But if you used to be able to afford steak and now all you can afford is ground turkey, readjusting the basket of goods for that shift in "preference" is just hiding the fact that nobody can afford steak anymore.
And similarly, the hedonic adjustments to smartphones sort of implicitly claim that the $100 cheap smartphone you can buy today is worth $8000 back in 2009 because of how much better processors and memory have gotten. But you can't buy an iPhone 1.0 for $1 to satisfy the need to have a phone that you can install apps onto (and the upgrade cost every few years as cheap phones can no longer run an O/S version that your banking app requires).
And similarly, the hedonic adjustments to smartphones sort of implicitly claim that the $100 cheap smartphone you can buy today is worth $8000 back in 2009 because of how much better processors and memory have gotten. But you can't buy an iPhone 1.0 for $1 to satisfy the need to have a phone that you can install apps onto (and the upgrade cost every few years as cheap phones can no longer run an O/S version that your banking app requires).