Apple iPhones are ubiquitous, with people obsessively hunched over them from New York to London to Kiev. But how well people can afford them varies widely, even among the world’s most prosperous cities.

苹果iPhone无处不在，从纽约到伦敦，再到基辅，人们都着魔般地使用它。但就算是在世界上最富裕的一些城市，消费者购买它的能力也是千差万别。

It’s not so much the price of the phone, but the wages their owners earn, that make the difference. Compare New York and London, for example. People in each city tend to be consumed by work, glued to their smartphones and caught up in a money culture driven by high finance. Both cities are in the top 5 on UBS Wealth Management’s latest list of the world’s most expensive cities.

原因和iPhone售价关系并不大，而在于人们的收入不同，从而造就了这种差别。就拿纽约和伦敦做一个比较。两座城市的居民都投入大量时间工作，时时刻刻离不开智能手机，卷入了巨额金融驱动的金钱文化。两座城市都位居瑞银财富管理(UBS Wealth Management)最新统计的世界生活成本最高城市名单的前五位。

But the average Londoner would have to work 41.2 hours to earn enough to buy an iPhone 6, while a New Yorker can buy it in just 24, according to the UBS study. That’s because wages lag farther behind the staggeringly high cost of living in London than in New York; London doesn’t even crack the top 10 cities for average gross earnings (it’s 13th, while New York is fourth).

然而，据瑞银统计，伦敦人平均得工作41.2小时才能赚够钱买一部iPhone 6，而纽约人只需24个小时。那是因为，相比于纽约，伦敦的收入大大落后于其高得惊人的生活费用；伦敦甚至挤不进平均毛收入前十城市之列（它名列13位，而纽约是第4位）。

You’d need an even stronger work ethic to afford an iPhone 6 in Athens (98 hours’ work, on average) or Beijing (218 hours) — and have to slog even longer in Nairobi (468 hours) or Kiev (627 hours). But if you lived in Zurich, the highest-paid city in the study, you could snap one up after just 20.6 hours.

在雅典（平均98小时）或北京（218小时），你需要工作更勤奋才能买得起一部iPhone 6。在内罗毕（468小时）或基辅（627小时），你得埋头苦干更长时间。不过，如果生活在苏黎世，即这项研究显示收入水平最高的城市，你只需工作20.6个小时，就能买得起。

The news is a little better for another consumer product sold around the world: McDonald’s Big Mac. An average Kiev resident has to work only 55 minutes, five times as long as the average New Yorker, to afford one.

对于全球售卖的另一款产品——麦当劳巨无霸汉堡——情况会略好一些。要买一个这样的汉堡，基辅居民平均只需工作55分钟，是纽约居民平均所花时间的五倍。