Have an iPhone, yeah? Turns out you’re a ‘rich’ person

Great.

If you own an iPhone, good for you. That must mean that you eat gold coins for breakfast, bathe in diamonds, and can afford to live in Dublin. Or it just means that you've got a decent phone because you want to be able to contact people and scroll through Instagram without your phone lagging every two seconds. According to some new research though, having an iPhone actually points to the former... apparently. A new study published the National Bureau of Economic Research found that almost 70 percent of people who have an iPhone also have high incomes. Where are all of these rich people with iPhones then because we certainly don't know anyway. The study considered the following:

"We measure cultural distance between two groups as the ability to infer an individual's group based on his or her (i) media consumption, (ii) consumer behaviour, (iii) time use, or (iv) social attitudes. "Knowing whether someone owns an iPad in 2016 allows us to guess correctly whether the person is in the top or bottom income quartile 69 percent of the time. "Across all years in our data, no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016."

The study is basically saying that if you own an Apple product, it's a sign of status. However, the research didn't state what Apple products they were talking about... and we all know there's a massive difference between a MacBook Air and a secondhand iPhone 3G you got from Cex. Sure look.