https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/20/16338022/iphone-x-google-pixel-2-price-change

This year has seen a big upgrade in quality from most phone companies: Samsung’s new Galaxy Note doesn’t explode, Apple’s iPhone has a radical redesign, the OnePlus 5 is lovely, and LG’s V30 is shaping up to be a strong contender. If you love technology, you love it for precisely this inexorable march toward better, faster, and prettier devices. But one thing that’s different about the best smartphones of 2017 is that the price of admission is going up.

With taxes factored in, we can say with surety that the $1,000 smartphone is among us — and it’s not going away anytime soon, either. That’s the reality of advanced mobile technology now. Even incremental change has become slow and expensive, so if we all continue to insist on seeing improvements on a yearly cadence, we should accept that some of the increased cost will trickle down to us. There’s no industry-wide conspiracy to hike up prices without justification, even though they are definitely moving up in a harmonized, seemingly coordinated fashion. We’re just looking at a very mature market, one where the major contenders are rolling out their eighth generation of devices.