I don't think the black money you proposed is very likely. If I have several thousand dollars of black money, that's not much and no one cares. OTOH, if you h

I don't think the black money you proposed is very likely. If I have several thousand dollars of black money, that's not much and no one cares. OTOH, if you have a lot of black money, let's say in millions of dollars, buying a single iPhone doesn't really help at all. Yet buying a bunch of iPhone's seems to be very inconvenient unless you are selling them to someone else. Status symbol was more likely 5 or 10 years back. Nowadays not a lot of people actually care about what phones you are using (at least the ones I know, potential selection bias there). My guess is that people simply don't care about having an iPhone vs an Android anymore. Especially so when Android phones don't suck or can be better than iPhone now.