Hacker News Reader

Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

What higher price? IPhones cost $100 to $300 new with contracts. The Android phones I've seen cost $100 to $300 with contracts. Most of the cost is in the service plans, which are very similarly priced.

I suppose there may be a bunch of crappy Android phones, floating around under my personal radar, available for even less than $100. That sounds like false economy to me. If you're gonna get soaked for $2400 in cellular bills over two years you might as well spend the extra 1-4% and do so in style.

Of course, this is a USA perspective. Things are probably very different outside the USA.

View on HN

I have an HTC Hero on T-Mobile at UKP20 per month, which compares very well to the iPhone offering which is UKP35 per month, slightly less if you accept a lower offering in terms of calls and texts. So for a little more than the price of an iPhone, I can get two Android devices, one for me and one for my wife.

The experience is STUNNING with excellent performance and more features than I've yet had a chance to grok fully. It's definitely the most exciting computer I've used for a long time.

> Of course, this is a USA perspective. Things are probably very different outside the USA.

Yes, here in Italy it's pretty common to find phones that are unlocked, and full price. I saw a 3gs at the store for 600 Euro the other day. Android phones are also pretty expensive, but not quite to those levels.

Overall, I like seeing the full price as it helps you to compare phones, not phones + whatever wonky plan they're trying to sell.

http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-A855-Android-Verizon-Wireless... $20

Verizon's also advertising two Droids for the price of 1 (or buy one, get one "free")

Correct, the price of the phone is about the same and I'd say my Droid Incredible is quite comparable to the iPhone in terms of quality and experience (I had a G1 before, which I loved, but could not quite say was on par with an iPhone). But there's another price- being locked in to AT&T, being locked in to phones made by Apple, being locked out of web sites that use Flash or apps that Lord Jobs has not blessed. The original point still stands, IMHO.

Hmmm. I got my unlocked HTC Desire for £350, and googling for 'sim free iphone 3gs' shows me prices in the £600 range.

Sure, but that's not how 99% of people get their phones, especially here in the US. From the perspective of a typical US phone buyer, who purchases a phone along with a 2-year contract, the prices are about the same.

Same in the UK, but looking at the cost of iPhone contracts and HTC desire contracts, the difference in cost does seem to be borne out - iPhone contracts look to be more expensive here.

How else was Apple going to maintain their 55%+ profit margins on the things?

It sure does make you wonder why Verizon is charging as much as AT&T for their Android plans when the device is almost half the cost. I guess the answer is because they can, because they have a better network. I also wonder if Android handset vendors will try to get a cheaper plan out of Verizon when the Verizon iPhone supposedly lands this summer/fall...

> How else was Apple going to maintain their 55%+ profit margins on the things?

Gross margin on Apple products has consistently been around 33%, at least for as long as I've been listening to their quarterly conference calls.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/29/report-iphone-margins...

> The Android phones I've seen cost $100 to $300 with contracts. Most of the cost is in the service plans

The unsubsidized N1 costs $1700 over two years compared to ~$2500. If you factor in the cost of the contract, the difference is huge.

Huh? The N1 costs $529 https://www.google.com/phone/choose . Or are you quoting prices in a different currency than USD?

He's talking about phone + service over two years.

Here an unlocked HTC Desire is a good 30-40% cheaper than and unlocked iPhone 3GS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com