Humans inherently rank things. We rank people, places, etc. Laptops and smartphones are definitely no exception to this bizarre trend of classification. The value of a smartphone or laptop comes from many things: how it is made, where it is made, what it is made of, where the materials that create it are made, who makes it, how long or how hard it is to make, etc. These factors, however, come primarily from the production of the commodity. Value also comes from the product in other ways: the service it provides, the demand for that product, the brand, the connotation surrounding it, etc. Most of the time, value is decided in regards to monetary value or by people. When it is decided monetarily, it normally relies on the costs and means of production. On the other hand, when it is decided by people, value usually relies on what the product means or stands for, as well as the demand for the product.
The main factor that makes one commodity more valuable than another is the brand. Of course there are cases where this doesn’t apply, but for the most part it does. Sometimes clothing can be more valuable based on fabric, such as a cashmere sweater verses a cotton sweater, but there are also plenty of cases where there are the same types of clothes, one is just hundreds of dollars more expensive because of who is selling it. This is known as sign value: commodities have value because they function as signs, value that emerges because these commodities are associated with status or prestige. An example of this would be a Mac computer. Most other computers can perform the same functions as a Mac computer for a much cheaper price, however, certain ideas such as wealth, popularity, etc. Both my phone and computer are Apple products and as commonly known, most Apple products are produced in areas in Asia that have relaxed human rights and labor conditions. This is a form of downward harmonization, because the company is getting cheap labor for cheap production.
The best example of use value or a high demand for a product, in my opinion, is in the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street”. In the film, the main character asks a group of people to sell him a pen. They all do the same thing and try to describe the pen as being “amazing”, but to no avail. Then one guy takes the pen and tells the main character he needs him to write down something. The main character replies that he doesn’t have a pen, and then the guy gives it to him. This guy was able to create a demand for the pen, and therefore, make the “sale”.
