Do you want to look rich? Buy an iPhone



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The new iPhone X is presented at a special Apple event at the Steve Jobs Theater on the campus of Apple Park on September 12, 2017 in Cupertino, California.
Photo: Getty

It's hard (and usually not all that productive) to guess how someone is rich based on appearances. But if you really need a shortcut to find out if someone is rich or not, a new study suggests that all you need to do is see what type of phone they have. If it's an iPhone, chances are they're doing well for themselves.

This little tidbit for on-the-fly badessments of a stranger's bank account comes from economists at the University of Chicago, who recently published an article with the National. Bureau of Economic Research highlighting how consumer behavior and media consumption can infer demographic information. It turns out that the iPhone is a pretty consistent symbol of wealth.

Of course, owning an iPhone does not mean that a person is rich, but the device is the most reliable indicator to determine if someone falls into a higher income bracket. "All the years in our data, no single brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016," the researchers wrote, by Business Insider.

This data showed that owning an iPhone gave the 69 percent changed to correctly identify the owner as "high income", which was defined in the document as being in the top quartile of income for the type of household of the person (single, married, with dependents, etc.). 19659004] There are, of course, some caveats to this. While new iPhones often carry a high price when they are not subsidized by a carrier, there are many older iPhones still in circulation. Last year, before the launch of the iPhone X and the iPhone 8, the search firm Newzoo watched all the iPhones in circulation and found that the majority of devices in the world were not in the box. user were the most recent model. At the time, the iPhone 7 line accounted for 19% of all devices in the wild. The remaining 81% went from the iPhone 6 dating back to the iPhone 4, released in 2010.

For all the stuff (especially deserved) Apple has taken to limit the processing power over the older devices in order to preserve the battery life, the company is actually good enough to continue to support its old phones. The current version of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 11, supports five different generations of phones dating from the iPhone 5S, released in 2013. When iOS 12 will be released later this year, it will continue to support all these generations of devices …

Still, if you are looking for a shortcut to place a person in an income-based demographics, look for the Apple logo. (In general, membership in the smart phone was an indicator of "high income" according to research, like owning an Android phone or having Verizon as a carrier also served as fairly reliable indicators of the determination of the a person's wealth. percent of low-income Americans own a smartphone.)

The information that is perhaps the most interesting of the diary is the speed with which the l & # 39; iPhone has become a status symbol, and what it has replaced. In 1992, the most reliable indicator of a high-income person was to own an automatic dishwasher or an answering machine. In 2004, the purchase of a new car or the possession of a personal computer were among the best markers of wealth.

[9to5Mac, Business Insider, National Bureau of Economic Research]
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