Apple iPhone X Demand Limited, Wall Street Analysts Say | Hacker News Reader

Apple iPhone X Demand Limited, Wall Street Analysts Say

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61 pointswalterbell217 comments

The iphone X is very overpriced when viewed as a utility object, because it doesn’t provide 4x the utility of a $250 phone. But it is very reasonable when viewed as a fashion accessory. A $1000 phone to go inside a $2000 purse is not crazy at all.

People keep looking at apple as a tech company and struggling to understand them, but if you view them as a luxury/fashion company who happens to specialize in technology they make a lot of sense. Nobody complains ferraris are overpriced for the mileage they get and the amount of trunk space, because utility is not the point of a ferrari.

I expect the iphone X to sell really well, to the crowd that buys luxury. The question is whether that is a big enough market to sustain the volume.

Sustain the volume at what level? All indications are that Apple makes less profit on the iPhone X than the other phones. Apple would be quite happy if someone bought any iPhone that they sell from the 6s to the 8s Plus 256GB. I'm purposefully excluding the SE. I think that probably has a lower profit margin.

And how is it overpriced? There is no such thing as an overpriced item in a free market as long as the quantity that Apple can make in a given time period matches the quantity people are willing to buy.

>There is no such thing as an overpriced item in a free market as long as the quantity that Apple can make in a given time period matches the quantity people are willing to buy.

That's the market perspective, but there's a value perspective as well. For example, my kid loves blind bags (no more youtube I think...) These companies want to sell him $0.05 plastic dolls for $5 and they prey on his gambling response to do so. These things are not worth anywhere near $5 except from the perspective that commercials can make my kid want them.

In the aggregate, "the value perspective", is how many people value the product enough to pay Apple's asking price. If the value perspective isn't enough to sell the number of phones Apple can make, then Apple would lower the price.

Or increase ad spend and arrange for PR-managed celebtrity sponsorships as “social proof.” Or repackage most of the tech in a new version with some allegedly extra premium feature, like a useable battery life. Or release some other products and rely on a halo effect.

The point being that perceptions of practical utility, Veblen value, and other price-defining factors are all malleable and brand-dependent, and essentially about social psychology, not some mythical “objective” market value.

The market value is not "mythical" and it is "objective". Everything you stated - advertising,Veblen value, and other "malleable" attributes are things that increase its value in the eyes of the target market.

Just because you may not find a value in a pair of $200 Jordan's doesn't mean that it's not the value that the market has placed on them. How the company influenced that value is irrelevant. The fact that someone spent $200 on a pair of shoes when they weren't under duress to do so, by definition means they valued those Jordan's at $200.

That's the market perspective, but there's a value perspective as well.

Entire libraries have been written about and many, many careers have been based upon the notion of "the value of something." It's actually a very, very complex idea. The minuscule mass-energy of the electrons and photons oscillating in various wires and fiber optic cables to bring these words to you have virtually zero market value as individual particles. However, the same quantity of mass-energy could just as well be worth $1000 or $10000 as a different arrangement of mass-energy forming a digital transfer of money. (Not blockchain, as that's a bit heavyweight, but one of many different forms of value transfer.)

"Why are things worth what they're worth?" is the same order of complexity as "Why do things fall?" Your layman's dismissal of value is something like a medieval peasant dismissing the question of why an apple falls from a tree as an idiot's question. It's not. It's Issac Newton's question. If you ask such a question and you look underneath the surface, there's an entire world of complexity unto itself there.

>"Why are things worth what they're worth?" is the same order of complexity as "Why do things fall?" Your layman's dismissal of value is something like a medieval peasant dismissing the question of why an apple falls from a tree as an idiot's question.

I don't think anything you just said is relevant to what I said here. All that I said is that there is a notion of value which is not simply "what the market will bear". Value means different things to different people at different times. As you said; it's complex.

There are items with inherent value, like gold. It's value is inherent because of how we use it (electronics, jewelry), but that doesn't change the fact that there is real value in gold. That's not the same as someone wanting to make a fashion statement, and I think your electron comparison is so simplistic and absurd as to not be useful in any way. Yes, everything in the universe is comprised of the fundamental building blocks of matter. Great insight here, how about we discuss this in a practical way?

There are items with inherent value, like gold. It's value is inherent because of how we use it (electronics, jewelry), but that doesn't change the fact that there is real value in gold.

Context. There are contexts where even gold has greatly reduced value. If you're on a sinking ditched airplane in rough seas, are you really going to try and stash that 1kg bar of gold bullion on your person? In that context, it arguably has quite a bit of negative value. I'd account the "getting you dead" property as conferring negative value.

