Tony Stark’s phone

Andy Warhol talked about the democratizing power of certain industrial age products.

You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Emphasis mine. This is what the Campbell’s Soup can paintings were about.

Not everything obeys that logic. The fantasy of the Batmobile reflects how a zillionaire who is (or has access to) an engineering genius can have a much better car than you, because it benefits from using rare materials, labor-intensive machining on the parts, more time from a mechanic devoted to tuning and maintainance, et cetera.

Software and consumer electronics are mostly like a Coke. Tony “Iron Man” Stark in the movies having a much better smartphone than you do, but this does not make sense. The hard part of making a smartphone is the up-front design & development of the chipset and the software. Once you have covered those costs to make one, making additional copies of it is very cheap. Everyone can have the best.

I have long joked that Apple’s business model was spending enormous fortunes to make the toys Steve Jobs wanted, and then covering the cost of doing that by selling identical copies of his toys to everyone else.

If you ask me, the implications are not just democratic but socialist.

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See also: The Democracy Laptop.