The other question to ask is why do some consumers want less for their money?
Apple is making luxury goods, they're not going to drop their prices.
It's like how there's recently been a bunch of articles about how phones are getting "too much" RAM and the comparison is laptops.
When the question should really be, why do laptop manufacturers get away with putting 4 or 8gb of RAM in a laptop and mobile phones are catching up.
And anyway. What most people do is use their devices however they want with the expectation that everything runs smooth, they can multitask and the demands of higher quality video/pictures/refresh rates can be met.
Of course there are people that are satisfied with yesterday's technology. Plenty of people use 10 year old ThinkPads and get their work and entertainment done. Same with getting a £100 smart phone.
Well, for example, I recently used my iPhone X to edit a 4K 60fps video using iMovie. This was quick, easy, and all playback was silky smooth. I did this while sitting at the airport lounge waiting for my flight, and it didn't use too much of my battery.
Meanwhile, my very high-end gaming PC struggles to play the video files from my iPhone at 60fps for some mysterious reason.
Yes it’s funny how fast people forget how much power is actually required to run all that basic stuff included in mobile OSes by default. Take the camera app on iOS e.g, it stitches 20+ MP panoramas in real-time, with filers enabled, does continuous zoom by combining images from multiple cameras etc. It wasn’t very long ago that I had software on my Linux desktop PC that did that (with much worse results) and it took up to half an hour in some cases. Or try browsing the modern web with a iPhone 4 or a ~5 year old Android phone for that matter. You don’t need to be a power user at all to benefit from the increase in processing capabilities in modern phones.
The playback issue (and the reason video editing went so smoothly) is probably because of hardware video codex support. Mobile devices, iPhone or otherwise, are miles ahead of most desktop graphics cards when it comes to video codec support.
H.265 support in graphics cards and consumer processors has laughably lacked behind on mobile, probably because of licensing.
There's also the fact that a lot of video applications on Windows don't enable hardware decoding by default out of fear of encountering buggy drivers or hardware.
On mobile there's basically only one way to decode video, which makes use of all the phone's dedicated hardware, while on desktop applications can use a wide variety of codecs. Then comes the decision whether to decode on the CPU or GPU, as both have hardware decoding support these days, or to fall back to software decoding because the specific combination of codec and bit depth wasn't supported by the hardware of choice.
Then there's the fact that Apple logically encodes video the camera records into a format that iMovie is well optimised for. If you encode video with your PC's GPU, it'll probably be just as snappy playing back while the iPhone video might still be struggling.
