And this is how they get people. You didn't spend an extra $10/month, you spent an extra $400 compared to getting the 8. I don't blame you, I think it's worth it, but that's a terrible way to think about prices.

No, it's the absolutely correct way to think about buying things. I didn't spend $1,000 to get a great phone to use this month, then throw it away next month. In business, you buy equipment, you typically account for it's cost over it's useful life, i.e. amortizing and depreciation. In your personal life, it's no different, you need the right framework to correctly evaluate these decisions.

And secondly, I didn't pay $400 extra over an iPhone 8. I'll own this phone at least two years. Historically an iPhone is worth roughly 30-50% (edit) of purchase price in two years. So my two years cost of owning an iPhone X is going to be (roughly) $300-500, and an iPhone 8 roughly $200-325, only a little more than a $200 average difference. A cheap Android phone only costs $200 but might only be worth $50 in two years, so it's only about $450 cheaper than my iPhone X.

Note that I'm ignoring service costs, because they should be the same no matter what phone I choose.

While this is the economically accurate way to view your actual costs, it can be used in a bad way to think is if you don't quantify your economic benefits. If there aren't any economic benefits, admit you are paying for the badge/prestige. And ask yourself if that's worth it.

In the case of the iPhone X, it's the fastest phone with the best screen, and best camera. Am I going to get $10 a month or so of benefits from them? I think so. Would it be worth $40 a month more? Probably not.

Edit: oh and I just bought a 20 y.o. car. My way of seeing it is useful in this case because I add the (very high) assurance rate, repairs and gas to get a realistic price. I predicted a reasonable car life and compared it with the numbers for a brand new car.

In the case of your car, what benefits are there to the more expensive model? My iPhone X, those benefits are easy to describe, better screen, better camera, faster, better form factor. Amortizing to compare the relative cost between it an iPhone 8 and seeing that it's roughly $10 a month allows me to make an informed decision about whether those benefits are worth the cost.

In the case of your car purchase, if the car salesman says it's only $200 a month more to get the "better" car, are it's benefits worth that much to you? Is the more expensive car safer, more comfortable, and are those benefits worth $200 a month? How much do you drive a month? Do you commute in rush hour traffic, or drive on the freeway? etc. etc.

And if I'm wrong about 50% depreciation being typical over 2 years, I'm not wrong by much. There is not a huge difference between 70% depreciation and 50% in your monthly cost of ownership. Undamaged 64GB iPhone 6s are selling for between $230 and $310 on eBay, so that's 60-70% depreciation. On average the 6s cost about $20 per month.

Consider also the fact that the battery life will be substantially decreased from new and that most people wont be able to replace it themselves.

Something that is overprice is actually more likely to decline because 2 years from now its just a comparatively slow device that no longer serves as a status symbol.

You wanted the best and it wasn't to expensive for you. It might not be a status symbol in the sense that you want others to know you're rich, but it's really hard to justify spending more than 500$ max on a phone these days unless you want something essentially useless (like it being "the best" in some measure).

My Nexus 5x is a few years old by now, but it's still hard to see the utility of upgrading it to something flashier for me.

Geeks always seem to want to erase the human factor out of everything.

it's likely that they have to rationalize their inability to understand/connect with "regular" people by feeling superior about not caring about "status symbols" or the like.

What I saw on launch were lots and lots of people Tweeting and posting about having placed orders and then posting pictures of the box. Forgive me, but that’s not something you do if you just bought the phone for utilitarian reasons.

A big reason is that in a case it's hard to tell which phone you have, I've yet to have anyone notice I've got an iPhone X.

The iPhone X offers significant enhancements over an iPhone 8 and 8 plus. The difference in cost is relatively minor when amortized it over your ownership life-time. For some people, like my wife, it's still not worth it (esp. if you prefer TouchID). For me it was.

Then it's interesting that you felt the urge to post about it - are you absolutely sure your motivations are what you think they are?

I find this aspect of the tech industry so gross that I'm considering changing careers. Building a new tool that makes people's lives better is great, but much of the time it just becomes a status symbol. No one should feel bad for owning a machine that's a few years old but does everything they need. I'm not convinced that consumer gadgets fill a real need any more rather than just being new and shiny for the sake of being new and shiny.

Unless we as a society can get over showing off by buying things we don't need, I think we're in trouble.

What career are you considering? There are even high-end supermarkets. This is a human condition.

Good luck with that. Maybe if you eliminated human sexuality first, somehow?

We've been "showing off" since we were cavemen. The iphoneX is just a really, really nice spear that you can throw further.

It used to just be the hidden surcharges that phone companies tacked onto my bill to cover the cost of the "free" phone, calculated from the assumption that I'd get a new phone each year.

Those surcharges are now gone. But they have been replaced with constant nagging to update the OS to a version that will harm the performance or battery life (or both) of a >2yo phone. They have been replaced with apps that will eventually refuse to stop working if I don't upgrade to a version that doesn't run on the older version of the OS that I used to use. They have been replaced with mobile sites that flat-out don't work on my older device's smaller screen.

