Before people start flagging this because it has the scary bearded man's name attached, it's actually a really accessible introduction to fundamental economic ideas without much political musing, if any. It does this with common, everyday items (iPhone) and common every day ideas, coupled with nice graphics.<p>I think it fits the bill HN has for intellectual curiosity fairly well.
<i>> We believe that the initial research and design labour costs can be ignored since these costs have been spread out over different models of the iPhone and the contribution of the research and development cost is increasingly negligible for the newer iPhones.</i><p>Is it? I believe that there are hundreds (or thousands?) of engineers working for Apple full time. And I can see that just keeping linux at my home computer updated needs combined efforts of hundreds of people at very least. So it seems very unlikely to me that R&D costs for newer iPhones are negligible. Am I right?
The piece starts out saying the iPhone is a commodity.<p>My chair is a commodity. The physical iPhone manufactured at a Foxconn factory has aspects of a commodity.<p>But is that physical iPhone device worth hundreds of dollars solely for its physical manufacture form? I know that teams of dozens/hundreds are working on software updates to push out over the network to fix problems and enhance the device. This helps make the high price worth it. But here the idea of the device as a traditional commodity breaks down. My chair does not get fixes and improvements pushed to it, at a very low cost, from a relatively small team.<p>I should note, this does not negate the idea that Foxconn workers are exploited, rather that the math is off. Because the iPhone price is from a mix of traditional manufacture, plus those programmers in Cupertino pushing out updates, and an analysis must take this difference into account.