What I find really amazing is that we have here an incredibly elite service that the vast majority of people will never be able to afford, and yet its elite clients are dependent on essentially the same mobile devices that everyone else is. You can spend ~$2k on a phone, and it will be the best phone you can buy. There's no $20k phone that will be any better.
It's like flying in first class and then having to queue up in the same immigration line as everybody else - except in that scenario you can pay your way into a priority lane.
True, ~$2k is still a lot for a phone, but it's within reach of so many more people than the gatekept world of private banking and jets.
This is not a comment about wealth disparity - it's about goods which seem to resist the impact of wealth disparity; where there is a relatively low upper bound on how good of a thing you can buy.
It's not going to be any better, but if you'd like to spend $20k on a phone, Vertu still seems to be around peddling crocodile skin phones encrusted with diamonds etc.
“The main trade that was carried out was in the skins of the NowWhattian boghog but it wasn’t a very successful one because no one in their right minds would want to buy a NowWhattian boghog skin. The trade only hung on by its fingernails because there was always a significant number of people in the Galaxy who were not in their right minds.”
I'm shocked that Vertu are still about - that said there's a classic idiom "money can't buy taste". The aesthetic of Vertu's devices is just so gauche, I'd imagine the traditional Coutts customer would abhor it.
You don’t get any actual advantage from them , it is all cosmetic.
Your flagship $1500 phone which is within the reach of the many people has the same or better specs than that.
"What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good"
I was joking the other day that the Apple Watch is the ultimate equalizer. The CEO, worth a billion dollars, and the janitor at our company are rocking the same Apple watch
Is this what some of Blackberry phones would have been if they continued their earlier legacy and designed phone lineups that appeal to reach people (hardened device, durable, privacy, "non-trackable", can connect to any cellular network and satellite internet.. etc)?
Vertu emerged from Nokia when they were at their peak - Frank Nuovo was the key designer there, and it was one of his projects.
From memory the original versions (Vertu Signature, Vertu Ascent, … ) used one of the Nokia feature-phone OSs as the base - maybe Series 30 or Series 40? - or they might have used one of the Symbian OS’es (Series 60).
They definitely used a Symbian OS in subsequent Vertu devices, before switching to Android later on.
They were incredibly well made devices, but ridiculous.
Source: I worked at Nokia for a while in a non-engineering role. I spent some time with a Vertu Ascent, and had access to the Vertu stores in Asia.
Index funds and low fees is the best way, and that's available to everyone. In fact the more expensive services are worse precisely because they're more expensive, and so underperform against passive index funds.
It's like flying in first class and then having to queue up in the same immigration line as everybody else - except in that scenario you can pay your way into a priority lane.
True, ~$2k is still a lot for a phone, but it's within reach of so many more people than the gatekept world of private banking and jets.
This is not a comment about wealth disparity - it's about goods which seem to resist the impact of wealth disparity; where there is a relatively low upper bound on how good of a thing you can buy.