In the same context, liter of salt water is worthless. In a different context, it would be worth many times what the gold would be worth.

1kg of gold is 1/10th the size of a coke can and is worth around $40k.

If you want to save something in a life threatening situation, that's a fairly reasonable choice.

If you want to save something in a life threatening situation, that's a fairly reasonable choice.

I wasn't talking about a life threatening situation. I was talking about a "life threatened by not being able to float well enough to breathe" situation combined with a "life threatened by not getting out of a sinking thing fast enough" situation.

Also if you think it's a reasonable choice, and the next person thinks it's a crazy choice, that supports my point instead of contradicting it. (And yes, I planned that out!)

I was merely illustrating that gold has high value and high density.

The hypothetical "1kg gold bar" would be the size of a highlighter more or less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlighter

Bothering to retrieve something so dense and heavy during a chaotic situation where being buoyant enough is a life or death issue -- it's worth a lot of money, but is it worth your life? If you're a very confident, strong swimmer, then maybe that's a rational choice. If you're certain that there's going to be rescue in just a few minutes, then maybe that's a rational choice. If the time and effort it takes to retrieve the thing isn't going to cost you your life by losing you a place dry and out of freezing water, then maybe that's a rational choice. What if all of those above knobs are cranked over to the most unfavorable position?

This is precisely my point: The value of something is highly contextual. The context might well be different for each individual at different times.

There are items with inherent value, like gold. It's value is inherent because

Besides electronics, historically the only reasons gold has been valuable was that there was limited quantity and people could trade it for needed goods and services and that people could make jewelry from it. But if tomorrow a large gold deposit was found doubling the amount of supply or people stopped accepting gold in exchange for goods, it wouldn't be as valuable. The price of gold doesnt reflect its utilitarian value.

Watching TV last night, I saw three ads for phones. One for the $1k iPhone, the other two for competitors, each of which in the fine print listed starting prices of $949.

There's a market. Don't hate Apple because it went there first.

The Note 8 was released a few months ahead of the iPhone X for $930 too.

It doesn't necessarily need to be a fashion accessory to justify that price. You're not just getting aesthetics for the money, you're getting performance, battery life, display quality, etc. I'm using my phone a lot on a daily basis, so it's worth paying a bit more to get the best available. There's nothing functionally different about a $2000 purse.

Besides, comparing iPhones to purses is basically the same sort of cringe-y argument some Android users have been making for a long time. "iPhones are for basic white girls". What's next, are we going to say the iPhone is the Pumpkin Spice Latte of smartphones?

A purse can last a lifetime, if not lost or stolen. An iPhone will be unusable within 5 years no matter what.

>An iPhone will be unusable within 5 years no matter what.

your comment makes a lot more sense if you substitute "50 years". This is what a 50 year old LV suitcase looks like:

https://i.pinimg.com/236x/1d/cf/2e/1dcf2e4b6dc46d851095f477b...

This is what a 2012 iPhone looks like:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_5

they're about equally useable today (2017/early 2018). After 50 years, though, the iPhone would be a joke. (unusable.) I think the iPhone 5 isn't even close to "unusable" after 5 years.

quite the pedantic answer. lets interpret "within 5 years" as < 6 years (give or take):

Now pick an IPhone 4 and good luck with installing/updating anything in ios 7.

The millions of people using iPhone 4's and the price of same on used market show they're far from "unusable."

For a non-durable consumer good, the difference between 5 and 8 years (i.e. 1.6x useable lifetime) is hardly "pedantic".

Would you say there isn't much difference between a 15 and 24 year mortgage in terms of length of commitment?

A phone might be the second largest personal investment many lower-income people make in any object, and it matters at what point it becomes literally unusable.

They are unusable or will be very soon.

Old applications refuse to start, the vendor blocks the old version or retired the remote API. New applications don't support older phones, they can't be installed.

Batteries die. Screens are broken. Spare parts stop being available after a while.

A phone has a life expectancy around 5 years, top.

I don't dispute anything you've said. We'e just going to have to different definitions of 'unusable, no matter what'.

No, in the context of real luxury goods, that's still not significant: Compared to a thirty-year-old purse, a seventy-year-old watch, or a three-hundred-year-old piece of jewellery, there is no difference between a five- or an eight-year lifespan of a phone: They're both "flimsy shit; here today, gone tomorrow" in that perspective.

