Manuvadi Apple does cost census in India with iPhone

Apple has restored the balance of the universe. Steve's boys have done a good Jobs and I mean every rupee of it.

For a while the iPhone had stopped doing its job. Its job was never to make calls. Its job was to tell the room who you are before you open your mouth and expose your SoBo or SoDe accent and ahankaar. A rising economy and no-cost EMI ruined that. Every Tappu, Duggu and Harku had one, and Harku even had the bigger storage than Harry, because second hand.

India is the OG varna vyavastha country. Two decades of liberalisation kept chipping at the old hierarchy and then the iPhone arrived just in time to hand us a new one, portable, pocketable but always in hand, with a bitten forbidden fruit on the back. Then time, the great leveller, levelled it. The income gap between Mukesh Ambani of the Altamount Road and Mukesh Chaudhary of Amaltash Marg kept widening, widening is not the word but there is no other word that means widening like widening does. To clarify it like ghee is to butter, the gap earlier was as wide as the Pacific Ocean and it kept rising by adding a Bay of Bengal every year. Neither Mukesh noticed it. As they drifted further apart on every Forbes list, they grew closer together on the Apple list. Both carried the 17 Pro Max. Mukeshbhai's had 2TB storage, he could afford a million TBs but iPhones maxed out two. Nobody can see a terabyte. That is the tragedy of storage, the one status symbol that stays inside. If the iPhone, as claimed, was a status symbol, the two enjoyed the same status.

The posh took evasive action. South Delhi is full of men who bought the Samsung Galaxy Ultra. Rohan from Panchsheel flaunts an Ultra not because he loves Android but because his driver Hareram wouldn’t sell a kidney for an Ultra. He would happily sell both for an iPhone. Exclusivity maintained by abandonment.

Cupertino noticed. India was full of iPhones and empty of aspiration, equality was rising. That’s the European disease, only the poor don't have an iPhone and the geeks don't want one. The same with America. Phone means iPhone. Except India is not Europe or American. If the iPhone loses aspiration in India it loses everything, because India is aspiration with a Tiranga.

So on Wednesday night Apple did what Manu did. It wrote the rules down. iPhone Duo, Rs 2,99,900 for 256GB, Rs 4,49,900 for 2TB, which you don't need but will buy. Pre-orders from October 16, delivery from October 23, dignity restored and delivered the same day. Duo, for the Sanskrit-challenged, means two. Dvi. Dwij. Twice born. The Brahmin of the lineup. It folds in half and so will you when you see the EMI, roughly twelve and a half thousand a month for two years on a no-cost scheme, which is roughly what Tappu earns, so the scheme has no cost only for people who never needed a scheme. That is the whole point. The Duo doesn't even have Face ID. It doesn't need to recognise your face. Your face needs to recognise it.

Below the Duo, the Kshatriya. iPhone 18 Pro Max, Rs 1,79,900, up Rs 30,000 on last year. Not foldable, but a warrior nonetheless, patrolling the border between the rich and the merely well off. Below that, the Vaishya. iPhone 18 Pro, Rs 1,64,900, the trader class, the upper middle class, the CA, the startup founder in his second funded year. Comfortable, ambitious, forever 15K short of the Pro Max and three tax brackets short of the Duo. In cricket terms the Pro is an IPL contract, the Pro Max is a Test cap, and the Duo is the BCCI. And that's it. Three varnas. The fourth is where the Cupertino Manusmriti goes quiet.

There is no iPhone 18. There is an iPhone 18 Pro and an iPhone 18 Pro Max, and a line in the press release saying the standard iPhone 18 is expected in spring, which is Apple for abhi nahin. Let the rich feel rich all winter and once winter is here, can the spring be far behind. Till then, notice the spring in the steps of Sunayna as she dials the bhaya to come and pick her up from in the front of the Promenade.

Meanwhile the rungs below can jalo and prepare for one meal less days. Last year's iPhone 17 now costs Rs 99,900, that’s 17,000 more than it did last year, for being a year older. The iPhone 16, a phone from 2024, is Rs 89,900, a full 20,000 up. The 17e, e for economy, is Rs 79,900, again 15,000 up. The Air is up thirty. And the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max, the two phones every Mukesh carried, have been discontinued. Retired. Struck off the register. The one iPhone that had become common has ceased to exist. That is not a price list, that is a cost census. The lower middle class has been informed that its EMI phone now costs an EMI and a half. The status symbol is back to being the status symbol.

Note the India premium too. The Duo is $1,999 in America, about Rs 1.90 lakh at the counter, before their sales tax. We pay Rs 2,99,900, a lakh and ten thousand more for the same fold. Cupertino knows us. We don't want the cheapest phone. We want the phone that proves we are not the cheapest. The South Delhi Ultra men can come home now. The Ultra was a protest note. The Duo is the coronation.

On October 16 at 5.30 pm the pre-orders open. There will be a queue, a virtual one, the only queue the Duo class will ever stand in. Somewhere a Harku will refresh the page, look at the number, and go back to his 17 Pro Max, a phone that officially no longer exists. He will do what India does when it cannot buy. He will chant. Achchha chalta huun, Duo mein yaad rakhna. Balance restored. Cupertino’s bank balance, too.

(Kamlesh Singh, a columnist and satirist, is Tau of the popular Teen Taal podcast)

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(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)