Are top of the line smartphones expensive?

High-end, top of the line, smartphones are as expensive as a good laptop computer and sometime cost even more. Does it make sense? Samsung’s new Note 7 and Apple’s iPhone 6, for example, are about JD700 in Amman. You can easily find a mid-range decent laptop for JD400 or JD500. Does this mean that laptop are cheap and smartphones expensive?

There is more than one way to explain this apparently strange price structure. To start with, powerful smartphones do for you more than what the typical laptop does, and end up being more essential, more critical to what you do every day; if only for the excellent camera that is built in the device. Moreover, smaller has never meant cheaper. When it comes to advanced electronics and digital systems it is quite the opposite actually. When you think of all the functionality that they are able to squeeze in a smartphone, it is simply mind blowing, unbelievable, by any standard. So smartphones prices are justified.

One also should compare apples with apples — and I don’t mean any word play here on the brand that bears the same name.

When you buy a smartphone you get the operating system (Android, Apple iOS or Windows Mobile) with it, and are also able to download and install hundreds of perfectly legal, perfectly free for most, and perfectly working applications. It is all included, and it is not a minor point.

On the other hand when you buy a laptop you typically have to pay for expensive software licences that significantly raise the total cost and in most cases make the computer more expensive than the smartphone in the end. Say you purchased a laptop at JD500; that is bare hardware. If it is a Windows-based model you still have to acquire a Windows licence (about JD130, approximately) and an MS-Office licence (about JD300). This is as much as the bare computer itself. And of course if you are planning to buy other software like Photoshop or such, you easily end up paying two or three times the initial price of the bare machine.

There was a time when software piracy represented the biggest share of the market in a place like Jordan. Buyers would only take into consideration the price of the hardware, betting on obtaining and using illegal software copies afterwards. These days are gone and software piracy though still existing has significantly decreased, and today has become marginal. Public awareness and usage ethics have improved and users not only realise the importance to abide by the law but also have come to appreciate the quality and the intrinsic value of original software licences, the fact that they can update them online, and so forth.

When you consider paying JD700 or so for a high-end smartphone you should not think that this is money paid on a mobile telephone. You are buying an excellent camera, a GPS device and a real window open on the Internet with all that this entails, in particular a superb tool to communicate via text, photo and sound with the world, and what is more for free, thanks to apps like WhatsApp, Skype, Viber and the like. This alone more than justifies the price initially paid.

As for the countless extra apps found on Apple Store or Google Play to download and install, they are either free or cost an average of JD5. Thinking it over, I find smartphones truly inexpensive.