Ouch: Indians pay the most in the world for an iPhone 5S

It’s no secret that at a little over Rs 53,000 the 16GB iPhone 5S is quite a splurge for many Indians. But a new report from Mobile Unlocked and broken down by the Guardian, using official Apple prices, tells us just how bad things really are. Using purchasing power parity to understand what percentage of a person’s disposable income he or she would spend to buy the iPhone 5S, Mobile Unlocked concluded that the phone costs Indians about 22 percent of per capital GDP, the highest in the world, followed by Vietnam (19.8 percent) and Jordan (18.3 percent). The cheapest place to buy the phone, based on this calculation, is Qatar where customers would spend under 1 percent of the per capita GDP. [caption id=“attachment_1104377” align=“alignleft” width=“300”]  Getty Images[/caption] The method is similar to The Economist’s Big Mac Index that uses the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac Burger to determine whether global economic trends eventually balance out to allow the same item to have the same value across various currencies, keeping them at their correct levels. If, instead of using income percentage, basic price and sales taxes are taken into account, then Jordan beats India, where the iPhone 5S costs more than 50% of the US price at USD 1091, followed by Turkey and Romania. Read the entire Guardian story here.