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The problem is, immigration is useful for a range of things, and 100k is either far too low or far too high, depending on the cohort in question. If you're trying to attract middle aged successful white collar workers from China and Europe, the number needs to be north of 500k or you'll get overwhelmed. If you're trying to alleviate local low skill labor shortages like immigration from central America has historically, 10k might be too high.
It's just price discrimination in action - Apple would make less money if they only sold one model of iphone, and if they could get away with exponentially distributed prices they'd do it in a second.
Middle aged white collar workers from rich countries are among the least likely to want to immigrate.
All else equal, sure, but when certain industries have compensation 2x or 3x in America what they do in Europe, you can overcome those barriers pretty easily.
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Can you elaborate?
Exponential distribution: most units sold at a low price, some sold at a moderate one, with a long tail of exorbitant prices.
I don’t think that it’s actually optimal, but it conveys the idea of price discrimination.
Exactly - there are consumers to whom $50k is perceptually the same as $1k to the average consumer - if Apple could sell them a model of iphone for $50k to take advantage of that without the inevitable backlash, they would.
And there are manufacturers that do sell phones in that price range and above, like Vertu. There are customers for whom for wealth signaling purposes the device can actually be objectively worse they would still pay more. Some of the most expensive Vertu phones are dumb phones; a less useful device than the phone your average african has in his pockets.
It's a bit like watches, a cheap quartz watch just plain makes for a more useful watch than an automatic. But for phones, I don't know, it's even more outrageous to me since unlike watches, a phone has a limited useful life, even if you could replace parts like batteries that wear off. Phones stop being able to give even the most basic services as providers sunset legacy protocols or require newer ones like VoLTE.
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