There's a very large community of people in which their smartphone might be the only luxury purchase they make (I'm pretty close to that).
Now that we no longer upgrade every second year (or, in fact, every third year) and given I usually get 50% of the cost back by sending the old phone in, spending $1500/phone means that I'm typically amortizing a $750 charge over 4 years - or $15/month for the only luxury item I own. I'm probably more concerned about the $85/month AT&T bill than the $15/month cost for the actual phone.
Never having to even think about storage, like literally zero concerns about how much I download is one reason I always grab the high-end model (now around 1TB)
Also - there are lots of weeks, (in fact, sometimes a month) that my mother doesn't touch her (pretty high end, nice 4K monitor) computer system - but I doubt there has ever been a single hour that she wasn't using her phone. The Phone, for many, has become the new computer.
And, with LLMs becoming pervasive, the new knowledge-system. (I can go many days without touching google - but I hit up some combination of Claude/ChatGPT pretty 7-10 times/day) I can already envision the day in which you will be able to run an LLM on your phone - but the H/W specs for that thing will likely be insane and I have a hard time seeing how the first releases of (reasonable speed, reasonable model -I'm aware you can do it today) - in a 2-3 years from now that can run an LLM will go for less than $2000-$2500.
And I will be standing at the front of that line begging them to take my money. Entirely new device at that point.
Now that we no longer upgrade every second year (or, in fact, every third year) and given I usually get 50% of the cost back by sending the old phone in, spending $1500/phone means that I'm typically amortizing a $750 charge over 4 years - or $15/month for the only luxury item I own. I'm probably more concerned about the $85/month AT&T bill than the $15/month cost for the actual phone.
Never having to even think about storage, like literally zero concerns about how much I download is one reason I always grab the high-end model (now around 1TB)
Also - there are lots of weeks, (in fact, sometimes a month) that my mother doesn't touch her (pretty high end, nice 4K monitor) computer system - but I doubt there has ever been a single hour that she wasn't using her phone. The Phone, for many, has become the new computer.
And, with LLMs becoming pervasive, the new knowledge-system. (I can go many days without touching google - but I hit up some combination of Claude/ChatGPT pretty 7-10 times/day) I can already envision the day in which you will be able to run an LLM on your phone - but the H/W specs for that thing will likely be insane and I have a hard time seeing how the first releases of (reasonable speed, reasonable model -I'm aware you can do it today) - in a 2-3 years from now that can run an LLM will go for less than $2000-$2500.
And I will be standing at the front of that line begging them to take my money. Entirely new device at that point.