I don't earn insane SV money but I could buy an iPhone X tomorrow, I save approx 50% of my salary every month but then I don't drive, own a house or have any debts.
My total owed to everyone is <1mth income.
I grew up poor though so my attitude to money is different to most people my age.
If I don't have a minimum of 6mths income in savings I feel vulnerable.
FWIW I won't be buying the iPhone X, my Moto G5 Plus is an ideal phone for me and only a few months old.
I did drop 1400 quid on a Thinkpad T470P though recently - I will spend money where it makes sense.
I suppose I have two points to make from your comments:
1) You are similar to most Americans in that you already have a phone that is ideal for your needs, and that phone isn't an iPhone X
2) You are different, statistically, from hundreds of millions of Americans, in that you have any money saved at all, and don't have large financial responsibilities (house, debts)
off topic, sorry.... I am about 1 year in on the T460P as a personal machine - first laptop purchase in 10 years. looks like we came to the same conclusions.
I love it, fast, lightweight, the 2560x1440 screen at 14" is lovely.
Not cheap but an i7-7700HQ in this form factor is a decent amount of grunt and with the nvme it's faster than my old i5-2500K desktop at home by a fair margin, it doesn't feel noticeably slower in practice than my Ryzen desktop for most things (until I spin up 3-4VM's and then I do start to notice but really 4VM's with 4GB of RAM each on a laptop is just crazy).
My total owed to everyone is <1mth income.
I grew up poor though so my attitude to money is different to most people my age.
If I don't have a minimum of 6mths income in savings I feel vulnerable.
FWIW I won't be buying the iPhone X, my Moto G5 Plus is an ideal phone for me and only a few months old.
I did drop 1400 quid on a Thinkpad T470P though recently - I will spend money where it makes sense.