Why iPhones cost so much … The iPhone X (pronounced “10”) will sell for $999 beginning Nov. 3.

That’s double what the first iPhone cost a decade ago, and more than any other competing device — as Apple positions itself as “a purveyor of pricey, aspirational gadgets,” per AP’s Michael Liedtke and Barbara Ortutay:

• “Apple is … continuing to push its prices higher, even though improvements it’s bringing to its products are often incremental or derivative. … [T]hat runs contrary to decades in which high-tech device prices have fallen over time, often dramatically, even as the gadgets themselves acquired new features and powers.”
• “[R]ival phones — many of them from Samsung — already offer similar displays, facial recognition, augmented reality and wireless charging, if often in cruder forms.”
• “Apple also introduced a TV streaming box that will sell for $179, far more than similar devices, and a smartwatch with its own cellular connection that will cost almost $400. In December, Apple will start selling an internet-connected speaker, the HomePod, priced at $349, nearly twice as much as Amazon’s … Echo.”
• “The premium pricing strategy reflects Apple’s long-held belief that consumers will pay more for products that are so well designed that they can’t fathom living without them.”

More than 1,000 people attended the first public event at Apple’s “spaceship” campus, the $5 billion (not a typo) Apple Park.

The reviews … USA Today front page, “$1,000 iPhone X: A crowd-pleaser on the face of it,” by Ed Baig: “With Touch ID having gone AWOL with the disappearing home button, you’ll be able to use Face ID … to purchase stuff through Apple Pay.”

• “On the new phone you navigate home by swiping up from the bottom of the display.”
• A fun feature: “using your face to create … animated emojis, or animojis. … Make an angry face and your animated emoji copies your facial expression.”

Go deeper: See a video of Axios chief tech correspondent Ina Fried trying the iPhone X at the Apple event.

Source: Axios AM – Axios