[WorldMaker]

> Apple sells a product that's in the pocket of every other snot-nosed preteen.

> However, they charge a larger-than-normal markup, so people feel like it's luxurious.

This doesn't seem to me to be a complicated "dichotomy" to square/understand where with phone hardware, at least, any markup is sometimes "larger-than-normal". It's very easy to be a phone "luxury" brand when so many phones are sold with thin to no margins. Apple certainly props up their "luxury status"/"luxury image" with much higher margin products in the margins outside of phones, but it is easy to see why the bar for "luxury phone" itself is so low that it can also be a mass produced/mass consumed object.