alcohol is possibly cheating, because it’s not really food and an expensive luxury category of its own? (but even there, really, most of the wine all the way at the highest end is like $1000 for bottles you’d consume semi-regularly, and about $10 at the cheap end).
naively, fast food is about $30 a day (fast food is actually kinda expensive, i guess the cheapest things you can do, bulk beans and rice sorts of things, are about one OOM cheaper). i think $1000 a day is actually more than enough to afford an entire person to do skilled work all of the time, although you could push it upwards a bit more if they were truly elite at the thing that they do, but probably not one OOM more.
(accounting tends to get tricky up there because I imagine a big part of the value proposition for your worker past a certain point is a sort of security, access to other commodities/conveniences, connections, etc.)
but to the original point, i do really struggle to imagine how an iphone is meant to provide you more value. i think a lot of what an iphone is supposed to do for you in terms of productivity is better achieved by other means, and it’s hard to improve for entertainment at its form factor.
as for signaling value, here are two websites that sell phone cases in the $10k range, as a sort of jewelry.
alcohol is possibly cheating, because it’s not really food and an expensive luxury category of its own? (but even there, really, most of the wine all the way at the highest end is like $1000 for bottles you’d consume semi-regularly, and about $10 at the cheap end).
naively, fast food is about $30 a day (fast food is actually kinda expensive, i guess the cheapest things you can do, bulk beans and rice sorts of things, are about one OOM cheaper). i think $1000 a day is actually more than enough to afford an entire person to do skilled work all of the time, although you could push it upwards a bit more if they were truly elite at the thing that they do, but probably not one OOM more.
(accounting tends to get tricky up there because I imagine a big part of the value proposition for your worker past a certain point is a sort of security, access to other commodities/conveniences, connections, etc.)
but to the original point, i do really struggle to imagine how an iphone is meant to provide you more value. i think a lot of what an iphone is supposed to do for you in terms of productivity is better achieved by other means, and it’s hard to improve for entertainment at its form factor. as for signaling value, here are two websites that sell phone cases in the $10k range, as a sort of jewelry.
https://caviar.global/ https://leronza.com/24k-gold-luxury-samsung-galaxy-z-fold7/
i guess you could switch between these regularly, as with jewelry, to effectively recover another OOM.