Also, a phone will hardly ever be _the_ "second largest personal investment many lower-income people make in any object" -- given how ephemeral the phone's service life is, if those people live past thirty or so, it'll have to be one of several successive such investments. Which is precisely the point: If phones weren't such flimsy pieces of crap, it might be. (Oops, sorry, seems I'm full-on channelling Pirsig here...)

But no, BTW, actually I don't see all that much of a difference between a 15-yr mortgage and a 24-yr one. If you get to live your Biblically allotted three-score-and-ten (or more), then they're both "a substantial chunk" of your life. Depending on how a lot of other shit goes -- do you win the lottery, get cancer, have one kid or six...? -- one could be better, or the other. The difference in runtime isn't all that significant.

Same thing, only in reverse, with your phone lifetimes: Five years isn't all that different from eight, in that both are rather equally IN-significant chunks of your life.

> A purse can last a lifetime,

People who spend more than $2k on a purse rarely use it for more than a season, sometimes just for a night.

My last tinder dates would disagree with that, but they're just normal middle class women.

The amount of people renewing luxury bags as fast as you say is very tiny.

Ok, it depends where you live I guess. In some countries only the super rich can afford $2k bags and in this case they don't use them for long. I very much doubt your tinder date will keep using it for a lifetime though.

The bag already outlasted her last iPhone. It will surely last a few more.

I come from a small city in France, it's not uncommon to see poor children [of struggling parents receiving social benefits] having iPhones or $500 shoes. That's in the order of a month rent.

I am in London now. Women could live in a dumpster with flatmates and save enough to buy a new bag every month.

People have different priorities I guess. Note that $2k is on the high side. You can get luxury brands for much less than that.

And a paperweight will last hundreds if not thousands of years!

This isn’t really relevant. An iPhone is a computer. It does a lot of things, and the technology is improving rapidly. A purse is basically just a type of bag. They don’t store more and more stuff every year.

On the contrary, luxury items are very often associated with « lifetime » usage. A pair of luxury shoes will last 20 years if taken care of properly, a swiss mechanical watch can be repaired 50 years after it’s been bought and transmitted from generation to generation. A jewelry is transmitted from mother to daughter, etc etc.

You can’t pretend something to be a luxury item if it’s completely obsolete after a few years. Luxury isn’t purely marketing or aesthetic.

I hope you aren't claiming there is anything from a utility perspective that would make the iPhone X a rational purchase, aside from the appearance of wealth which can be utility depending on which business you're in. otherwise there is simply none, let's please cut the bullshit here. well all in all, the premium is purely for the fashion/wealth thing

Recently bought one myself, and it’s the best phone I’ve ever had. I have zero interest in having a status symbol, but for a nicer screen, camera etc. it’s worth the premium over the other models for me.

You should be a bit more open-minded and realise that it’s not the case that everyone who makes a different assessment of value from you is merely status-seeking.

>>> it doesn’t provide 4x the utility of a $250 phone

That is not correct. Try taking a photo of a text document with a $250 phone, the text is not readable because the camera and the software is terrible. A better phone would allow you to not have a dedicated scanner.

Motorola G Plus[0] is 184$ with a 12Mp back camera. You won’t catch a cat jumping in pixel perfect beauty, but that’s plenty enough to scan a text document.

Same for your mail, maps, browsing, messaging, light gaming. It won’t be blazingly fast under the latest OS, but will do any important task with decent performance.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01N6NTIRH/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=...

The number of pixels has zero relevance to the quality of a photo.

The world is filled with cheap phones that will make a blurry picture if there isn't perfect lighting or if you move by a single millimeter when you press the button.

Of course. I found it interesting that scanning a document is the exact best case scenario: exposure can be adjusted with the flash, and the document hopefully doesn’t move (I had the previous Motorola G, hand shaking would need to be pretty bad to make it blur when using the flash)

On the contrary I take it as an example of bad case scenario. Texts and annotations can be very small, a tad of blurriness and it's unreadable. The blurriness might not be apparent on the phone screen but it's very noticeable on a computer or TV.

I speak from experience with a cheap phone, having to take 6 photos not moving by a iota hoping one will be good enough. Same shit next month when I will have to take a newer proof of address.

I got a G5 plus for my brother earlier this year, and after using it a little bit i felt kinda ripped off with my iphone 7+.. all that money and the motorola does everything just fine!

A $250 phone is plenty able to take a legible photo of an A4 text document.

I know of no phone that can replace a dedicated scanner, though. I regularly use my phone for quick scans, but even the iPhone X can't scan an A4 document at 300dpi. Even if it could, I wouldn't be able to hold it steady enough to do so.

