People often say that iPhones are nothing but for status. Its true that they are for status, but are they nothing but for status?
Luxury such as iPhones and, dunno, Hermes bags, have some things in common. Namely, they are meant to be made from premium materials, last longer by consequence, and be consumed as an exclusive item. Here, exclusivity is the key word, iPhones are nothing without being exclusive. This is obvious. However, there is more to this
Design is used as differentiator. We build objects from shapes and we assign them meaning by their usage/purpose. This way, a chair has four legs, and a sheet to place your bum onto the top. This is an essence of a chair, or a quintessence. So, chairs are stable objects, they hardly change functionally or structurally, but they do change appearance. Design is then fashioning the structure in order to make an object a useful utility. We can make a three legged chair. It wont conform to the chair's quintessence of the four legs, but we could sit on it, and its not like it didnt have legs at all. So three legged chair is semantically and genealogically related to a four legged chair because it is the parent of the three legged chair
Difference of design for objects of the same utility can be explained thus: objects in the world are undifferentiated so long they have no symbolical relevance to us. This means, that if we dont care about a rock on the street, we dont have categories for different rocks of the same category, rocks are undifferentiated in this way that we only care wat color they are and if they are big or not. But if we have a rock that is symbolically important, like a gem, then we care a whole lot about it, its properties, its usage. Design is making a common rock into a gem, making an undifferentiated into symbolic
There is a second purpose of design, aesthetic, which is the more significant one. Human pattern of use of the tools is not actually straightforward, people not always obey symbolic coding of objects. There are also usage overloading, a rock can serve as a tool of murder and a tool of breaking a coconut. So, design as a functional coding is limited structurally and cannot serve as determinant of behavior, it is only a guide to perceiving objects in a particular way. The functional basis of design cannot alone make people into using the object as it is intended semantically. Intention is purely aesthetic, so, there is never functional design aspect
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