Eli5: how did we get to the point where laptops and phones are in the same price range ?
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The most simple answer is high-end product of one market can easily cost as much low-end product of another market.
However there are other reasons. Some phone like iphone is expensive because it is status symbol. Apple also has been paying a lot of money to establish that their product is fashion. Thus since apple basically said cheaper phones are inferior it forced other brands to create halo product with high price tag so they wouldn’t be associated with a cheap brand in consumer mind.
They aren’t. Some phones are the same as some laptops, but across the full range of both, phones are still pretty significantly cheaper than laptops.
The cheapest phones, even smartphones, are easily only $100 if not cheaper, and they max out at around $1500 or so. You can have a pretty cheap laptop too, especially something like a chromebook that’s meant to mostly use web-based services, but they can get a LOT more expensive than $1500 (and way more customizeable).
If you want an easy comparison, look at Apple. The cheapest iPhone is currently $429 and the cheapest laptop is $999. The iPhone 14 Pros start at $999 and go up to $1599, while their higher end laptops (Macbook Pro 14″) starts at $1999 and you can max out an Apple laptop at over $6,000. The cheap laptop is the same as the mid-range iPhone, but the cheap phone is not even close to the nice-ish laptop, never mind the max. And yes, Apple prices are high, but the iPhone is still the most popular phone in the world, so it makes sense to compare them, especially when the same brand also makes laptops.
Please some economist remind me of the correct term/theories here but the gist of it (ELI5 version) is that:
>People pay what they think something is worth, not goods actual values.
Take Apple, when they charge you 100 bucks more for 128/256g iPhone models, that $100 means nothing for them simply because by choosing **any** iPhone model, you already paid all their expenses for whatever kind of memory you end up “choosing”, so if you chose to pay more, that is a 100% profit over whatever their already big profit margin already is.
Because some financially ignorant people pay over $1,000 for a phone! I really like the ones who finance the $1,400 ones for 36 months and just roll what remained into another phone 24 months later….I mean you are upside down on a phone!!!!
There’s a lot of comments in this thread trying to justify their phone price – saying it’s a high end computer in a small package.
All the data comparing CPU’s point to this being false. While profit margins (consumer cost/production cost) are down in recent years by 5-10%, one main reason phones are so expensive is because they can. They can charge that much and people will buy it.
Take expandable storage. Every phone 10 years ago had a microSD card slot. Can you name one flagship today that has a slot?
Take removable batteries. Most phones 10 years ago had removable batteries that the user could replace if the old was was starting to die out. Can you name three flagships that have removable batteries?
The true answer is that phones went the way of apple. Limited functionality, good product, very expensive price.
This coupled with a number of midrange phones makers exiting the market (LG) makes the current market skew high-end.
You can find a “laptop” for about 150 bucks. So I would say it happened a few years ago a new cell phone can cost 1500 to 2000 usd so that means you can buy a decent laptop for that price as well
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