I use a Nexus 5X. Refurbished for $180 ($270 new) on amazon right now. The picture quality is excellent and for something basic like taking readable pictures of text documents it's perfectly fine. In fact it's pre-pre-descessor was perfectly fine for that task. I was using it extensively for just that purpose.

These expensive phones are luxury devices with almost no added utility. A few milliseconds of delay can make a big difference in how a device feels, and be expensive to get rid off, but they don't fundamentally alter what you can do with the device.

I remember looking at that phone last year, the cheapest was 350 euro and all the sellers were out of stock.

It is not a fashion statement. When was the last time you saw a phone without a case, that makes it indistinguishable from the rest?

It is just an object of desire.

Imagine your annual income is $200k, and you expect your iPhone X to last 2 years. Imagine you're very busy with work and parenting, and it's very valuable to you to be able to take high quality pictures of your baby and share them with family and friends. A smartphone is the most convenient way to do that. A smartphone that costs ~$1000 takes much better pictures, and faster shutter response, than a smartphone that costs $250.

Is the iPhone X worth an extra $375 per year for the person described above? Of course.

Does it need to provide 4x the utility to be worth 4x the price? No. The marginal utility just needs to be cost-effective, vs. the other ways to 'buy' utility with the same amount of money.

What's the marginal utility over a 500$ Galaxy S8?

Let's assume the cameras (hardware and software) are equally good. If the person I described already uses iOS (and has done for the last few years), then I expect they'd find switching to Samsung-flavoured Android would cause at least a few hours of inconvenience up-front to get most things they need set up, and then little annoyances here and there for a long period afterwards.

At least that was my experience switching my primary mobile device from iOS to Android. And I'd have the same amount of inconvenience if I were to switch from Android to iOS.

Some people value their time highly, and don't find it enjoyable to find solutions to technical or usability problems. So switching to/from iOS has significant disutility.

Sure, so you pay for having locked yourself into a particular ecosystem. Even then, the relative utility of an X over an 8 is not utility.

An iPhone X doesn't provide a better user experience to my hypothetical user than an iPhone 8?

Nope. For some reason a myth of the iPhone's superiority persists -- perhaps mainly among iPhone owners? -- but according to most reputable reviews I've read over the years (and a few people I know who have owned both), that hasn't been true any more for about half a decade now.

"Does it need to provide 4x the utility to be worth 4x the price? No."

Exactly! This fallacy of comparing ratios rather than differences in price is extremely common, totally unjustified, and causes people lots of harm from bad spending decisions in both directions. $100 extra is $100 extra whether attached to a small purchase or a big one.

The correct comparison is (as you say) between the benefit/cost of the extra spending and the benefit/cost of other marginal purchases you would consider. Comparing to the benefit/cost of the "base" purchase (the basic smartphone in this case), which may be very high because that purchase is not marginal for you, is just wrong.

There was a luxury Nokia studded with gems -Vertu. I don't think it did all that well. So it's not only about fashion. There has to be something else which creates desire and demand.

This is not limited to Apple. Top phone prices including Galaxy, Pixel etc have been steadily creeping upwards yearly starting from $500 and are now at $800-1000. Next year it could well be $1200 and in 3 years $1500.

Has the fundamental tech in the phones dramatically increased to justify this, not really.

The same applies to ultrabooks with low performance heavily throttled dual core chips, going from $700-800 to now $1500 plus. This applies to macbooks, dell xps, surface, hp and even lower cost alternatives like Asus.

There is a trend of sorts and it may well be rising income disparities means those at the top are not price sensitive and will pay $500 or $1500 with little qualms, and marketers are responding to the market.

I think market analysts continue to miss the mark on this story.

What I keep hearing over and over are variations of "people are turned off by the $1,000 price tag." I think this is a complete misread. People don't pay $1k for an iPhone because it's the practical thing to do. If practicality is the #1 priority for phone shoppers, they will simply buy a 7 or 8. I don't think this comprises the top of the market, though, and the top of the market is Apple's wheelhouse.

Practicality has nothing to do with why people buy the X. People buy the X because it's a status symbol and they want to be seen with it. With consumer spending up pretty much across the board, I will be very surprised if Apple misses on earnings next month or reduces guidance. I think comparisons to the release of the 6 are misguided as well, since this phone was in shorter supply to begin with, carried a 50% higher price point, and was released alongside two other models.

>People buy the X because it's a status symbol and they want to be seen with it.

