The author has been paying his bills with iPhones. Not with apps or on bank sites -- he has been using the Apple hardware as currency. An unlocked, gold, 32-gigabyte iPhone 5s that costs about $815 with tax in the US goes for E839 (about $1,130) in Italy, roughly a month's wages for workers who do laundry, pick up kids from school, or provide care for the elderly. When one worker heard the author was visiting the States, she asked him to pick her up an iPhone in lieu of the equivalent cash for work she'd done. Transnational workers rich and poor have long dealt in an ever-evolving system of arbitrage for luxury goods carrying significant price differences around the world. Apple CEO Tim Cook has hinted that the cross-border movement of iPhones is important to his bottom line.