That's a fantastic list and reflects my sentiment about Apple's price hikes very well. iPhones to me always started at around $700ish. Only with the larger plus sized models people started accepting $800+. Then boom - suddenly the jump to $1000+ with the X (which was deemed a 'special' device based on it's 'advanced' features), so I think many expected prices to come down again. But instead we now have an XS Max with starts at $1100. Compared to the $700 usual starting price we are up 58% and innovation has decreased not increased since.

That's amazing to me, actually. Compare what 3Gs can do vs an Xr, and that's only $50 more in real dollars? Incredible. Shows the rapid rate of progress in mobile technologies.

That is assuming your wages / salary increases with inflation. Which is not true for majority of people, hence it felt expensive. Not to mention consumers got used to Tech being cheaper with Moores Law, which is no longer true.

> is that seriously the bottom end?

It's the middle end by average sales price -- about half of people pay less than that, about half pay more. Check out https://twitter.com/asymco/status/1040240778860146688 for the whole picture.

No, the budget option is £449.

No, the bottom end for Apple is the iPhone 7 - Apple is still selling it, for £449.

That's why I switched to Android. iOS is great and had no complaints about the platform. It was lovely. But the price hikes became ridiculous and as a symbolic protest I am now an Android user. I can't accept the prices anymore.

Android isn't an equivalent replacement, but I can adapt.

Increasing the highest possible price is kind of meaningless. You can look at the most expensive iPhone and max out the memory on that to reach an even higher price. For a better comparison US inflation has been ~25% since the iPhone's so:

The cheapest new iPhone is $449.99 which works out to 360$ in 2007 dollars. The cheapest original iPhone was $599 in 2007 dollars or the equivalent to ~750$ today, making them far more affordable.

What really changed is cellphone companies stopped baking in heavy phones subsidies. Now you can still pay next to nothing at purchase, you just see a separate monthly fee on every cellphone bill.