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.
Yeah that comment was intended more about getting the newest version of any phone, just because it came out on a certain day.
I don’t use much data because I have internet at home and am here most of the time since I am self employed. Mine is an ON5, I think just a stripped down version of galaxy 550
That’s how I see it as well. When I see somebody with something I can’t afford, I don’t see them as gluttonous or wasteful.
I’m grateful to the people who are wearing the Apple Watch now, thus getting it improved to a point that eventually it may be cost effective for my purposes. Maybe the watch will one day do everything the iPhone does now. If it can project an image onto a surface (like a wall or whiteboard), to allow for a display larger than the watch face, the technology will really take off. Something like that would be very expensive at first, but as more people buy it, the price would come down, and the functionality would go up. Win/win!
What?
Huh?
Please to 'splain. I don't know what that is, and can't imagine it. Details please?
Yes! You see it too...:)
Are you suspect correctly, sir! A well thought out post.
Why, thank you...
The “taptic engine” on the Apple watch pulses your wrist to signal events.
https://www.quora.com/How-does-Apple-Watchs-taptic-engine-work
It’s been used in other Apple devices like trackpads, and was miniaturized to fit in the Watch. It vibrates or pulses. On certain messages you’ll get a pulse on your wrist, instead of a ringtone or buzz that would disturb others. When I use it with GPS map functions and come towards a freeway exit or turn, it will pulse my wrist while announcing to turn left or right. Very handy so you won’t miss an exit on the freeway or a hidden driveway entrance. Especially handy for wives who keep their iPhone in their purse and won’t feel a vibrating phone, but will feel the Watch vibrate or pulse.
Sound like nice cars! :)
And yeah, I never understood used.
Even TWO years old you can save like 7k or even more sometimes.
5 years or more forget about it
even my great z28 and 350z were 3 and 4 years old when i got them
can go two or three days without a charge.
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As I said , useless as a watch ,, my watch goes about 4 years on a $0.99 battery.
I didn’t need one, not having worn a wristwatch for 20 years or so.
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You proved my point , you do not use a watch therefore the “watch” function of the iWatch is irrelevant to you... it isn’t a watch it is a bluetooth gadget.
The Pentium pro came out in ‘95. Just sayin.
Social-sexual hierarchy. There are many gamma “conservatives”. Anyone who gets wedgied up about what phone people are purchasing has “secret king” issues.
Oh, I like that.
No, you got it all wrong. I didn't need one before, getting the time from other numerous gadgets I carried or used. But, after buying an Apple Watch, I greatly appreciated the time features in addition to the other apps in use. I don't have to see the watch face, I merely tap it and it verbally tells me the time. I can't do that with any of the other gadgets I had that display the time. Very useful when I need my eyes on something else, I just tap it and it announces the time. So no, the "watch" function on the Apple Watch is far better than most timepieces.
I mentioned the bit about wives having phones in their purse. I used to get annoyed at my wife when I would repeatedly call her and get no response - she would claim the phone was in her purse and she couldn't hear or feel it. After we got a pair of Apple Watches, no more problems. I text or call, she feels it on her wrist, rolls her wrist and responds. You can talk directly via the Watch, or dictate to Siri to send a response. When driving, I tap my Watch and tell Siri "Call my wife", it does so and we carry on a conversation via the Watches. No more fumbling for a phone in her purse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWVt07ChexQ
Some things I have others try it out or look it up elsewhere. Just in case it’s something to crash my devices! Long ago, in my early days of being a systems engineer at the journeyman level, I was working on a large IBM mainframe servicing thousands of customers. So I’m trying to remember some console commands before applying some changed systems code, and a co-worker tells me to enter “quiesce”. As operators watched, I entered it and to my horror it stopped everything in it’s tracks - batch programming, telecommunications, payroll, everything. Co-worker laughing, and I caught heat for disrupting uptime. After that, I made sure I knew exactly what each command would do.
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