iPhone Sales Soar in Spain Despite High Costs and Economic Strain

Apple as a mirror: the best-selling phone is the most expensive

September 2015. Apple released the iPhone 6s, coinciding with an uncomfortable statistic: in a country with public finances on the verge of collapse, the best-selling phone is also the most expensive. This coincidence angers some and amuses others, fueling a discussion we have repeated for years without resolution. Is Apple a cult, or simply the company that sells best?

The pure marketing thesis: Apple as McDonald's

The most common argument is blunt. Apple sells what is least; what truly matters is knowing how to sell it. The company resembles McDonald's or Coca-Cola, multinationals that have made their fortune not with the best product, but with the best packaging. Pure marketing, they say, with margins that would not hold without the apple in the showcase. And the person buying an iPhone does not always have the rest of the ecosystem, but repeats the same logo like a uniform.

The corollary discomforts those who believe themselves immune: the apple cult exists, yes, but it is not the only one. Android users form another equally closed group, only invisible. With the system distributed among thousands of different models, not everyone is seen with the same badge on their hand, and so it does not attract attention. The sect without a uniform. The portrait is completed by the Spanish consumer in the background: exaggerated in bars per square meter and capable of buying the most expensive phone in the catalog during full financial hangover.

Is Apple more expensive or does it only seem so?

Here things get technical. An iMac with i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and 500 GB of disk appears offered for 1,150 euros, a supermarket price for those who look from outside. The apple defender responds with the usual: if you try to build a PC with the same hardware as a Mac, you dangerously approach its price range. The counter-reply comes with numbers: the processor in that team scores about 7,000 Passmark points, while an i7 5820K nearly doubles its computing power, memory bandwidth, and peripheral support.

The exchange rises in tone and abandons the realm of feelings to delve into the guts of silicon. And there, no one wins.

Hardware no longer distinguishes: same silicon, different packaging

The old promise that a Mac lasts longer and runs faster died when hardware became the same for everyone. A professional team with 1,534 CUDA cores serves to edit video; the superior card, with 2,000 cores, did not fall below 800 euros in budget. To retouch photographs, a 90-euro card is enough. Buying more is not robustness; it is leaving money on the table.

Those who have tinkered for decades add their own layer of nostalgia: systems compiled to measure for a single machine, central servers with 32 CPUs at 100% calculating a single task, old teams providing service to thousands of people with response times that no laptop freshly out of the factory matches today. A Mac, they repeat, is an ordinary computer to which any operating system can be installed. The magic is not inside.

Why Apple seems a cult and Android does not

The most used answer has to do with the showcase. An apple devotee tends to buy phone, tablet, and laptop from the same house: the complete ecosystem, the flag on all gadgets. The Android user splits their money between a Chinese brand, a Korean tablet, and a Taiwanese laptop. There is no liturgy because there is no common parish.

The status card is also played. Some buy Apple for the same reason another buys an expensive brand sweatshirt or a luxury watch: to distinguish themselves. Nothing new under the sun, only now the showcase is on the bar table. The one paying for the most expensive phone does not consider themselves rich for having it, but acts as if the price were a medal.

What those inside defend

On the other side, it is not all faith. Some describe in detail why they do not return: a touch panel without buttons that responds to the gesture, the ability to sign with the finger directly on it, a team that does not ask for reinstalls or fights with drivers every now and then. For those who work with image, the Mac was for years the industry standard. That is not marketing; it is professional custom.

The counterweight is equally solid. There is almost nothing that can be done on a Mac and cannot be done on Windows or Linux; on the contrary, yes. There are devices and programs that simply do not support the apple. And the security argument falters when looking at the proportion: for every Apple computer, there are more than a dozen Windows computers, so the interest of those who write threats points to the large market. If the proportion were the reverse, the king of computer problems would be the other.

Buying the brand or buying the stock

And then there is the argument that disorients everything: perhaps the product matters little. Apple would not be a great company because of its gadgets, but by its consistency as a business. Some confess having had shares and recommended them without believing in the quality of the article, only in the company's ability to sell the same thing to more people for longer. The apple as a cult is, from that perspective, the best possible investment: cults do not change faith. The same would apply to fast-food chains, cola drinks, or theme parks. The stock market does not reward the best product; it rewards the best story.

With this, nothing is closed. The unanswered question is exactly the same as the one still open: how much of that price is hardware and how much is belonging. And there, two people with the same phone in hand will give two incompatible answers.