Exactly this. China is a great example. Many many people will buy the LTE model strictly for the red dot, with no intention of actually using LTE, because it's a status symbol. I'm really surprised Gruber doesn't get that.

There was a post I saw recently, that I thought Gruber linked to but I can't find it anymore, about how Apple's strategy of taking old phones and selling them as the lower tier models is great because it means people can buy those phones and nobody can tell that they bought a lower-tier phone (because it looks like they could have just bought the top-tier phone last year and not gotten around to upgrading yet). This was also used to explain why the 5C was apparently a flop, because it was immediately obvious to anybody that a 5C owner bought the cheap phone.

Status symbols are important.