REVEALED: WHAT DEFINES LUXURY & QUALITY OF LIFE AROUND THE WORLD
A luxury lifestyle might cost more than it used to, but how does it compare with cities around the world?
4 min
A life of luxury in Australia costs more than it used to in Australia. Inflationary pressures have pushed everything from the price of real estate, extravagant dining experiences and lavish weekends away up higher than they’ve ever been before.
The price tag for luxury homes across Australia now starts at $2.52 million, up an eye watering 72 per cent from a decade ago.
But what counts as luxury varies significantly depending on location. Sydney remains Australia’s most expensive market, where luxury begins at $4 million. The Gold Coast has now taken second place at $2.6 million, pushing ahead of Melbourne’s $2.49 million entry point.
That’s according to Luxury Report, produced by real estate firm Ray White, analysed what defines luxury today.
Global comparison
Housing affordability continues to hover at crisis levels in Australia, but how does a luxury lifestyle in Australia compare with the rest of the world?
A look at real estate markets abroad quickly reveals that where you choose to live can have a huge impact on what it costs to put a roof over your head.
For example, in Monaco, a small apartment can set you back more than $38,800 per square metre. Here, more than 40 per cent of the nation’s residents are millionaires: the highest proportion of any city in the world.
According to the ninth edition of a report that offers a snapshot of how global cities compare on cost of living, quality of life and income and affordability, Sydney and Melbourne isn’t anywhere near as expensive as other cities around the world.
Which puts it perspective for the wealthy trying to grapple with whether or not they can afford to keep the holiday house, or whether to list it for sale.
The Mapping the World’s Prices 2025 report ranked the cheapest and most expensive cities around the world, with the Deutsche Bank Research Institute assessing global cost and quality of life indicators.
The report tracks what it costs to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle. This includes the prices of everything from groceries, wine, buying a city apartment, salaries and general measures of the quality of life. Other factors measured include the cost of a summer dress, a carton of cigarettes, internet data and what it costs to dine out in some of the best restaurants.
Produced by the Deutsche Bank Research Institute, the report points out that inflation making a roaring comeback over the last five years, currency swings are influencing purchasing power and the world’s cost of living leaderboard is therefore shifting quickly.
Researchers focused on the 69 cities that matter most to global financial markets, and therefore your investment portfolio.
Here’s a breakdown of the most expensive places to live around the world:
Quality of life
If you’re seeking a good quality life, the top five cities for a quality lifestyle listed in the report are Luxembourg, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Vienna and Helsinki.
Meanwhile, Zurich and Geneva have slipped out of the top five because cost of living pressures have continued to skyrocket, making these cities now the most expensive in the world to live in.
Buying an apartment
Prices for an apartment have fallen by 20 per cent in Hong Kong over the last five years, but still top the list, followed by Zurich, Singapore, Seoul and Geneve.
London and New York are just outside the top five, while Beijing comes in at ninth place, highlighting the elevated property prices in China. If you’re looking to buy an apartment, unit or townhouse in Australia, the median price in July 2025 was $686,399.
Utility bills
Electricity bills cost around $350 to $420 per quarter in most states of Australia, which is much cheaper than what Germans are forking out. Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin have the highest energy bills in the world, while Warsaw, Vienna and Prague also make the top 10, highlighting that Eastern European cities are counting the costs of the lack of cheap Russian gas.
iPhone
If you want to pick up a smartphone to keep in touch with loved ones while travelling, you’re going to pay a lot more for one in Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, India and Sweden. Seoul is the cheapest as competition with Samsung makes it even cheaper than in US cities.
Groceries
Geneva, San Francisco, Zurich, New York and Boston are the top five costly places to stock up on groceries. Even by Swiss standards, groceries in Geneva are generally expensive, while groceries in Sydney are 39.41 per cent lower than in Geneva.
Wine
Picking up a bottle of wine will set you back if you’re in Singapore, where you’ll pay more than anywhere else in the 69 countries surveyed. Jakarta, Seoul, New York and Oslo are also expensive. It’s much cheaper to purchase wine in some other lovely cities, including Rome, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Budapest and Lisbon.
Cigarettes
Incredible, Australia tops the list anywhere in the world for the price of cigarettes. Government taxes and duties applied to cigarettes aim to dissuade consumption mean that Melbourne and Sydney have been ranked as the most expensive place for cigarettes, along with New Zealand.
Restaurants
Eating out in a swanky restaurant in Australia can set you back up to $300 per person. That might sound expensive if you’re trying to feed a family of four, it’s going to be more in Zurich, Geneva, New York, San Francisco and Boston.
Buying a car
Singapore and Copenhagen actively discourage the purchase of cars and are the most expensive cities to purchase a set of wheels. In fact, the cheapest possible car will set you back around $150,000 in Singapore Dollars. That’s for a basic car like a Honda Jazz, which is the same price as a Porche in any other part of the world.
The reason cars are so expensive in Singapore is the huge population in a limited space meaning the government prioritises a clean environment and less traffic. The next most expensive places to purchase a car are Tel Aviv, Istanbul and Abu Dhabi.
