I just bought a new iPhone. With taxes, it was $1,175.93.
I didn't pay that all at once of course. I used Affirm like a normal person, for mysteriously interest-free monthly payments.
A thousand dollars is a lot of money. I bought a car for that just like seven years ago. A Toyota Echo, standard with no power windows or A/C.
Cost isn't the only value we use to measure something. It might not even be the main measurement. Things like status, trendiness, and virality are really the powers that cost is raised to.
Since the iPhone does cost a lot of money (same as a Macbook Air almost), it's an interesting starting point.
So, what's it an iPhone worth?
Is its value objectively measurable, or is it subjective? A few guiding questions:
- What's its value if you can intuitively learn all of its features and integrate it seamlessly into your life?
- i.e., a Gen Z'er for whom no learning curve exists
- Maybe it's more valuable if it significantly improves one or two things in your life?
- i.e., you're 82, live alone, and your daughter shows your how to FaceTime the grandkids
- What if you're a young person in Nigeria and can get an Android and a year of data for ~$250?
- e.g., then you can get a job as an Uber driver and unlock a wealthier life
Value is hard to measure
I recently tried to measure how valuable Spotify is to me based on the playlists I create each new season of the year (subjective).
There's a whole philosophical discipline (Axiology: "questions about the nature and classification of values") devoted to studying value. It's an interesting question, and problem, because how we measure it influences (determines?) where we put our time and energy. And we don't always assign value explicitly which makes the exercise of doing so hard, but useful.
In the iPhone's case, I think we can measure its value in three ways:
- Use: How much do I use it?
- Usefulness: What can I do with it while I'm using it? -- Or -- How does it improve my life?
- Durability: How long can I reasonably expect it to serve my purposes?
Use
Use is straightforward: How often is the thing used? It's kind of boring, but also an interesting measurement.
Turns out, we use them a lot. On average, we check our phones 144 times a day (PC Mag). How useful those 144 times are is a different consideration, and one we'll talk about, but that's a lot of pure use.
For my $1,175.93, each check costs about $0.00895. If an iPhone battery lasts, on average 2.5 years (or, 131,400 checks) before significant loss in capacity, this actually seems like a great return on investment.
thank you, ChatGPT
Not all checks are equal though, so let's look at the second way to measure value: usefulness
Usefulness
Let's be generous and say that 50%, or 72, of those 144 checks are compulsive type pickups. I've done it, and you've seen it: Someone in the airport waiting on their flight, AirPods in, opens up their phone and swipes their thumb to the left through each page without ever really doing anything. Some version of that likely makes up a decent amount of our 144 checks. These aren't very useful.
Usefulness is pretty subjective. You might find playing Candy Crush anywhere you want, anytime you want, highly useful. Or, maybe you run an eBay store for rare coins and being able to manage your store from anywhere is highly useful.
So, in your case, even 7/144 of your daily-pickups may make your CPC (cost per check) highly valuable. In the case of Candy-Crush-guy, high ROI on enjoyment. In the case of eBay-rare-coins-lady, high ROI on dollars.
how useful is a tiny super computer?
We went to the moon pretty much because we (JFK) stated it as a goal, got geo-politically competitive with the USSR, and made it happen. That's a pretty simple reason in comparison to all the philosophical and practical reasons that we could have led with; i.e., the beginning of exploring what's out there or advancing our technologies back on Earth.
Our logic for going to space, is about the same as asking your friend Jason why he decided to marry Paula and he goes, "Because we wanted to beat the national divorce average. And, also the tax break."
Both are reasons, but they're not necessarily inspiring or beautiful reasons.
Now, the tiny super computer:
Comparing Instruction Processing Speed and Memory, an iPhone 15 Pro is lightyears ahead of the Apollo Guidance Computer.
The same thing you use to order DoorDash, that's half the size of a piece of bread, has about 125,000 times more memory and 35,000 times more processing speed than the Apollo Guidance Computer. That's fascinating!
Super computers in 1969 were often in huge rooms or even whole floors of buildings. This is what the room would've looked like to house the same level of compute that the iPhone 15 Pro has (according to DALL-E).
One last note on the Apollo/iPhone comparison: It's probably not a totally fair one.
The AGC was built for a very narrow task: Guiding a shuttle containing humans to the moon. It didn't necessarily need the same compute as an iPhone. It might not could have even used it if had it. a bit more thought in the Xtwitter thread.
This is why Usefulness is a worthy measure of value: How you make something useful is more interesting than how much of something you have. There are a million human examples of this, and you often hear "successful" people reference how much more clever and productive they were when they had less.
You can, and kind of do, have all the capabilities you could possibly need on a credit card-sized super computer in your pocket, that's an extension of your dominant hand, but how's that interesting if you're not making it useful?
Most of us use it to "text the group" and "scroll."
Durability
We all kind of feel like every major appliance or product we buy is undergoing some kind of planned obsolescence. If your gut reaction to this is some internal agreement like, "Yeah, probably", then you cannot be blamed. Things like this make sense on the surface.
But, even if Apple is doing to us -- says the shaking-fists-man behind the Mac keyboard -- we're still coming out ahead on durability.
screens
It's quite possible they continue getting better. They're now ceramic-shielded and seem to withstand drops better (up to several meters). If you want to get into screens, check out this Reddit thread; spoiler, there's Newtonian physics involved.
battery
For a thing that can navigate you, organize your life through all your Notion-like apps, FaceTime your grandparents 3,000 miles away, give you access (for $11/mo....) to all of the world's songs/podcasts, and help you capture beautiful things and then remake them, lasting 2.5 years on average is a pretty good deal.
Remember, that only costs you about $1,000 brand new.
Or, about $0.00895 per time you use your phone.
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You've got more in your pocket than the most intelligent people in the world thought you'd ever need (h/t, Bill Gates).
And that's cool.
If you can figure out how to make it useful.