I'm a little confused on why anyone would pay this much for a phone. (Although if you consider it conspicuous consumption that happens to work as a phone, I can believe that.)
But I wouldn’t, because I actually understand that people are different and like it that way.
Consider: your opinion is worthless when it comes to what I care about in terms of luxuries I enjoy, just as mine is worthless when it comes to what you care about in terms of luxuries you enjoy.
It’s way better when you don’t run around judging other people for liking different things than you.
My iPhone is the computer I use most every day, by a WIDE margin.
My last personal computer purchase was an M1 Pro MBP 4 years ago. I could have maxed it out and my life would be the same, but instead I bought on the low end… or somewhere in the middle if we look at Apple’s lineup as a whole.
It’s now 4 years later. This is the longest I’ve probably ever kept a laptop. It’s still running fine, I’m not hurting for more power, and will like wait another 1-3 years before an upgrade… maybe more, we’ll see.
The laptop is a glorified Chromebook for me. I do edit some photos from time to time, encode some video, and code a bit. But 95% of the time, I’m just looking at webpages. Maxing the thing out would have been a massive waste of money.
My work laptop is also a MBP of a similar generation. It’s not up to me when it’s upgraded, but it also wasn’t maxed out, and it’s still fine. VS Code and Outlook aren’t going to run fast enough to matter with a M5 Mac and 128GB or RAM. The bottleneck isn’t my laptop, it’s bureaucracy.
For some, having top end specs will matter, but that is a shrinking percentage of the overall market.
I would append "subject to diminishing returns" for your use cases.
I could afford maxed-out computers (within reason) but, for most purposes, the premiums for the very top-of-line exceeds any discernible increase in functionality I would experience.