I do not really feel anything premium about iPhone. Mobile phone market saturated quite sometime ago. Only thing premium about iPhone is Apple pricing. It apparently gives some quarter of the walled garden market tremendous "high-end" feeling by owning iPhone. Apple really succeeded in creating this image. Apple watches, though very useful, are something disposable every 1 to 3 years yet they put Hermes, Nike and other name brands to maintain high end image. When Apple hyped up X super-cycle, I stopped my annual update cycle. I did not want to be milked. My current SE2020 is very "useful". I used to be an incurable gadget freak but became quite sober these days. I ran my own business that requires heavy use of off-office (i.e., mobile) communications. But I have no desire to buy the latest and the greatest. Perhaps next year when iPhone 14 might have some sort of touch ID, I will probably buy it. Until then, nothing really attracts me (as far as mobile phone is concerned). Other thing is that I strongly believe that the culture of Apple has changed (or completely lost). I do not expect Apple will wow us every year. But somehow, when Apple was more than spreadsheet gazer/bottom line defender, I loved everything Apple was doing and was proud of owning their products, S/W or H/W.
If I may, I just wish to post some quotes I stole from another forum that I noted and stored in my Notes app (hey, it's Apple app and very user friendly!
. Sorry, my post is becoming too long.
I value those airy-faiiry image of Apple in yesteryears more than high-end image created. In the era of former CEO, we all could feel that he was always thinking about pleasing users of Apple products. The bottom line naturally followed.
"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." - Steve Jobs
"Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything." - Steve Jobs at the unveiling of iPhone
"We built products for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. - Steve Jobs"
[Think Different] commercial in his own words in 1997
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtftHaK9tYY
Ahh, speechless.....