To me the latest iPhone (xs) doesn’t have any feature that warrants such a price bump. I got an iPhone 7+ 128gb for AUD 1429 when it launched. The XS 256gb is $1879. I got one for my wife only because I had a gift card for a few hundred bucks. It’s a great phone, but not worth the $450 price bump for me.
If Apple bumps the storage on the base model to 128gb and drops the price by a hundred bucks, I’ll pick up this years phone on launch day. But I don’t see that happening.