The best gadgets are available to millions, and the ones designed for the rich are a joke. In tech, the advantages of wealth have become more subtle.
Say you're a rich person. In particular, you're the kind of rich person who likes to buy the best stuff. You drive an Audi with a special suffix, live in two or three tremendous houses, and cook with a kitchen full of $300 pans. Your kids play with a tiny, stupid purebred dog, and have tutors with PhDs. Somewhere in one of your basements, there's a mechanized massage chair with built-in speakers. Everything you have is better than the things everyone else has. Except your gadgets.
In the most important categories, real rich people tech doesn't exist. There is no better phone than an iPhone or the best Android or Windows Phone. There is no better everyday laptop than the major companies' flagship models. There are fantastically expensive TVs, of course, but the best one for your bedroom's $8,000 ivory-inlaid mahogany entertainment center isn't going to cost you more than two grand. The best tablet? $500, or a few hundred more if you want extra storage. The best wireless internet connection? Less than $100 a month. A desktop that can play any game for the next three years? $3,000. The best desktop for doing anything else, with the best spare monitor? Same.
I suppose you could buy a $20,000 pro camera or spend a fortune on audio equipment or extravagant home entertainment systems, which are priced specifically with rich people in mind. But most of the core of the luxury segment, as analysts like to call it, is basically dictated by Apple's price tiers, which means it's accessible not just to the rich, but to the middle class. There's no VIP section in tech hardware, no credible Rolex or Ferrari or Hermes. The biggest companies make the best products, and they don't charge very much. A CEO of a Fortune 500 company quite possibly has the same phone as his driver, who has the same phone as you.
Gadgets are better when they're precisely and uniformly assembled, and require advanced manufacturing techniques as much as they require careful design. Great new gadgets routinely require entirely new manufacturing techniques, which means they require hundreds of millions of dollars to launch. That's why you can't hand-craft a better cellphone, and even if you could, you'd have to hand-craft better software than Google and Apple and Microsoft's multi-billion-dollar R&D departments.
That's also why those super-expensive phones — think Vertu — never made sense. They're usually just jewel-covered feature phones, which makes them worse than the worst smartphone you can buy at any Verizon store. They're $10,000 Skymall products. You only buy them if you're rich and stupid, which is probably why they're fading out of existence.
The flattening of the gadget market is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before, oh, 2005, there was a tier of products for rich people: new things. If you were rich in the late 70s, you got to be the first person at your country club with a PC. In the early 90s, you might've flashed a laptop at your jetsetting buddies. You had a cellphone before anyone else, and a BlackBerry before smartphones took off. Being rich let you live in the future, with tech categories that had just been invented.
