His opinion was that a similar thing would literally be worth multiple billions to the Federal government in the 80s/90s.

That's the thing -- not only are phones technology marvels in their own right... they open the door to capability with almost incalculable value.

I think his point was less about the tool as is, but the simplicity and ease of access to information.

In the early 50s, much pf Europe and Asia was still rebuilding from war, and the US held an effective monopoly on multiple industries.

From the data I could find for 1952 in the US, a house was 5 years of income and a new car was half a year's income.

For many people in the US today, a new car (post tax dollars) is either completely unattainable (multiple years of income) or a complete joke (one month's income).

The numbers are different for 1982, but still closer to the 1952 US situation than today's 2017 situation.

So, I guess what I am trying to say is that $1,000 for a phone is still fabulously expensive for 99.3% of the world today who aren't millionares.

EDIT :

Thank you for your insight :)

I am thinking that maybe I am just very different from most consumers, or that our definition of "afford" is very hazy.

I am writing to you either from my $50 cracked screen wifi only iphone 5c, or my $40 2009 lenovo thinkpad running lubuntu.

What is strange to me is that I'm not buying this because I am price sensitive, but rather because "it is enough for what I want to do".

I have a hard time believing that a large percentage of the US market will buy an iphone X. Or if they are buying it, then they don't fit my definition of "affording it". Here's why:

Just 36.8% of US adults have a networth of over 100k.

That means 63% of US adults would be spending more than 1% on a mobile computer (phone) that is not very much different from a $300 phone. How many of these users will Apple capture?

Additionally, many people's net worth in the USA is tied up in real estate or retirement accounts. So these funds are not available to be spent, and it manifests itself in the following stat:

In 2016, 63% of Americans said they could not come up with $500 to cover an emergency purchase.

So, tons of americans can't even afford basic expenses, let alone luxury phones.

That is why I feel this is a millionaire's phone only.

It might be dumb for a minimum wage earner to spend 1.8 weeks of their income on a mobile phone, but I absolutely believe a certain subset of working-class Australians will, with some difficulty, manage to scrape together enough to buy one.

Or, more realistically, they'll finance one on a $100/month phone plan, which I also think is a bit ridiculous and unwise, but not so far fetched as to be impossible for many lower-income people who really want to do it.

Now, if you're middle class... let's just say that as someone who earns a salary that's within the same ballpark as the national median, I could go out and buy several iPhone Xs tomorrow if I had to...

Here's a chart of how a middle class American family currently spend their money.

Please note 74k in income is pre tax, and 57k in expenses is post tax.

So, the average American family is actually spending every dollar they earn.

I don't know where technology fits in to this current budget, but you can see it's pretty much pegged due to housing and healthcare.

$1,000 for one phone is out of the budget for all middle class Americans, period, unless they begin to cut back on cars or food.

Which, you can assume that some might, but on the aggregate, they won't.

I could go out and buy literally 100 motorcycles tomorrow, but I wouldn't even buy one, and I damn sure wouldn't buy one that was 5x more expensive than a similar motorcycle that isn't "luxury".

Thank you for writing :)

High end as in iphone 5c, iphone 6, or iphone 7?

My iphone 5c, cracked screen, was like $40 off of ebay or something. When it came out, the original price was like 200-400 depending on contracts and gb capacity.

I think you will see the same thing happening with iphone 6s too.

But if you told me that you see a large number of fast food employees and janitorial employees and etc riding the bus to work, with iphone 7s in their hand in the first year of launching, I'd definitely be surprised and interested.

I too rode the bus for 3 years and never really noticed that trend among those types of workers who are struggling the most. I just saw a ton of galaxy s3 phones, which are awesome phones from 2012 or whatever.

I don't doubt your experiences however! It is a really interesting thought to have. If they are affording it, I can only assume they aren't purchasing something else, like a car or high end laptop or house.

My total owed to everyone is <1mth income.

I grew up poor though so my attitude to money is different to most people my age.

If I don't have a minimum of 6mths income in savings I feel vulnerable.

FWIW I won't be buying the iPhone X, my Moto G5 Plus is an ideal phone for me and only a few months old.

I did drop 1400 quid on a Thinkpad T470P though recently - I will spend money where it makes sense.

I suppose I have two points to make from your comments:

1) You are similar to most Americans in that you already have a phone that is ideal for your needs, and that phone isn't an iPhone X

2) You are different, statistically, from hundreds of millions of Americans, in that you have any money saved at all, and don't have large financial responsibilities (house, debts)

I have considered an iPhone down the line though because Apple focuses more on privacy and that is something I do care about.

Not cheap but an i7-7700HQ in this form factor is a decent amount of grunt and with the nvme it's faster than my old i5-2500K desktop at home by a fair margin, it doesn't feel noticeably slower in practice than my Ryzen desktop for most things (until I spin up 3-4VM's and then I do start to notice but really 4VM's with 4GB of RAM each on a laptop is just crazy).

The way phones are financed makes them much more attainable, also. The way people will get that $1000 phone today is paying $2-400, and then $35 a month, folded into their phone bill, for 2 years. That's reasonable for anyone with decent enough credit to get standard wireless service. Not most of the US population, perhaps, but definitely the same demographic as the people already buying $800 Samsungs or previous iPhones, which is tens of millions of people.

So while technically the iPhone is a computer, with a microprocessor that executes instructions, primary and secondary storage, and so on, the device has more in common with the traditional telephone and television, because it can be used for communicating and consuming content, but not general purpose computing.

I'm not an iPhone developer, but from what i understand you can write apps to do about anything and run them yourself - just not distribute them on the app store.

It's no fun dropping a $1000 phone in the toilet or down the stairs.

A lot of people forget this.

It did seem like a big purchase initially. I used it for 6 years of college. I mainly used it for word processing. It never skipped a beat.

Once every two years, I would need to re-ink the ribbon with ink myself. Just dipped the ribbon into the bottle, and rewind. I was too cheap to buy a new ribbon.

Besides the initial outlay, I spent $2.00 days on ink in six years.

If I had foresight, I never would have thrown away a great computer. I miss the word processor program. I definetly miss that dot matrix printer. (I never told anyone at school about my about my computer. I felt like I was cheating. Not one professor noticed the dot matrix print type.

What people miss about old hardware from the days was everything was built like tanks.

The thought of buying a new computer every two years was unthinkable. In my world, it's still unthinkable.

I really believe we have been duped by the industry--on all levels.