LONG POST INCOMING!
Honestly I don't think it is daylight robbery. The cost of Apple devices are more justified if you look at it from ecosystem view and device performance.
1. Device Performance.
iPhone X Geekbench : 10,357 - $1,648 = $6.28 per point
Note 9 Geekbench : 8,876 - $1,398 = $6.34 per point
2. Ecosystem
Many people downplay this or simply just do not notice this at all but buying any Apple device usually throws in a high cost of software and ecosystem as compared to Android/Google.
Apple Ecosystem works tightly together, hardware and software are tuned perfectly to their best performance. It shows clearly how a 6 Core phone with 3GB of RAM and a 2,716mAh battery can outperform and outlast a phone with 8 Cores, 6GB of RAM and a whopping 3500mAh battery based on efficiency alone.
Software intergration is the best on iOS, Android has a lot of catch up to do. I would love to go into details in another post about this but for now things like on Tablets dragging and dropping is best on iPads and Android tablets are crap with this.
Apple isn't a data company, nor do they run ads for their users. Everything they do runs locally on your device. Photo suggestions, Siri, indexing of your emails, your on-device searches. Everything runs only on your device. Every part of Apple ecosystem is encrypted with a 128-bit AES encryption at very least in transit and on their server. No one can read it except yourself.
Even if they do collect analytic data it uses techniques such as Differential Privacy. For example, since iOS 10, Differential Privacy technology helped improve QuickType and emoji suggestions, as well as Lookup Hints in Notes.
Apple can now identify commonly used data types in the Health app and web domains in Safari that causes performance issues. This information will allow Apple to work with developers to improve your experience without revealing anything about your individual behavior.
Google/Android is an ad-revenue company. They make almost all of their money from ads. Android with Google services is the best at harvesting data to push expensive but very personal ads to users via the internet. Almost all the ad banners you see usually come from Admob which is also part of Google. So Android with Google can log your locations, travels, your app usage patterns (Within apps there are also recordings of what you tap and like more) You use Chrome or even google.com to do your searches. All this helps google push ads through almost every service you use and the cost.. Is your privacy and your data. Android has not really even started on on-device processing so your photos recommendation by google photo backup (Which is used to process and train their AI in their servers, encrypted? I don't think so) Your location suggestions is updated to Google first before running and scanning nearby for points of interest and gets pushed to you.
All this data is very very expensive and many companies want these to be able to target you.
I've been jumping between my iPhone X and my S9+ and I can tell you the ad tracking when I use solely my iPhone is very lost. They throw me very disconnected ads on pages that are unavoidable. (Safari has adblock & tracking prevention)
Then when you quickly shift over to Android for another month, the ad are crazy accurate.
3. Customer service.
Apple hands down are the kings of this. People sing praises for their services and Android OEMs are nowhere close to this.
4. Updates and Security
As with macOS vs Windows, the security outlook for iOS vs Android is stacked heavily in Apple’s favor: There’s more malware aimed at Android devices, it gets through more often, and security updates are slower in rolling out (not least because Google’s hardware partners are involved as well as Google).
iPhones aren’t invulnerable to hacking attempts, but they’re much more tightly locked down, and you don’t have to worry about security quite so much.
And updates...NEED I SAY MORE? Look at that iPhone 5s and iPad mini 2 on that iOS 12 supported list!
All in all for that cost say you get the iPhone X @ 1,648 vs Note 9 @ 1,398. Easily I'll spend that extra for the iPhone X
