Let's go in order of ascending price.

Apple Watch Series 4

There's nothing "problematic" at all about Watch Series 4, really.

(Aside from the awful LTE premium. It used to be $70, but now it's $100.)

Yes, Series 4 is a higher-priced device than Series 3, which started at $329 and $359, depending on whether you chose the 38mm or 42mm case. The new 40mm and 44mm case options are up $70 from their prior-generation "ancestors", so to speak. $399 for the smaller Series 4 + GPS, $429 for the 44mm case.

I suspect it won't be hard to sell existing Watch owners plus a decent amount of first-time Watch intenders on Series 4, though, given the raft of improvements year-on-year, such as:

• considerably bigger screen on both models (at least 32% - 40mm case sees the most screen area improvement by percentage)

• nicely evolved design, 0.7mm thinner than Series 3

• ridiculously speed-boosted, newly 64-bit SiP claimed to have a max 2x performance delta over the Series 3 (!), which would place the Apple S4 at up to five times faster than the "Series 0" (all the consumer cares about: Series 4 should be pretty damn snappy)

• safety features such as fall detection

• and an FDA-cleared (CORRECTION: not the same as "approved") echocardiogram-on-demand feature, a smartwatch world first ("coming soon") 

Seems Kevin Lynch and his team are doing everything they need to do to keep Watch on a positive trajectory heading into FY 2019. The arguably best value, assuming the Watch fits both your wrist and your fashion sensibilities, is the 44mm SKU, compared to its 42mm Apple Watch Sport ancestor from 2015. 42mm Sport was $399 (and without GPS) then, so in that aspect, Apple seems to have done just fine keeping Watch pricing under relative control.

iPhone XR (or "Ten-R", or whatever)

XR, the new mainstream flagship iPhone, is an interesting SKU. It's similar to the iPhone 8 of last year in general market positioning, but it doesn't resemble it at all - and since we're firmly in "sleek new look" territory, that's probably going to be a significant demand positive when the product's plusses and minuses are netted out.

I'm just your average consumer, but I suspect XR is aimed squarely at the iPhone 6 through 8 Regular crowd (maybe some of the 6 Plus and 6S Plus owners as well). Now, as a consumer, I get instinctively offended when a product category goes upwards in price, particularly when it's tech (I mean, just look at most megatrends in tech pricing from TVs to Windows PCs, right?).

XR, however, is a very meaningful improvement over the iPhone 8 in multiple ways:

• ~1.4MPdisplay (1792x828 less some pixels for rounded corners + notch), vs. the 1.0MP (1334x750) display on iPhone 6 through 8 Regular

• iPhone X-like design

• the exact same Face ID, front camera and back wide-angle camera and A12 Bionic as the $250+ more expensive iPhone Xs-series

• a major step forward to the 8 Plus realm of battery life, plus a claimed 90 minutes of additional runtime on top of that

Drawbacks are relatively few: No 3D Touch (luckily for me, I've only REALLY used 3D Touch for a single game app which I haven't played in over a year), having to adjust to a phablet-class device, and not having access to 512GB of storage (I'm guessing very few people will have a problem with this).

All told, paying $50 more for the same storage choices as last year shouldn't prove all that "painful" to Apple's traditional "$649 and up" crowd.

Though...I feel bad for you, iPhone 8 Plus owners. You don't need an upgrade path given the much-more-sensible 2+ year iPhone usage period, but if you're on the iPhone Upgrade Program and wanted to upgrade, your choices are not ideally priced relative to your previous pick. Anything can happen in a year, but I'm not seeing where a "natural" 8 Plus successor can be found within Apple's iPhone product matrix.

iPhone Xs ("iPhone Tennis") and the Theoretical Pitfalls of Living on the Edge of Technology Leadership

I'm not expecting a particularly large fraction of iPhone X-owning, non-iPhone Upgrade Program subscribers to jump for the Xs or Max. Nor should they!

But sure, it certainly seems that Apple has delivered, yet again, very meaningful year-on-year improvements to what you might call the premium flagship line.

The "problem", so to speak, is that Apple might not have found a way to engineer its premium flagship iPhone to enable a starting retail price less than $999 (for the Xs, at least). Confirmation of my theory will be fairly straightforward: Will Apple's overall gross margin remain somewhere around the 38.x% level it's at presently, or will it see a significant bump into the 40% range starting in FY19?

Why am I giving Watch and XR a relative pass, when iPhone Xs added in tangible improvements with no increase in price vs. last year?

Both Series 4 and iPhone XR have major design changes, particularly externally, which make it much easier for consumers to rationalize the price premiums. All of Apple's newly introduced products seem to have a good relative value vs. the prior year. However, value is ultimately in the eye of the buyer, not the seller.

Put differently: Series 4 and XR have price points that are well within the "historical Apple pricing norms" for those general classes of product, but $999 and up iPhones are still a very new phenomenon.

This isn't to say that near-term problems exist on the horizon given Apple's product strategy. Here's two reasons why Apple's decision to continue down the technological vanguard approach should be just fine for the upcoming 12-month sales cycle.

First, iPhone X was a runaway hit, somehow becoming Apple's most popular smartphone by units (and even the world's most popular?!) despite having a truly eye-watering (for a smartphone) price tag. Thus, Apple has established initial pricing power/consumer acceptance.

Second, until we see otherwise, the world economy is...more or less doing fine, despite the background jitters and trade war saber-rattling we could really do without. Clearly, when the global economy is in relatively good times, the global smartphone market can support prices of $1,000USD and up (even higher in various geographies).

Consumer perception of value can be an unpredictable thing, however, which inherently renders the $999 through $1,449 iPhone Xs and Xs Max more vulnerable to price elasticity of demand in the event of (not necessarily the eventuality of) a major-economic-power or overall-global recession. While the overall trend of worldwide prosperity has been up throughout history, as with the equities markets, cycles are more a question of when, not if; the only variables are extent and duration.

It's not that Apple lacks "defenses" against a deep recession - iPhone 7 starting at $449, for instance, isn't an "extravagant" price even if iPhone X never existed. Apple is one of the strongest companies in history, and very capable of handling recessions, as it has already done in the past. If Apple had to cut prices and thus margins to weather economic storms, I have little doubt it...well...could. ("Would" lacks history for confirmation, as the Apple of 1997 onwards had never been forced to take such drastic action. Also, iPhone's growth trajectory didn't seem visibly affected by the late-2007-to-mid-2009 U.S. recession.)

I'm not being bearish here (or so I think), just realistic. Apple has simply made a deliberate "business tradeoff" of sorts with its flagship devices, iPhone Xs series in particular. It has fully committed, eyes wide open, to lead the industry in overall design, technology, materials, and usability innovation. And the resulting products will simply cost what they cost. Apple management have often said they're not economists, though I'm sure they have an impressive team to help advise them on such macro matters.

So if the premium flagship iPhone line (currently Xs) remains at $999 and up for the foreseeable future, an interesting question arises: Is it possible for a technology company to want to innovate too much (one such example, boosting the Neural Engine from 600 billion operations/sec thoroughput to 5 trillion in a single generation)?

Or will Apple be able to pull off one of the most remarkable long-term consumer behavior reversals in all of tech history, and singlehandedly drag the market along to expect and readily buy the most cutting-edge smartphone form-factor functionality at this relatively new, well-north-of-$900USD price plateau?

Time will tell.