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Comment by thoward | Hacker News Reader

This article reminds me of the "shitphone" story that got posted here a while back. Long but definitely worthwhile IMHO.

https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love-story-a44e6643480...

Basically an exploration of value. An iPhone can cost 3x times as much as some of these other phones, and is certainly a more pleasant device to use, but does it really offer 3x as much functionality?

The basic (world-changing) functions of the smartphone (location services with GPS, decent point and shoot camera with you at all times, web access on the go, etc.) are present in both devices.

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You shouldn't expect the usefulness of devices to be linear in cost, even for completely rational buyers uninfluenced by fashion or culture. Such buyers will select a phone where the marginal cost is equal to the marginal benefit.

Water gives my 99.9% of the usefulness of Coke (i.e., I don't die of dehydration), but it's also very reasonable for me to spend 10 times more for Cokes because the marginal cost is still small compared to the enjoyment benefit.

> The basic (world-changing) functions of the smartphone (location services with GPS, decent point and shoot camera with you at all times, web access on the go, etc.) are present in both devices.

Generally, cheap ($30) phone's camera is awful. $200 Android phone's camera is good. iPhone 6's camera is excellent. (Though I am using iPhone 6 Plus, I still think iPhone 6 Plus is too expensive.)

Given the Sony makes $20 per iPhone 6 sold for providing the cameras to Apple, I would hope that they'd be better quality than the $30 phone!

Design and execution count.

If I have to wait 30 seconds for my phone to get out of its own way each time I desire to accomplish a task (camera, map application, web access), am I actually going to use it for those things, or do I now have a dumbphone with more things that can break?

True, but consider this from the shitphone piece...

"Things had gradually become slower. They rarely came to a full stop, but they got close. Complicated websites in particular were hard for shitphone. I found myself blaming the websites."

Maybe you would just stop going to horribly designed mobile websites, and you wouldn't be much worse off.

Haven't read the article but the same argument could be made of cars (not saying it's wrong).

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