A side note: “Your strength as a rationalist is in your power to be more confused by fiction than reality”. I had also believed there weren’t any $100k iPhones, and was not convinced your explanation, and hypothesized the typical reason for such things: economies of scale. But then I sat down, had Claude look up the fixed costs associated with phone production, which turned out to be like $1B, which you could amortize over eg 100k of the richest individuals ($1e9/1e5 phones=$10,000/phone)! So then I figured such a company really ought to exist, I asked Claude if there existed any such phone company, and Claude mentioned Vertu!
A side note: “Your strength as a rationalist is in your power to be more confused by fiction than reality”. I had also believed there weren’t any $100k iPhones, and was not convinced your explanation, and hypothesized the typical reason for such things: economies of scale. But then I sat down, had Claude look up the fixed costs associated with phone production, which turned out to be like $1B, which you could amortize over eg 100k of the richest individuals ($1e9/1e5 phones=$10,000/phone)! So then I figured such a company really ought to exist, I asked Claude if there existed any such phone company, and Claude mentioned Vertu!