Where Is the Hermes of iPhones?

Why do Taylor Swift and I have the same phone? We don’t wear the same clothes: she wears custom designer clothes and I wear Costco specials. We don’t eat the same food: she eats organic hand-picked arugula and I eat frozen meals. We don’t travel the same way: she flies in a private jet and I take the subway with two hundred strangers. Yet, we both have an iPhone. In fact, a lot of rich people seem to have iPhones. It is weird that rich people aren’t using a more luxurious version of the iPhone. Why hasn’t someone started a company that caters to this underserved market? I have a few guesses, ordered from least convincing to most:

1. No one wants a luxury phone. Maybe the standard iPhone is so good that it is its own luxury version. It already has everything a rich person could possibly want.

2. A luxury phone company would have trouble hiring people. Engineers are a pretty egalitarian bunch. They hate wearing fancy clothes, they play ping pong at work with their boss, and they contribute free code to open-source projects. They will not enjoy spending years building a tool only for rich people to use. (PornHub manages to hire engineers though, so why couldn’t a fancypants phone company?)

3. A luxury phone wouldn’t be good enough. Making a new phone is pretty hard. You have to get right a million little things: the privacy policy and the charging cable and the calculator app. And a luxury tech company can’t just get these things right, it has to get them perfect. Rich people who are spending thousands of dollars on a phone want a phone that is absolutely magical. They want the privacy policy to be written by Zadie Smith and the calculator app to explain the mean value theorem to them. Maybe building something that perfect is impossible.

4. A luxury phone would cost too much. To make a phone from scratch, you need to hire a few software engineers, a few hardware engineers, a designer or two, some testers, and so on. Hiring all these people will cost, let’s make up a number, $10 million. Apple can split this cost across the millions of phones it sells, so each phone is relatively affordable. However, a luxury tech company would only sell, say, a thousand phones. Each phone would need to cost $10k just to cover its R&D costs. Maybe that’s just too expensive, even for rich people. (Billionaires do spend a lot of money on weird shit though, so I’m not fully convinced by this.)