Time-telling: ~$10 Casio through to a ~$100k Rolex
This is an odd one out: both of them will tell you the time about equally well (as indeed will any phone). The purpose of a Rolex is fashion and/or status signalling.
The transport one includes “a custom Bentley” which is probably also mostly status signalling compared to a Range Rover or Tesla.
Most of the others seem to be material upgrades (e.g. a private chef lets you have tasty food every day, exactly to your tastes).
A $100k iPhone would struggle to set itself apart from a merely “good” iPhone in terms of material quality. (The standard way to scale up computers is usually by adding more computer, which quickly becomes too big to fit in one’s pocket.) I suspect the most relevant comparison would be the Rolex: it would do the same job a bit better, but mostly be for status signalling. Currently, nobody wants to status signal with their iPhone, so they choose not to.
I agree that the 100k Rolex (and most luxury goods) are all about status signalling. Even for the private chef, you certainly get higher-end private chefs which give the material upgrade as well as the status signalling.
which quickly becomes too big to fit in one’s pocket
i think compute and networking speeds are honestly enough that most people struggle to take advantage of more of those things (streaming video is about the most data-intensive thing a lot of people do, and what’s above that is mostly actual computational tasks), so it would take (significant) additional innovations in figuring out how to convert these things into better experiences in order for this to be tenable.
it seems a lot of the time that the line is usually drawn somewhere around gaming enthusiasts (e.g there is a cohort of people who will buy a more powerful smartphone so it can render graphics better so they can game on their phones more enjoyably, same for the display). this could be because economic incentives towards innovations in compute still favor commoditizable things, since compute is more generally useful (for the amount of work you could employ to make phones better for a small contingent of people who would buy them, you could just make some similarly advanced/complex system better for some industrial/trad-tech purpose and make way more money)
This is an odd one out: both of them will tell you the time about equally well (as indeed will any phone). The purpose of a Rolex is fashion and/or status signalling.
The transport one includes “a custom Bentley” which is probably also mostly status signalling compared to a Range Rover or Tesla.
Most of the others seem to be material upgrades (e.g. a private chef lets you have tasty food every day, exactly to your tastes).
A $100k iPhone would struggle to set itself apart from a merely “good” iPhone in terms of material quality. (The standard way to scale up computers is usually by adding more computer, which quickly becomes too big to fit in one’s pocket.) I suspect the most relevant comparison would be the Rolex: it would do the same job a bit better, but mostly be for status signalling. Currently, nobody wants to status signal with their iPhone, so they choose not to.
I agree that the 100k Rolex (and most luxury goods) are all about status signalling. Even for the private chef, you certainly get higher-end private chefs which give the material upgrade as well as the status signalling.
This assumes current technology and no innovation
i think compute and networking speeds are honestly enough that most people struggle to take advantage of more of those things (streaming video is about the most data-intensive thing a lot of people do, and what’s above that is mostly actual computational tasks), so it would take (significant) additional innovations in figuring out how to convert these things into better experiences in order for this to be tenable. it seems a lot of the time that the line is usually drawn somewhere around gaming enthusiasts (e.g there is a cohort of people who will buy a more powerful smartphone so it can render graphics better so they can game on their phones more enjoyably, same for the display). this could be because economic incentives towards innovations in compute still favor commoditizable things, since compute is more generally useful (for the amount of work you could employ to make phones better for a small contingent of people who would buy them, you could just make some similarly advanced/complex system better for some industrial/trad-tech purpose and make way more money)
Tbf, there is some market for status signaling with customized iPhones in the $50-100k range, though it does look far more unconventional than Rolex