This year Apple has surprised us with the prices of the iPhone 15: all of them are cheaper than their predecessors. That does not mean that we are faced with a smartphone that is still expensive at the same time. from 959 euros in Spain.
Precisely that is a particularly interesting point, because in reality how cheap or expensive the iPhone is for those who buy it depends not only on the price, but on what that price represents in each person’s economy. And that is where a unique ranking appears: where is an iPhone 15 most expensive or cheapest?
Well, logically, it is cheaper for those who earn more money, and more expensive for those who earn less. At CompareDial they wanted to carry out a study that precisely tries to reflect how expensive or cheap the iPhone 15 is in different countries around the world.
In their list they have analyzed 85 countries, and in each of them the fundamental factor that reflects how cheap or expensive the iPhone is for its citizens is the average annual salary in these countries. The countries with the best average salaries on average enjoy a fundamental advantage over those with the lowest salaries, and that gives an idea of how expensive the iPhone 15 may seem to those who buy it depending on the country where they live.
Source: CompareDial
That table shows a curious “iPhone 15 index” on the right side in percentage form. That percentage represents the percentage of annual salary What the iPhone 15 costs for each citizen of each country, based on the average annual salary in that country.
The data comes from Our World in Data, World DataBank and data published by each country. On the comparison website you can click on any country to display the specific statistics for that country, and that allows us to quickly get an idea of how expensive or cheap the iPhone 15 is in each of the economies included in the comparison. study.
According to these data, it is easy to see how someone who works in Spain has to spend 4.83% of your annual salary to buy the iPhone 15 in its base model with 128 GB capacity. That annual salary in Spain has a median—remember, different from the average—$21,308.85 according to the study data.
The cost of that iPhone according to the data from this study is $1,029.66. It is a conversion quite close to the 959 euros that it officially costs here, which at the current euro-dollar exchange rate is equivalent to 1,024.58 dollars.
In the United States, for example, that index is 1.69%: Someone who works there has to spend on average that percentage of their annual salary—the median of which is $50,371.33—to be able to buy an iPhone. There, by the way, the cost in dollars is also significantly lower, since with taxes included – although they vary by state – they indicate that the base iPhone 15 costs $849.73.
What does that mean? That someone who works with that reference salary in the United States earns a significantly higher figure according to that median and therefore for him the iPhone 15 is “cheaper.” In fact, it is if one also looks at the price difference once taxes and the euro-dollar exchange rate have been applied, but that median income reveals that The iPhone is more or less three times more expensive in Spain than in the United States according to that index.
There are, of course, many more possible comparisons: the iPhone 15 is only cheaper in Luxembourg and Switzerland than in the US, while the cost is absolutely exorbitant for a large number of countries in which this index is greater than 20% of the annual salary.
In Mexico (median salary, $5,922.89) the rate is 19.24%: a worker there spends almost a fifth of his annual salary on an iPhone. In Argentina the situation is even more terrible. Although the median salary is somewhat higher, 6,793.32, the price of the iPhone 15 is the highest in the world: equivalent to $2,048.27, something motivated by high inflation and restrictions on imports. That makes the iPhone rate there 30.15%: the cost of that mobile phone is almost a third of the annual salary in the country.
This data also includes countries like China (rate of 11.58%) for whose citizens the iPhone 15 “costs” more than double what it costs us in Spain. These figures seem to be misleading, because in 2022 Apple became the second in mobile phone sales in the Asian giant, according to CounterPoint Research.
India, the most populous country in the world and Apple’s great commercial objective for the future, is another contradictory example of the situation of their mobile phones: there the rate is 38.60%, so theoretically a 128 GB iPhone 15 costs Indian citizens almost 2/5 of their annual salary. Even so, quarterly sales in the last quarter of 2022 were two million units according to CMR, which seems to reflect the great economic inequality of the country, which has more than 1.4 billion inhabitants.