I disagree that consumer gadgets, especially phones, don't fill a real need anymore. We have at least a good four or five years, minimum, for a lot more to be done in that form factor. It may not necessarily be new sensors, but significant improvement in what's available now. Things like AR and VR have quite a while to mature and bring about more practical use cases than we see now, and smartphones and devices associated with them will be the ones leading the charge there.

That doesn’t bother me as much as planned obsolescence. Here’s why I had to upgrade to the iPhone X from my iPhone 6.[1]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why-people...

Even if there wasn't CPU throttling to keep old phones usable, software marches on adding features and benefits.

iPhone 3: 256 Mb ram

iPhone 4s: 512 Mb ram, 490 multicore Geekbench

iPhone 5: 1 Gb ram, 1,203 multicore Geekbench

iPhone 6s: 2 Gb ram, 3,888 multicore Geekbench

iPhone 7 Plus: 3 Gb ram, 5,763 multicore Geekbench

iPhone X: 3 Gb ram, 10,108 multicore Geekbench

I have always been amazed at Apple's ability to shoehorn iOS versions and new features into such limited memory capacities (compared to Android for example). But there is always a limit to what can be done.

My daughter's iPhone 5 shipped with iOS 6, and is currently running iOS 9. Is it slower? Yes. Does it have more features than when released, heck yea.

Yep, Apple is slowly filling in price points below the top end. They will not ever be budget, but they have iPhones starting at $349.

I'm confused about all the hubbub around the 1k price tag. Top end phones with the next storage option were already ~1k. Additionally, most people buy their phone using the free loan from the carrier so the price goes from ~$40/month to ~$50/month if they wanted the X.

I think Apple beats earnings and successfully raises the ASP across the iPhone line using the X.

Numbers in this case would be reduced orders at Apple suppliers, reduced demand for labor at an iPhone assembly factory, and reduced iPhone Q1 unit forecasts from Apple itself. I'm assuming they also collect their own numbers by surveying end users and consumers to round out both the supply and demand side picture. Then they draw the conclusions in the article.

Now these could be bad analysts, in which case they would start with some presupposed beliefs, then mold the numbers/forecasts to fit their story...

What we know for sure is that the phone was sold out as soon as it opened for pre-orders and that Apple on their last earnings call reported huge demand for the X. I'm not at all saying that the following is what happened, but it's important to not take any one news report as fact, especially one based on "sources" or "rumors". Stock manipulation and poorly-researched reporting are very real things and again, not saying that's what's going on here, but I would want to see Apple come out and report low demand before forming any lasting conclusion. If that happens, I'll definitely have a different opinion.

In the face of lots of evidence to the contrary, lines like this make me skeptical of the validity:

Apple is said to have trimmed its first-quarter sales forecast to 30 million units from 50 million, Taiwanese newspaper Economic Daily News reported, citing unidentified supply chain officials.

Clever or particularly frugal shoppers may note that the SE has the same chip as the 6S (the A9) and can be had for $250 unlocked and in mint condition.

Believe it or not, I was split between an SE and an X. Either get the smallest phone that's still very powerful and useful, or get the best screen/processor/camera. Mainly went X because of the camera.

I think Apple may have overplayed their bet on this point. Unless their top end clients are going to buy the 8, then dump those on the market and start buying the 10.

If it is a status symbol, then those people are going to want the latest iphone, regardless of cost, right? In that case, many of the people who are already flaunting their 8's will have to make the decision of either holding onto the 8, or moving to the 10. I'm sure those pure status symbol seekers will indeed move to the 10, but doing so could create a large increase in stock on the 8 and driving down its price.

Do you think the way they positioned it was done on purpose with the $1000 price tag so they're not losing their shirt when their market starts to cannibalize itself?

1) There was execution risk with the X. Had they run into supply chain issues or the facial recognition didn't work properly, they would still have had a new phone to launch.

2) $1k is an elevated price point and so the 8/8 Plus present a hedge against risk that consumers won't pay more than $800 for the X.

3) Perhaps most importantly, from what I read Apple couldn't have produced enough X's to come close to meeting the initial demand, which is in large part why the raised the price in the first place. Keep in mind that if they had not released the 8's early with plenty of supply, lots of those buyers would have wanted the X. If you have a supply shortage, raising the price is the obvious move. But then that leaves huge swaths of people who want to give you their money and stay in your ecosystem who are unable to because they have to wait months to get the phone.

So if those theories are true, then we should expect the 6/7/8 form factor to be sunset after this release cycle and then the X and the reported larger X Plus (or whatever it will be called) will be the new form factor once the supply chain and demand concerns have worked themselves out. I think the multi release was just a bridge to get them to the new price point and form factor.

A few hundred bucks either way is inconsequential.

Style-wise, they aren’t visibly much different than the last several generations of iPhones or Androids.

How does this contradict the article? Demand is limited because fewer people will or can spend $1000 on a status symbol. Seems like basic economics.

It is a phone beset by compromises, the only thing it does reliably is broadcast that you are rich enough to buy a $1000 phone.

I think most of us with engineering backgrounds have a very hard time accepting that social capital is a valid reason to buy a device. It may just not be valid for me personally.

But the X is very reliable at everything except broadcasting that I own an X. You see, like most every other X, mine is in a case. So far no one has ever noticed it's an X. And that case means I don't care about the glass back.