Are you calling me a sucker for exercising critical thinking when I purchased my iPhone X?
Just because I like something that you don't like doesnt make me a 'sucker'.
2017 flagship phones are expensive because of R&D, manufacturing, and profit margins. Samsung and Apple both roll some of their own silicon (Exynos + A-series). The iPhone X has a Samsung display, and I'm sure that they give them as bad of a deal as they can get away with, since they're their direct competitor. Though https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171108005056/en/iPh... puts the cost of the CPU at $27.50 , consider the R&D that was required to get to that part and that part cost, and the operating system, which receives continual updates for years after the device is released, which has hundreds of people working on it at Apple.
The LEGO 75192 Millennium Falcon is $800 retail and sold out everywhere. It's just plastic blocks to some people.
The reason it costs so much is because that's how much it costs to design, develop , manufacture, distribute, market, sell (Apple owns a ton of retail locations + employs many salespeople + support people that you usually get free access to), and support the hardware and software while maintaining ~20% net profit margins ( https://www.stock-analysis-on.net/NASDAQ/Company/Apple-Inc/R... ).
The fact that it exists at $1000 is impressive to me given how Samsung, LG, Sony, Motorola, HTC, etc bear much less of the cost of OS development + support. http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/11/02/android-versus-ios-s... shows where some of the extra cost of an Apple device goes.
I don't care what phone you want to buy though.
Personally I use my phone so often that I pretty much don't care at all how much it costs because any price is cheap on a $/use basis.
I dislike other things about iphones though so it's more of a moral issue for me avoiding Apple.
and
> For example, BMW has better handling, style, etc...
Sounds like BMW is trying to extract maximum value for a brand and reputation it took them decades to garner. Where is the childish thinking again? If the fee is worth all these other things, people will pay. As well they should.
If there's a line, your prices are too low. Period. If people line up to buy BMWs, the price for BMWs are too low, and they (BMW) should soak people for however much they can. What part of that is childish?
If many people stop buying BMWs, they're gonna have to adjust prices or cut component costs.
Also, surprisingly I love the phone. Camera is amazing. The faceID thing does not suck.
I tend to be skeptical of such analysts, though. Not that the ultimate claim of "the iPhone X's advances and form-factor are going to be moved into all the other models" is terribly controversial -- that's pretty literally what Apple said would happen. Just that it's a person guessing, and such things have been fairly spectacularly wrong in the past.
And on top of it, you buy a car for a variety of reasons. For example, BMW has better handling, style, etc... Some people just don't want a mercedes or audi. You can't convince enough people to jump ship and BMW will never think its because of the airplay thing anyways.