A resurgence in high-end travel to Egypt is being driven by museum openings, private river journeys and renewed long-term investment along the Nile.
In the lead-up to the country’s biggest dog show, a third-generation handler prepares a gaggle of premier canines vying for the top prize.
Parts for iPhones to cost more owing to surging demand from AI companies.
4 min
Apple has dominated the electronics supply chain for years. No more.
Artificial-intelligence companies are writing huge checks for chips, memory, specialised glass fibre and more, and they have begun to out-duel Apple in the race to secure components.
Suppliers accustomed to catering to Apple’s every whim are gaining the leverage to demand that the iPhone maker pay more.
Apple’s normally generous profit margins will face pressure this year, analysts say, and consumers could eventually feel the hit.
Chief Executive Tim Cook mentioned the problem in a Thursday earnings call, saying Apple was seeing constraints in its chip supplies and that memory prices were increasing significantly.
Those comments appeared to weigh on Apple shares, which traded flat despite blowout iPhone sales and record company profit.
“Apple is getting squeezed for sure,” said Sravan Kundojjala, who analyses the industry for research firm SemiAnalysis.
AI chip leader Nvidia recently became the largest customer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , or TSMC, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on a podcast.
Apple had been TSMC’s biggest customer by a wide margin for years. TSMC is the world’s leading manufacturer of advanced chips for AI servers, smartphones and other computing devices.
Spokesmen for Apple and TSMC declined to comment.
The big computers that handle AI tasks don’t look like the smartphones consumers own, but many companies supply components for both. In particular, memory chips are in short supply as companies such as OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, Meta , Microsoft and others collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI computing capacity.
“The rate of increase in the price of memory is unprecedented,” said Mike Howard , an analyst for research firm TechInsights.
That applies both to the flash memory chips that store photos and videos, called NAND, as well as the memory used to run apps quickly, called DRAM.
By the end of this year, the price of DRAM will quadruple from 2023 levels, and NAND will more than triple, estimates TechInsights.
Howard estimates that Apple could pay $57 more for the two types of memory that go into the base-model iPhone 18 due this fall compared with the base model iPhone 17 currently on sale. For a device that retails for $799, that would be a big hit to profit margins.
Apple’s purchasing power and expertise in designing advanced electronics long made it an unrivaled Goliath among the Asian companies that make most of the iPhone’s parts and assemble the device.
Apple spends billions of dollars a year on NAND, for instance, according to people familiar with the figures, likely making it the single biggest buyer globally. Suppliers flocked to win Apple’s business, hoping to leverage its know-how and prestige to attract other customers.
These days, however, “the companies now pushing the boundaries of human‑scale engineering are the ones like Nvidia,” said Ming-chi Kuo, an analyst with TF International Securities.
Demand for AI hardware is poised to keep growing rapidly. Apple’s spending growth is modest in comparison with what is being spent to fill up AI data centers, even though it is breaking records with huge sales of the iPhone 17.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are raising the price of a type of DRAM chip for Apple, according to people familiar with Apple’s supply chain.
Big AI companies pay generously and are willing to lock in supply and make upfront payments, giving the South Korean chip makers leverage against the iPhone maker.
Apple signs long-term contracts for memory, but it has used its heft to squeeze suppliers.
Its contracts have empowered it to negotiate prices as often as weekly, and to even refuse to buy any memory from a supplier if Apple didn’t view the price as favorable, according to people familiar with its memory purchases.
To boost leverage with suppliers, Apple even began stocking more inventory of memory. That was atypical for Cook, who normally cuts inventory to the bone to maximize Apple’s cash flow.
Apple is fighting not only for current deliveries but also for the attention of engineers at suppliers.
Glass scientists who worked on developing the smoothest and lightest smartphone displays are now also spending time on specialised glass for packaging advanced AI processing chips, according to industry executives.
Makers of sensors and other gizmos inside the iPhone are winning new business from AI companies such as OpenAI that are developing their own hardware.
Still, suppliers said they were far from giving up on business with Apple. Working with Apple is a form of education, they said, because it remains one of the most demanding and disciplined customers in the industry.
TSMC, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, has built successive generations of its most advanced chips with Apple as its lead customer, relying on the big predictable demand for iPhones.
Now that TSMC is doing more business with Nvidia and other AI companies, people with knowledge of the chip supply chain said Apple was exploring whether some lower-end processors could be made by someone other than TSMC.
One of Apple’s biggest profit-spinners is selling extra memory for far more than the memory chips cost the company.
Last fall Apple discontinued the iPhone Pro model with 128 gigabytes of storage.
Customers who want that model must now start at 256 gigabytes and pay $100 more—the type of move that could be repeated this year to help Apple offset higher costs, wrote Craig Moffett, an analyst at Moffett Nathanson, in an investor note.
However, Apple isn’t expected to raise the price of its next iPhone models over similarly equipped iPhone 17s, said Kuo, the analyst.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services.
In the lead-up to the country’s biggest dog show, a third-generation handler prepares a gaggle of premier canines vying for the top prize.
From Tokyo backstreets to quiet coastal towns and off-grid cabins, top executives reveal where they holiday and why stepping away makes the grind worthwhile.