I find this aspect of the tech industry so gross that I'm considering changing careers. Building a new tool that makes people's lives better is great, but much of the time it just becomes a status symbol. No one should feel bad for owning a machine that's a few years old but does everything they need. I'm not convinced that consumer gadgets fill a real need any more rather than just being new and shiny for the sake of being new and shiny.

Unless we as a society can get over showing off by buying things we don't need, I think we're in trouble.

I don't disagree with you about what people should do, but the reality is that consumers have been this way for a long time, the only thing that changed is that phones shifted from commodities people bought for performance to fashion accessories. People pay more for cars, bags, clothing, etc. to elevate their feeling of status, now we can add phones to that list. Perhaps this has been Apple's greatest contribution to the hardware industry.

Consumers have this in them, but it’s conditioned by a couple of centuries of marketing.

The part that irritates me is, I am actively punished for being someone who doesn't behave this way.

It used to just be the hidden surcharges that phone companies tacked onto my bill to cover the cost of the "free" phone, calculated from the assumption that I'd get a new phone each year.

Those surcharges are now gone. But they have been replaced with constant nagging to update the OS to a version that will harm the performance or battery life (or both) of a >2yo phone. They have been replaced with apps that will eventually refuse to stop working if I don't upgrade to a version that doesn't run on the older version of the OS that I used to use. They have been replaced with mobile sites that flat-out don't work on my older device's smaller screen.

Those updates are always optional, and also keep your 2+ year old phone secure.

As long as there have been cellular phones, they have been "fashion accessories". We all joke about the business guy with the giant phone, but that was the "iPhone X" of the 80's.

> I find this aspect of the tech industry so gross that I'm considering changing careers.

What career are you considering? There are even high-end supermarkets. This is a human condition.

>No one should feel bad for owning a machine that's a few years old but does everything they need.

That doesn’t bother me as much as planned obsolescence. Here’s why I had to upgrade to the iPhone X from my iPhone 6.[1]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why-people...

You had to upgrade to a X when a 8 or a 7 was available - or even a new battery for $80?

When were you planning to upgrade your three year old phone? I upgraded for same reason as you (6 plus), but when I found out I could have paid $85 for a new battery to restore much of my performance my reaction was, meh. I would have still upgraded anyways.

Even if there wasn't CPU throttling to keep old phones usable, software marches on adding features and benefits.

iPhone 3: 256 Mb ram

iPhone 4s: 512 Mb ram, 490 multicore Geekbench

iPhone 5: 1 Gb ram, 1,203 multicore Geekbench

iPhone 6s: 2 Gb ram, 3,888 multicore Geekbench

iPhone 7 Plus: 3 Gb ram, 5,763 multicore Geekbench

iPhone X: 3 Gb ram, 10,108 multicore Geekbench

I have always been amazed at Apple's ability to shoehorn iOS versions and new features into such limited memory capacities (compared to Android for example). But there is always a limit to what can be done.

My daughter's iPhone 5 shipped with iOS 6, and is currently running iOS 9. Is it slower? Yes. Does it have more features than when released, heck yea.

> No one should feel bad for owning a machine that's a few years old but does everything they need. I'm not convinced that consumer gadgets fill a real need any more rather than just being new and shiny for the sake of being new and shiny.

I disagree that consumer gadgets, especially phones, don't fill a real need anymore. We have at least a good four or five years, minimum, for a lot more to be done in that form factor. It may not necessarily be new sensors, but significant improvement in what's available now. Things like AR and VR have quite a while to mature and bring about more practical use cases than we see now, and smartphones and devices associated with them will be the ones leading the charge there.

>Unless we as a society can get over showing off by buying things we don't need, I think we're in trouble.

Good luck with that. Maybe if you eliminated human sexuality first, somehow?

We've been "showing off" since we were cavemen. The iphoneX is just a really, really nice spear that you can throw further.

I'm okay with this aspect of the iPhone X. People buying $1,000 iPhone X's subsidize the technology that goes into a $350 iPhone SE.

They also pave the way for the third generation of the iPhone X to cost $350.

> If practicality is the #1 priority for phone shoppers, they will simply buy a 7 or 8.

Yep, Apple is slowly filling in price points below the top end. They will not ever be budget, but they have iPhones starting at $349.

I'm confused about all the hubbub around the 1k price tag. Top end phones with the next storage option were already ~1k. Additionally, most people buy their phone using the free loan from the carrier so the price goes from ~$40/month to ~$50/month if they wanted the X.

