But why are phones that expensive to begin with? The actual hardware costs are magnitudes less than the retail price. For the price of a the cheapest iPhone X you can get a high end laptop. It doesn't make sense to me why other mass consumer electronics like PC's continuously get faster, better and cheaper but smartphones continuously get more expensive for only modest and incremental improvements.
My understanding is Apple has a pretty good margin while most other manufacturers are hardly profitable. It’s a competitive industry. Nobody is charging twice as much as they need to because nobody has that kind of market power.