iPhone Pricing and Status

Except it's not a good idea. It's never been about price. Otherwise Apple would've never succeeded with the iPhone. There are tons of cheaper smartphone options out there yet people are still flocking to the iPhone. Consumers today are trending towards quality and usability, even if it costs them slightly more.

Makes sense - in my experience people with iPhones are more willing to pay for things.

Parent's arguing that a minority of users have different motives and view it as a Veblen good. Might be true, but what about the rest of the iPhone users ?

iPhones are not expensive enough to signal you are rich, most people are able to buy one, the question is if it makes financial sense to do so.

Id speculate that there is a group of people who buy iPhone as a fashion statement and then probably dont have money for apps.

Generally people tend to buy cheaper phones. But iPhones are kind of exception, some people are so obsessed with iPhones that they're trying to get loan to buy iPhone. It's not really logical decision, they just want to look more wealthy than they are, it's kind of luxury item.

There's plenty of times in Apples history where looking cool has won out over practical concerns. People have more money than sense and will happily ignore that they could buy a rock solid (literally) feature phone for <50 dollars, if in doing the opposite they can look trendy.

Well most people do drive Corollas and use mid-tier GPUs and buy cheap clothes and all those similar things.And we're seeing this on the mobile market as well, especially in lower income places like China and India - the 300$ phones these days can do pretty much everything what an iPhone does. With a bit less pixels, slightly worse camera and less words like "Magical!" in the marketing pitch.So it's getting really hard for people to throw away several months of their sa

People said that about iPhones that cost $1500. Yet they still sell to the masses. The masses just decided they preferred to have a blue bubble than to go on vacation each year.

iPhones are more expensive, and are thus status symbols. That's it. That's the phone.