I think Apple beats earnings and successfully raises the ASP across the iPhone line using the X.

> People buy the X because it's a status symbol and they want to be seen with it.

I think Apple may have overplayed their bet on this point. Unless their top end clients are going to buy the 8, then dump those on the market and start buying the 10.

If it is a status symbol, then those people are going to want the latest iphone, regardless of cost, right? In that case, many of the people who are already flaunting their 8's will have to make the decision of either holding onto the 8, or moving to the 10. I'm sure those pure status symbol seekers will indeed move to the 10, but doing so could create a large increase in stock on the 8 and driving down its price.

Do you think the way they positioned it was done on purpose with the $1000 price tag so they're not losing their shirt when their market starts to cannibalize itself?

I'm certainly not knowledgable enough to try and get inside the head of Apple's strategic decision makers, but if I had to guess I would say that they already had a proven form factor and supply chain in place to produce the 8 and 8 Plus so they chose to launch with three models instead of just one or two because:

1) There was execution risk with the X. Had they run into supply chain issues or the facial recognition didn't work properly, they would still have had a new phone to launch.

2) $1k is an elevated price point and so the 8/8 Plus present a hedge against risk that consumers won't pay more than $800 for the X.

3) Perhaps most importantly, from what I read Apple couldn't have produced enough X's to come close to meeting the initial demand, which is in large part why the raised the price in the first place. Keep in mind that if they had not released the 8's early with plenty of supply, lots of those buyers would have wanted the X. If you have a supply shortage, raising the price is the obvious move. But then that leaves huge swaths of people who want to give you their money and stay in your ecosystem who are unable to because they have to wait months to get the phone.

So if those theories are true, then we should expect the 6/7/8 form factor to be sunset after this release cycle and then the X and the reported larger X Plus (or whatever it will be called) will be the new form factor once the supply chain and demand concerns have worked themselves out. I think the multi release was just a bridge to get them to the new price point and form factor.

I get a new iPhone every 2-3 years. This year I spent $10 a month extra to get the best possible screen and camera on a device I use hours every day. Not because it’s a status symbol. And very happy with my purchase.

>This year I spent $10 a month extra to get the best possible screen and camera on a device I use hours every day. Not because it’s a status symbol. And very happy with my purchase.

And this is how they get people. You didn't spend an extra $10/month, you spent an extra $400 compared to getting the 8. I don't blame you, I think it's worth it, but that's a terrible way to think about prices.

I think it's a different way to think about prices, but I think the terribleness of it is subjective (assuming one understands the pricing model).

Why is that a terrible way to think about prices? Most people earn money at a predictable rate per month, so it’s perfectly reasonable to talk about these phone payment plans in the same terms. Obviously this isn’t true for things like credit card or mortgage payments, where interest is likely a significant factor, but AFAIK these cell phone payment plans are interest free.

It’s terrible because any difference between carrier prices is a large multiple of what the sticker/brochure says. Most plans here (New Zealand) are over 2 years, so any difference in price is 24x greater at the end of the contract. And no one here is paid per month, that’s seen as completely antiquated and they are paid per week or per fortnight.

Really? Nobody is paid per month? Coming from the UK that is unexpected. Are jobs wages advertised per week? What are the real advantages? Surely it's a bit harder to pay for larger purchases as it requires more controlled saving and spending?

I’m sure someone is paid per month but I’ve never come across it. The advantage is fairly obvious - you get to have your money. How much interest are you missing out on? Having your employer in debt to you for up to a month per pay is fairly primitive.

I live in NZ and I would have said that virtually every salaried worker is paid monthly.

Have spent years on salary and so have most people I know, paid fortnightly. Seems like we need some real data.

It's an intellectually dishonest way to de-emphasise how much it costs in total by showing you the smaller monthly amount. You are basically using a marketing trick on yourself to justify the money spent.

It also hides the opportunity cost. $10/month doesn't sound like much, but $400 could buy something else nice.

There is no lost opportunity cost. Apple or the service providers are proving zero interest purchase plans. My iPhone X costs around $42 a month for two years, then I own a phone that is likely still worth about $500.

It is only true because there is a second hand market that trust this is the correct price. Seeing how those devices need to move technically with their time (more powerful hardware), I fail to see the attraction of a device that would be well passed its prime, specially with a battery that isn't replaceable.

Whether you see the value or not, there is a robust secondary market whose history shows that there is strong demand for used devices and that their entire value doesn't evaporate in a few years.

