As a counter point, the cars in a billionaire's garage aren't just many different Toyotas with custom rims.
because phones are small and expensive to design it's just not worth it
This would imply that luxury watches and luxury fashion don't exist, which they do. (I see you mention the watches later in the comment, but not the fashion, although your explanation for luxury watches roughly applies to fashion as well).
I don't really think progress being fast is quite sufficient to explain things
I'll agree here. I don't think my theory fully explains certain things. Books, movies, and other creative works are things that don't quite fit into this framework nicely. I suspect that these things are limited by creative innovation, but I'm not very certain about that belief.
I think it's because a phone, or gmail, starlink, etc. has super high fixed costs, and the smaller market for luxury goods generally means the design will be worse
The super-high-fixed-costs hypothesis would imply that we don't have luxury watches, cars, jets. I suspect it is a factor in what causes a luxury good to come onto market, but I don't think it can be the only factor.
So my prediction would be that the luxury smartphone business only starts up when lots of rich people have different problems from the average consumer that need a custom device (security maybe?) or subscribe to a status game that results in the phone equivalent of luxury watches
I appreciate the concrete prediction, although I wouldn't be surprised if these conditions are already met in some way. The ultra-wealthy definitely already need more security, privacy, etc than your average joe. And I believe that many of the ultra-wealthy already subscribe to status games.
Huh, this is interesting. I think there's something missing in my original idea, because I feel like iPhone : Vertu :!: toyota : Bentley. The fact that the Vertu phone appears like a regular phone just bejeweled might be the difference, but I'm less sure now.
It's possible that my prediction at the end of the essay (that there'd be luxury smartphones soon OR there'd be innovation) might just be arriving early. I'm unsure.
Asking for a $100k iPhone is like asking for a million-dollar Toyota Prius instead of a million-dollar car.
I disagree, there is no company that only builds >10k smart phones (from scratch, as opposed to taking someone else's phones and adding expensive materials). Sure there are companies that will gold-plate your iPhone, but they're not taking on the risk that innovations in smartphones would cause their luxury product to become worthless (since they can always gold-plate whatever the most recent innovation is).
I don't think that the ratio from most expensive to least expensive is a constant as you are using it, I'd be very surprised if this ratio is the same for various different goods and services.
fine dining+private chef to prepack+fast food is ~1.5oom
I disagree, I'd be very surprised if a full-time expensive private chef + ingredients + alcohol is only 30x more expensive than fast food.
I agree that the 100k Rolex (and most luxury goods) are all about status signalling. Even for the private chef, you certainly get higher-end private chefs which give the material upgrade as well as the status signalling.
which quickly becomes too big to fit in one's pocket
This assumes current technology and no innovation
I do believe gradual disempowerment to be a real risk, although I don't think the incentives for automating human labour will result in the damage stopping there.
Not the solution you asked for, but tighter integration of prediction markets into social media could enable this. For example, making the tweet -> prediction market UI/UX flow really good (and also surfacing relevant prediction markets next to the content) would make it easier 1. setup a market based on someone's predictions and 2. keep track of those predictions.
So the relevancy part (my bold) is probably more true today, but the top-of-the-line smartphones from the 2000s and early 2010s very clearly have not been relevant for a long time. I think smartphone innovation is slowing down, so it's possible that today's smartphone would be relevant for a longer time than those from previous years. But I think this is because of slowing innovation.