Time of Cost for iPhone

Apple iPhones are ubiquitous, with people obsessively hunched over them from New York to London to Kiev. But how well people can afford them varies widely, even among the world's most prosperous cities.

It's not so much the price of the phone, but the wages their owners earn, that make the difference. Compare New York and London, for example. People in each city tend to be consumed by work, glued to their smartphones and caught up in a money culture driven by high finance. Both cities are in the top 5 on UBS Wealth Management's latest list of the world's most expensive cities.



But the average Londoner would have to work 41.2 hours to earn enough to buy an iPhone 6, while a New Yorker can buy it in just 24, according to the UBS study. That's because wages lag further behind the staggeringly high cost of living in London than in New York; London doesn't even crack the top 10 cities for average gross earnings (it's 13th, while New York is fourth).

You'd need an even stronger work ethic to afford an iPhone 6 in Athens, Greece (98 hours' work, on average) or Beijing (218 hours) — and have to slog even longer in Nairobi, Kenya (468 hours) or Kiev, Ukraine (627 hours). But if you lived in Zurich, the highest-paid city in the study, you could snap one up after just 20.6 hours.