Top model iPhones have increased price about 15% per year since launch

Yes, and they’ve also improved by orders of magnitude in terms of processing power, camera quality, etc.

Today’s top-end iPhone probably would have cost upwards of $10,000 in 2015, if it were even possible to manufacture.

As an aside, someone did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and found that the equivalent computing power of a 2014 iPhone would have cost $32 million in 1991: https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/how-much-would...

This is a great example, because if Apple had launched the iPhone SE in 2015 at $10,000 alongside their $199 6S, it would have bounced like a bad joke, and probably only a few wealthy people would have bought them.

So in one sense, yes, tech has gotten cheaper, but in another sense there's a limit to how much deflation can really be stated because you can't say someone buying a new iPhone in 2020 is saving $9000 relative to what they would have spent five years prior. They wouldn't have spent it.

There's also a recent inflationary trend in tech, in that old computers actually slow down due to the growing CPU/memory demands of software and web apps to deliver more or less equivalent value to what they used to.

Yes, but so what? My current iPhone now devotes trillions of potentially-useful cycles to NOPs or processor sleep cycles. Does this mean that $32m of actual value is being created for me?

That’s key, people are spending more on mobile phones now than they were a decade ago. The benefit they get is difficult to quantify on an individual basis, certainly the difference between a phone from 5 years ago have very little difference than one from today, better camera perhaps, but how many people who bought a separate camera in 2016 don’t bother now.