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Buying memory in an iPhone 6: Like wiping your bottom with dollar bills

Mind, t'Motorola StarTac were like GOLD

Anal-ysis So, Apple charges £539 for a 16GB iPhone, £619 for a 64GB device and £699 for a 128GB jeesus! Phone.

Which means that if you buy your memory in the form of a more expensive iPhone, you pay something on the order of £1.60 for a gigabyte. Which, in turn, might just be why the Jesus mobe doesn’t come with an SD slot. A little eBay shopping and you can find 128GB Micro SD cards for under a tenner and full sized ones for under a fiver.

That’s 3p per GB, not £1.60.

Of course it’s not just memory, it’s Apple memory - so it must be fifty times better. Indeed it is better, because it’s about how it makes you feel. Brides magazine reports that the average reader spends £1340 on a dress (plus shoes and a £108 veil). You wouldn’t feel quite so good getting married in a £150 Marks and Spencers one: but that’s only a ninefold mark up, not fiftyfold like Apple memory.

To look at something which really challenges Apple memory in these terms you need to look to something more outrageous. As our own Tim Worstall has pointed out these are usually Veblen Goods, such as £15,000 Hermes handbags, but there are other examples. I once worked out that if you filled the petrol tank of a £300,000 Lamborghini Aventador with printer ink, you’d spend more on filling up the tank than buying the car.

Apple can’t however beat the Motorola StarTac. When that was launched in 1996 demand for the sub 100g phone was so high, black market prices (this was before eBay) took values into the thousands. I worked out at the time that it made the StarTac worth its weight in gold. Which is something you can’t say of the iPhone. ®

Bootnote

Here are some other things we here on the Register consumer advice desk have found that cost roughly fifty times as much for basically the same result, as though you were buying your memory from Apple in an iPhone 6 rather than in SD cards:

Drinking camel's milk instead of ordinary milk.

Wiping your bottom with dollar bills instead of lavatory paper.

Using Jewel of Russia Ultra Limited Edition vodka to clean metal with instead of rubbing alcohol.

Can you think of any more? - Ed

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