> I mean, if 87% of teens own an iPhone, then that's very much by definition NOT luxury.

Yeah this is the point. Apple has a strong brand and pricing tactics that places itself as a high-end company. This branding works really well and Apple is perceived as luxury by many people, but the truth is that it creates consumer products and there's no luxury in that. If the iPhone was a luxury you wouldn't find it everywhere in almost all high schools. Luxury doesn't dominate a mass market.

Some tech guys seems to think that value comes solely by a sort of price/performance ratio. If you can get MORE POWER for less money then you are getting ripped off. The rest of the price is not justified, you aren't paying for anything else so you must be paying a luxury premium. That's really a shallow way of analysing apple products. You pay more because the following is included: long time support (software updated and that continues to work without random behavior for 5yrs), really high quality control and higher quality components (no things that randomly stop to work after one or two years), great customer and tech support (yeah, non-tech people actually need it), seamless software integration, privacy and security guarantees. There are so much more things included in apple devices beside than tech specs and people find a lot of value in that.

If the situation goes on, the US will go back to the spot when ATT was a monopoly for anything telecomms.

Humans never learn.

You can get a new Android phone for $20. The charging cables alone for an iPhone, which don't come with the phone, cost $19 each by themselves.

Erm. Every iPhone comes with a lightning cable in the box. You can also buy lightning cables from other manufacturers for considerably less than $19. Get you facts right.

What are you talking about? No you can't.

If you're talking about an unlocked smartphone that you can install apps on, there is absolutely no such thing as a new Android phone for $20 that any American consumer can buy.

The Samsung Galaxy A03s is Samsung's cheapest, it's considered "ultra-budget", and it costs $160. The Moto G Pure, Motorola's cheapest, is also $160.

> If you're talking about an unlocked smartphone that you can install apps on, there is absolutely no such thing as a new Android phone for $20 that any American consumer can buy. Or even close to it.

Hardly anyone buys a phone unlocked in the US. Most buy carrier locked devices and at the low end, it's mostly prepaid. I just bought a Samsung A03 from target that was for prepaid carrier Total Wireless for $10. I didn't activate it, I just use it for testing a mobile app on a lower spec phone.

> The Moto G Pure, Motorola's cheapest, is also $160. Right now, you can get a Moto G Pure for $49 from three different no-contract pre-paid carriers at Wal-Mart.

Come on, that’s just not the “price” of a thing by any sane definition, or otherwise I would be very happy how cheap I got my home for..

Ok, I'll be sane. I bought a Samsung A03 at Target, off the shelf, in store for $20. It was on sale from it's regular price of $49.

To their credit, you can get pretty close: a prepaid TracFone will run Android for $30. It's not unlocked, but it's a real Android system with all the usual bells and whistles (and anyways you have to pay for a plan no matter what you buy).

https://www.amazon.com/TracFone-View-Prepaid-Smartphone-Lock...

I am 100% sure parent meant $200, not $20.

Just for the sake of argument, there are brand new android go phones in amazon. So, if you need a phone you can install apps on, $50-$200 being the base price, you can consider $1000 a luxury.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=android+phone&i=mobile&rh=n%3A707...

Seeing as they were directly comparing a $20 phone with a $19 cable implying they were the same price, it seems to me like they actually meant $20. ;)

On the other-hand, plenty of people will buy a locked phone direct from a carrier. The Moto G you mentioned only costs $35 from tracfone. You can't change carriers, but you still can install arbitrary apps.

And as mentioned, you can buy any top end iphone for likely free with a sufficiently expensive plan, how is that relevant? You do pay for the full price (often multiple times).

The original cables do. You can buy much cheaper cables on Amazon and elsewhere.

Some cheaper Lightning cables don't work properly. Some don't work at all.