Exactly. Many people want to upgrade their $1k phones, and are willing to work the extra time to do it.
Automation could reduce the cost of these items (and thus labour required to acquire those items), or it could just increase the complexity/upgrade-rate of them. So now your phone has numerous new features and takes twice as much labour to produce, but with automation you break even and end up in the same position.
Even with our current level of technology, we could probably significantly reduce labour and poverty/inequality with some hypothetical economic system, but some of us might not have access to all the same luxuries we have right now.
Well, we could definitely reduce inequality a lot, but a big part of the reason we aren't and won't any time soon is that having luxuries is treated like a goal in itself. You can't spend a billion dollars, you have to be a government to toss those sorts of numbers around, so what is the point of a few people accumulating those amounts of wealth?
If you want to have a better smartphone, I am sure there would be people who want to make them, but the technological arc would be different if there wasn't an incentive for offering small incremental improvements in a wrapper of planned obsolescence.
Encouraging the automation of labor and regular discarding of resources in the name of profit margins is what led to the insanity that Gwolfski is pointing at, where corporate entities have goals of their own, and rights, and so forth.
Modern fondleslabs are fucking amazing, you drop someone with one just a couple of decades back and they're full on sci-fi territory just from that one device. I remember dreaming up stuff like them as handheld computers for inventor characters in rpgs as part of my "whiz-bang gizmo loadout" and those still weren't as impressive as modern ones... once you leave out stuff like optional self-destruct systems, built-in combat lasers, and the like.
We're already well into the territory where we can't just keep throwing transistors at the problem for massive gains, we've already got scifi toys we carry around in our pocket, but we've gotten accustomed to "the next upgrade" and "the next killer app" by now.
That doesn't seem like it will work out well in the long run when you get big insane* corporate entities asking things like "employee productivity loss due to bathroom breaks and food consumption is a problem, what if we could get rid of the need to eat and eliminate?" and keep applying upgrade cycles until you get where there is no reason to keep employing people beyond needing
someone to buy your stuff.
Wait, that could be the next big app!
"Introducing the eMployee2.0: now with 'wants' and 'needs' to fulfill!"
*I'm not sure if insane or lacking sanity is more apt here, they don't have human motivations or minds even, so something which benefits a corporate entity but screws over people would only seem insane if you aren't a corporate entity I guess?
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