded.... K car.
drove to the shore a whole summer on baloney skin tires in the K car. :) 200 bucks.
Died at the end of the summer and i just left it and took the plates.
You can say that again. . . Oh, you did.
Funny story. my best friend Doug bought a 20MB HD for his Amiga 500 computer, cost something like $595. A month or so later I bought a 49MB HD for my Amiga 500 for about $795. My buddy said "Why'd you by such a huge hard drive? I can't imagine ever needing more than 20 Mega Bytes for anything!"
Needless to say, every time he now buys a larger hard drive I have to echo his statement from back then: "Doug, why are you buying that 3TB hard drive? You couldn't imagine ever needing more than 20 Mega Bytes!"
Hilarious. . . never gets old, used it dozens of times. . . we always get a good laugh out of it.
Today we’re spoiled.
Even the iPhone X is a bargain by comparison. For less money, it has 1000x the functionality in a 1000x smaller package using 10x less power.
People today are tech-spoiled.
Something tells me this article was written while standing in line outside the Apple Store the day before the release of the iPhone X.
What do LG phones have to do with the price of the Samsung Note 8 other than that neither is an Apple product?
And typed with one hand. :=)
Me too. 20 MB was more than enough to operate my business.
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