Re: "A job is worth the money that the employee earns for the company"
"Anyone who seriously believes that either wages or prices bear any real correlation to actual costs or profits, clearly doesn't really understand capitalism."
Anyone who believes they DON'T clearly lacks an understanding of capitalism, or any form of economics, or even simple math.
Can you go buy a brand new car for $500 right now? An actual car that meets all of the usual definitions of what a car is, not a golf cart or some such thing. If not, why not? Wouldn't Chevrolet or Fiat or Volkswagen like to make oodles of money selling millions of cars for $500? Sales would be through the roof! They'd reach millions of customers who had never been able to participate in the new car market before. So why hasn't anyone done it?
Well, they can't, because they can't build a car for $500 and not take a massive loss on each sale. The "actual cost", in your words, is far higher than $500, so you won't see one at that price. The carmakers are willing to compete to get sales, but they have to break even after all the costs are considered.
The seller of an item can, of course, set the price however he wishes. If he sets it too low, as in the $500 car example, he'll make plenty of sales, but lose his shirt on the costs. If he set it too high, people would buy a competing product or just elect not to buy anything in that particular category. For every price, there is a corresponding demand that matches that price. It's up to the business in question to figure out what the potential demand for a product will be and to price it accordingly.
With some goods, like Apple iPhones, the profit margin per unit is quite high. They're perceived as luxury goods, and priced accordingly. They're not priced SO high that only the rich can afford them; ordinary people can afford them in first world countries, but their price point reflects the perception that Apple wishes people to have, which is that their products are not commoditized, but are instead a step up from anything else you can buy. Not everyone agrees, obviously, but enough do to make Apple tremendously profitable selling iPhones at a premium.
That, though, doesn't at ALL mean that there's no correlation between what you've called the actual cost and the price. There's a very strong correlation if you know what to look for. The market price of iPhones is whatever price will result in demand for iPhones that matches the number that Apple wishes to sell in a given unit of time. The difference between the per-unit cost and the per-unit sales price is what Apple's after-- the profit. What you've apparently not seen in this relationship is that Apple designs the iPhone to hit a certain point on the supply and demand curves, one that will provide the profit they want while managing the cost per unit of manufacturing. The components in each phone, the features each has, the corners cut or not cut, and the ability of manufacturing to scale production up or down and the effect of that scaling on the change in per-unit cost are all part of Apple's design.
So yes, the link between the per-unit cost and the per-unit retail price is definitely there... you just can't consider any random product, multiply its sales price by whatever constant you wish to use, and from that deduce what the manufacturing cost was for the item. Some items are high-margin, some are low-margin, and some are sold below cost just to increase liquidity in the short term... but that doesn't mean the prices of those items are not strongly linked to the costs to manufacture them.