To give another angle, my iPad Pro cost around 1000€. The iPhone X is about the same price.
Event taking into account miniaturization, waterproofing and just “luxury” tax, it’s insane that both products cost the same when their capabilities are so wildly different.
I know there are reasons (like paying licensing and cetification for the cellular stack, and pure greed), I just feel they are wrong reasons.
I doubt cellular stack certification is what's driving prices up. I used to make mobile phones back in the late 90's, and even then we constructed mobile phones as an n-way system.
The cellular stack runs on a subsystem on it's own, and all communication to that system is done through the good old fashioned Hayes Command set (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set).
This subsystem is responsible for everything cellular, and it is certified by itself, meaning when you make a new phone model, you put in the same certified chip as you did in the last n models, and it's automatically certified (wrt to the stack anyway).
There are still FCC/CE certifications to be passed for all electronic devices, as well as devices containing radio emitters, but those are cheap in comparison.
Apple has always priced their products on a level of what they think people are willing to pay. It is a luxury product, and they (used to) spend a lot of time making sure it feels like it. From the very moment you enter the store, to you open the box, to the onboarding experience.
Most Chinese manufacturers have more of less copied the experience since then.
Also, and thats the main thing keeping me from having an iPhone at this point, is that, even after paying a premium price for an iPhone, you have to spend even more money due to the App Store situation.
On my Android, I use a lot of open-source application that, I find, are often really the best app to do X or Y. They are also free, often without annoying advertisement, with the option to pay for a "premium" version (that usually add nothing but its to help the devs).
Because most OSS devs (with the exception of a few big project like VLC) don't have the money to pay for an iPhone and/or to publish their app on the App Store, there is almost no good open-source/free application on iPhone.
So not only do I have to pay a quite hefty price for a phone (which, to be fair, I find very good), but I also need to pay even more if I want to replicate the setup I have currently for free on an Android. Some application, don't even have good equivalent on iPhone.
I really hope one day Apple change their policy regarding OSS and open up iPhone programming like Google did with Android.
Event taking into account miniaturization, waterproofing and just “luxury” tax, it’s insane that both products cost the same when their capabilities are so wildly different.
I know there are reasons (like paying licensing and cetification for the cellular stack, and pure greed), I just feel they are wrong reasons.