This year’s crop of new iPhones got announced today, and of course I shall upgrade my current iPhone 7 Plus to the new iPhone X. I’m going to go ahead and pronounce the ‘X’ as ’ex’, and not ‘ten’ like Apple does it.
However, my god did the new iPhone get really expensive. For sure there’s the incrementally new iPhone 8 at a more palatable $699, but anybody technology-obsessed like me isn’t going for that model. The bezel-free OLED screened iPhone X starts at an eye-blink inducing $999, but us techies aren’t likely going for that model either. The one I want is the iPhone X with 256GB of storage ringing in at $1,149 - this is premium laptop levels of expensive.
Indeed, top smartphones of this era are getting to be as powerful as the full-on laptop computers. I read somewhere on twitter the A10X fusion chip in the latest iPads are already faster than the best Mac Mini available for purchase. Every day the iPhone 7 amazes me with its agility at chewing through complex tasks with liquid smoothness. It can handle my camera’s 42 megapixel images with the same alacrity as the iMac: real-time adjustments, effects and all. One of the chief reasons I dump money into the ocean and upgrade the phone every year is because of the revolutionary leaps in computing power each iteration presents.
And right, the camera, too.
With Samsung’s top phone the Note 8 hovering in the low $900 starting price mark, it seems paying four-figures for flagship smartphones is the new reality. Even adjusted for inflation, the very first iPhone’s $599 ($725) is still some $274 off the iPhone X. The price of progress for the incredible power and functionality of modern smartphones is steep indeed.