And if I'm wrong about 50% depreciation being typical over 2 years, I'm not wrong by much. There is not a huge difference between 70% depreciation and 50% in your monthly cost of ownership. Undamaged 64GB iPhone 6s are selling for between $230 and $310 on eBay, so that's 60-70% depreciation. On average the 6s cost about $20 per month.

The 6S Plus was $750 for the most basic model at launch and now ebays for about $200 which squares with losing about half the value per year which is pretty normal.

Consider also the fact that the battery life will be substantially decreased from new and that most people wont be able to replace it themselves.

Something that is overprice is actually more likely to decline because 2 years from now its just a comparatively slow device that no longer serves as a status symbol.

But the opportunity cost is also $10 a month for however many months the plan runs. It would be appropriate to think of other monthly payments with the same opportunity cost (like a Netflix subscription), but it would be inappropriate to talk about things that cost $400 up front without also recognizing that you wouldn’t get those things until the end of the payment period.

I use the count-it-as-a-rental for several items, not often seen as such, like cars and phones. Yet I still own an S3mini, so not exactly a trick to spend much ;)

Edit: oh and I just bought a 20 y.o. car. My way of seeing it is useful in this case because I add the (very high) assurance rate, repairs and gas to get a realistic price. I predicted a reasonable car life and compared it with the numbers for a brand new car.

Intellectually it's actually the most honest way to consider it, because phones don't evaporate in a month. They retain value over years. So what is your real life time cost, and how does it relate to other options, and how does it relate to benefits from the purchase?

But the commenter actually is paying the smaller monthly amount, which probably is easier to afford than paying the entire price upfront. It should sound like a bunch of smaller payments instead of one large payment, because it truly is that.

Also, it’s not a marketing trick. Time value of money isn’t just some silly irrational psychological problem that marketers exploit. It’s a perfectly rational and useful phenomenon. The entire cost of an iPhone right now “feels like” a lot more than the cost split up into small monthly payments, because it truly is a lot more, by any reasonable theory of value.

Yeah it sounds just like how car salesmen try to talk you into buying a car you cannot afford.

It is, but it's also the most accurate way to view your actual costs. You understand it can be both, correct?

In the case of your car, what benefits are there to the more expensive model? My iPhone X, those benefits are easy to describe, better screen, better camera, faster, better form factor. Amortizing to compare the relative cost between it an iPhone 8 and seeing that it's roughly $10 a month allows me to make an informed decision about whether those benefits are worth the cost.

In the case of your car purchase, if the car salesman says it's only $200 a month more to get the "better" car, are it's benefits worth that much to you? Is the more expensive car safer, more comfortable, and are those benefits worth $200 a month? How much do you drive a month? Do you commute in rush hour traffic, or drive on the freeway? etc. etc.

Edited for more accurate depreciation estimates.

No, it's the absolutely correct way to think about buying things. I didn't spend $1,000 to get a great phone to use this month, then throw it away next month. In business, you buy equipment, you typically account for it's cost over it's useful life, i.e. amortizing and depreciation. In your personal life, it's no different, you need the right framework to correctly evaluate these decisions.

And secondly, I didn't pay $400 extra over an iPhone 8. I'll own this phone at least two years. Historically an iPhone is worth roughly 30-50% (edit) of purchase price in two years. So my two years cost of owning an iPhone X is going to be (roughly) $300-500, and an iPhone 8 roughly $200-325, only a little more than a $200 average difference. A cheap Android phone only costs $200 but might only be worth $50 in two years, so it's only about $450 cheaper than my iPhone X.

Note that I'm ignoring service costs, because they should be the same no matter what phone I choose.

While this is the economically accurate way to view your actual costs, it can be used in a bad way to think is if you don't quantify your economic benefits. If there aren't any economic benefits, admit you are paying for the badge/prestige. And ask yourself if that's worth it.

In the case of the iPhone X, it's the fastest phone with the best screen, and best camera. Am I going to get $10 a month or so of benefits from them? I think so. Would it be worth $40 a month more? Probably not.

I work out of my house. I rarely go out in public (perhaps once a week to the store,) and I couldn’t possibly care less if people see my phone. I see my phone hours a day. I take a lot of photos, read a lot of ebooks and do a ton of stuff on my phone. My X purchase has zero to do with “status symbol.” It’s a childish and ridiculous assertion that “status symbol” is a primary motivator for a phone. A car on the other hand is far more likely to be purchased based on what the neighbors think. It seems like every 5th car in the South Bay Area is a Tesla, but I have no idea what kind of phones they use. The reason the Prius had such a “distinctive” shape was because Prius owners just LOVE letting everyone know they drive a Prius — but I have yet to meet the person that makes a huge show of owning iPhone. X is literally one of the best phones available today — attributing that desire for ownership to something so trite as “status symbol” is clearly the work of someone who has yet to use one on a daily basis. It’s really great.

