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​We all know Apple's iPhone X is expensive, but how much of your life are you giving up when you fork over a thousand dollars for that shiny new smartphone? It depends on where you live. Using data collected by the investment bank UBS, personal finance site HowMuch graphed the number of hours needed to work on an average salary in dozens of cities around the world in order to buy an iPhone X. (The iPhone X starts at a sticker price of $999 in the US, but UBS looked at the average price of the phone in each location to make its calculations more accurate.) The results show a lot of variation both within continents and among continents.

 

The cities where you have to work the fewest hours to afford the iPhone X are Zurich (38.2 hours), Geneva (47.5 hours) and Los Angeles (50.6 hours). The cities where you have to work the most hours to afford the iPhone X are Cairo (1066.2 hours), Mumbai (917.8 hours) and New Delhi (804.2 hours). Assuming a 40-hour workweek, you'd have to work for six whole months on an average Cairo salary to be able to buy a fancy new iPhone, without spending any money on rent, food or anything else, compared to less than a week in Switzerland's largest city.

At risk of stating the obvious: It's not worth it! An iPhone X is a time-, attention- and quality-of-life-sucking machine that is not worth six months' of anyone's labor. And yes, we know it's facile and paternalistic to tell people in the developing world that they should forgo luxuries that Westerners have already adopted en masse, and we also know that access to computers and smartphones is increasingly a job and life requirement around the world. But if it's at all possible to raise standards of living in developing countries without getting a new generation trapped in a cycle of buying an expensive new Apple product every year or two, let's do that, please. 

[HowMuch]

<p>L.V. Anderson is Digg's managing editor.</p>

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