Why £1,000 isn’t too much to spend on a phone
What object do you look at hundreds of times every day? Okay, that’s a little vague, so here are some more clues: it’s never more than a couple of feet away from your side, even when you’re sleeping; it can save you from boredom whenever you hit a quiet moment; and it’s at the heart of everything you do, both business and pleasure.
I admit this “riddle” wouldn’t stump Bilbo Baggins for more than a nanosecond, nor am I suggesting that your phone is more precious to you than your partner – that’s one you’ll have to grapple with in your own time – but ask yourself this: which do you pay more attention to when it makes a noise?
As such, it seems odd that many people are quite happy to pay £1,000 and above for a laptop, but collapse in horror at the thought of spending a similar amount on a phone. This, as Mr Spock would say, is not logical, Jim.
Read my review of the £570 Asus ZenBook UX410UA on p68, for instance, and explain why this would make any less of a difference to your personal and working life than a MacBook Pro costing twice the price. It’s a perfectly fast machine that’s built to last, and has good battery life. It has the best screen I’ve ever seen in a sub-£1,000 14in laptop. And it will probably sell a tiny fraction of any MacBook you care to name.
The truth is, just like Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for human behaviour, we have base needs from our technology – and then higher needs. For mobile phones, the bottom plane used to be simply making calls, but now it’s more likely to be accessing your calendar, sending WhatsApp messages and “life apps” such as banking and online stores.
There’s no reason why a £200 phone couldn’t fulfil those duties just as well as the £1,000 iPhone X. So then we come to the higher planes. How does the phone make us feel? Does it deliver a jolt of joy whenever we hold it? Do we love gazing at the screen? Will watching TV and films on our phone be a more pleasurable experience? Can we take photos that make our lives look even more spectacular than they really are without the application of seven different filters?
What’s more, phones have gradually become the fulcrum of our digital lives, the secret power behind everything from fitness watches to broadband routers to NAS drives. Not for nothing has Apple limited its operating system support to iOS 11 and above for the Apple Watch Series 3; the company understands that each product it sells is part of the puzzle, and by making one desirable it makes the other necessary.
Nor can we ignore social status. I sit in the middle of the bell curve here: I don’t feel the need to wear designer jeans and jackets, but I wouldn’t want to be seen pulling out an old, dog-eared phone in the same way that I feel selfconscious when I wear my trainers with a hole in them (note to self – really must buy new trainers).
But here’s the killer for Apple. Those are all the reasons I believe that spending £1,000 on a phone isn’t a ridiculous waste of money. The problem for the iPhone X is that it gets too many things wrong to be worth that amount of cash. To find out precisely why, turn to our review on p54.