Luxury Gadgets That Are Probably Worth More Than Your Car

It seems like technology is getting more expensive all the time. Purchasing a new gaming system is a considerable investment, and that's before you account for controllers and games to round it out. Buying a new phone puts such a dent in your bank account that most major wireless providers offer financing as a standard option, breaking up the payments over the course of two or three years.

Most of us only manage to get a cool new gadget once or twice a year, if that, usually for special occasions. Then we have to hope they'll last long enough to get us to the next time we can afford to splurge for something extravagant.

That's the relationship most of us have with ordinary, everyday technology, a careful balance between treating ourselves and breaking the bank. There is, however, an entirely different class of gadgets. These are the high-flying pieces of tech you only read about. These are the things your coworker swears their uncle's, cousin's best friend has, but you know they're lying. Getting your hands on any one of these devices might require you to break into the kid's college fund, take a loan, or win the lottery.

We don't know exactly who the market for these gadgets is, but we're glad they exist, if only so we can gawk at them in equal parts awe and disbelief like a diamond-encrusted train wreck.

We might be nearing a time when cabled phone chargers will no longer exist. Most modern phones are capable of charging wirelessly on a compatible charging plate. Additionally, smaller peripheral devices like wireless earbuds and smartwatches have gotten in on the wireless charging game. Consequently, having a reliable charging plate is one of the easiest ways to add a little convenience to your life, but which one should you choose?

Sure, you could use an affordable wireless charger like all the other normies. You can get any number of them for as little as $20.00. Alternatively, you could spend a quarter of a million dollars on the Valet 3 and be sure your phone remains charged in style.

The heavy price tag comes from the materials encasing its electronic guts. The housing is made of 18-karat gold and that's just for starters. On its surface, you'll find vicuña wool, the most expensive fabric in the world, (via Money Inc). The vicuña is a protected animal from Peru and a relative to llamas and alpacas. Their wool is prized for its texture and warmth and only harvested from free-roaming animals who are then released safely back into the wild, (via Master Class).

It won't charge your devices any better than a more common charger will, electricity doesn't flow more freely in the presence of opulence. Sometimes spending money is the point, I guess. It pairs well with any of these ridiculously priced phones.

The wealthy and the connected have made headlines recently by taking commercial flights into space aboard a Blue Origin flight but there's another uncharted domain closer to home, that of the world's oceans.

Exploring the ocean can be as simple as getting some snorkel gear or a SCUBA certification, and that's good enough for most of us. However, if you want to explore in luxurious comfort without worrying about shark attacks, or you want to delve deeper than a tank of pressurized oxygen will allow, then look no further than a personal submarine from Triton.

Triton offers several models with different specifications depending on how many people you want to take with you, how deep you want to explore, and how much travel time you want to have.

One of their more affordable options, the Triton 3300/3, can carry a crew of 3 to depths of up to 1,000 meters and keep you down there for up to twelve hours. They don't list prices on their website, you'll have to make an inquiry for that, but according to Plexiglass one of these subs will run you in the neighborhood of $3.5 million.

That's certainly a hefty price tag, but if you're like James Cameron — who became only the third person to venture to Challenger Deep in his Triton sub, (via Triton Submarines) — you might be able to turn your investment into a lucrative film career.

The flying car of your dreams is finally here. Sort of. You won't be taking to the skies and parking in a garage at the top of a skyscraper, but you will soar over obstacles as tall as 20 inches in The Flying Hovercraft from Hammacher Schlemmer.

While more common hovercraft use blowers to create a high-pressure cushion of air beneath the craft, (via Scientific American), The Flying Hovercraft uses a 130 horsepower twin-cylinder engine to power a thrust propeller at the back. That doesn't achieve a hovering effect in and of itself — it is essentially a fan boat in this regard — that's accomplished by a pair of integrated wings on the craft's sides.

Two 9-gallon gas tanks give you 160 miles of range before sputtering to a stop and drifting back to the Earth. In the meantime, you'll glide seamlessly at up to 70 miles per hour, carrying payloads of up to 600 pounds, including passengers. Strangely enough, you'll have to register your hovercraft as a boat, despite the fact that it hovers easily over sand, snow, or swamp.

If you've ever wanted to try your hand at flying in the low-stakes arena of the airspace roughly two feet off the ground, The Flying Hovercraft can make that happen. All it will cost you is $190,000.

None of us wants an alien invasion or an interplanetary war. Yet, at the same time, riding around in gigantic robotic mech suits would be pretty cool. Luckily for all of us, Suidobashi Heavy Industries has jumped the figurative gun and built the mech warrior of our dreams in advance of any supernatural invading force.

Their Kuratas mobile robotic suit stands 13 feet tall and weighs roughly 4.4 tons, (via Engadget). The user interface uses Kinect to allow for motion control and, let's be honest, we're not sure we'd even want a mech suit without that.

There are only a couple of problems if you're hoping to own the giant mech suit of your dreams, aside from where you're going to store it. First, shipping is a nightmare and if you want one, you really have to live in Japan's Kyoto region, or at least be willing to travel there. Second, this thing comes with some assembly required. In fact, it's a starter kit and you'll have to build the whole thing yourself. Finally, its $1.35 million price tag doesn't even include arms, (via Engadget). Those are extra, and that's if you can even get your hands on one. They are incredibly limited, but that's probably a blessing. As cool as riding one around would be, too many of them clogging up the highway would be a pain. The robot wars are going to have to wait.

Looking into the night sky is one of the most humbling things you can do with your time. It's only a little more humbling than the price tag on the Meade 16-inch LX600 ACF F/8 telescope with Starlock. Coming in at just under $20,000, it offers a wide aperture and fully automated control, which makes finding your target in the night sky easier than ever.

There are certainly more expensive telescopes in existence, but they're usually under the control of universities, observatories, or world governments. The Hubble Space Telescope, for instance, has racked up a bill of about $16 billion over the course of its mission, (via NASA) and the JWST is giving it a run for its money, having already cost about $10 billion, (via NPR).

By those measures, the cost of this consumer scope is a small price to pay for your own window into the universe. It is built with deep sky astrophotography in mind, using its Starlock technology and GoTo system to easily find more than 140,000night sky objects and keep them in the center of your field of view. It's the sort of personal telescope Galileo could only have dreamed of.