And I honestly don't see what's wrong with wanting the status part of it either. When I started web contracting 5 years ago, the first thing I bought with my money was a MacBook Pro to replace my ancient ThinkPad T40. Makes client meetings go that much smoother when you're using the same thing as everyone else.

Geeks always seem to want to erase the human factor out of everything.

> Geeks always seem to want to erase the human factor out of everything.

it's likely that they have to rationalize their inability to understand/connect with "regular" people by feeling superior about not caring about "status symbols" or the like.

I’m sure you got yours because you genuinely like the product. That doesn’t make the assertion that lots of people’s motivations for owning one because it’s a status symbol childish. And I’m sure those people would deny that’s the reason, too. Would lots of people admit that they bought BMWs to impress other people?

What I saw on launch were lots and lots of people Tweeting and posting about having placed orders and then posting pictures of the box. Forgive me, but that’s not something you do if you just bought the phone for utilitarian reasons.

"lots" of people is often used to justify lots of anecdotes. Apple didn't sell tens of millions of iPhone X's because it's a status symbol. There aren't millions of unwrapping photos and videos.

A big reason is that in a case it's hard to tell which phone you have, I've yet to have anyone notice I've got an iPhone X.

The iPhone X offers significant enhancements over an iPhone 8 and 8 plus. The difference in cost is relatively minor when amortized it over your ownership life-time. For some people, like my wife, it's still not worth it (esp. if you prefer TouchID). For me it was.

My X purchase has zero to do with “status symbol.”

Then it's interesting that you felt the urge to post about it - are you absolutely sure your motivations are what you think they are?

You are willing to spend money on the best. I can nto believe that you evaluated the difference between best and second best and decided the best was sufficiently better to justify spending 10$ a month on.

You wanted the best and it wasn't to expensive for you. It might not be a status symbol in the sense that you want others to know you're rich, but it's really hard to justify spending more than 500$ max on a phone these days unless you want something essentially useless (like it being "the best" in some measure).

My Nexus 5x is a few years old by now, but it's still hard to see the utility of upgrading it to something flashier for me.

> If practicality is the #1 priority for phone shoppers, they will simply buy a 7 or 8.

Clever or particularly frugal shoppers may note that the SE has the same chip as the 6S (the A9) and can be had for $250 unlocked and in mint condition.

On Black Friday they were going for $150 brand new.

Can you link to this? I don’t think this deal happened because Apple doesn’t discount this heavily. Some of their partners might but only in exchange for phone service or something. The SE is $350/$450 USD new, not $250 like the above poster said.

I didn’t mean from Apple or an authorized reseller. Check Swappa - that’s where I got the above price.

Ah, ok! Yes, I’ve bought five iPhones on Swappa and Gazelle. I don’t think a used or third party refurb is an apples-to-apples comparison with a new X, though I prefer the SE. I’m hoping the SE 2 in the spring will have iPhone 8 internals.

I agree. I mention secondary SE prices to show that frugal & discerning Apple customers will go much further down than the iPhone 7.

This is amazing, given they also have 2 Gb of RAM, a 6s processor & a 6s GPU with significantly less screen to push pixels through.

Believe it or not, I was split between an SE and an X. Either get the smallest phone that's still very powerful and useful, or get the best screen/processor/camera. Mainly went X because of the camera.

(Good) analysts start with numbers, then draw conclusions based on those numbers.

Numbers in this case would be reduced orders at Apple suppliers, reduced demand for labor at an iPhone assembly factory, and reduced iPhone Q1 unit forecasts from Apple itself. I'm assuming they also collect their own numbers by surveying end users and consumers to round out both the supply and demand side picture. Then they draw the conclusions in the article.

Now these could be bad analysts, in which case they would start with some presupposed beliefs, then mold the numbers/forecasts to fit their story...

I don't think Apple actually reduced guidance, I think the article in question predicted that they would reduce guidance.

What we know for sure is that the phone was sold out as soon as it opened for pre-orders and that Apple on their last earnings call reported huge demand for the X. I'm not at all saying that the following is what happened, but it's important to not take any one news report as fact, especially one based on "sources" or "rumors". Stock manipulation and poorly-researched reporting are very real things and again, not saying that's what's going on here, but I would want to see Apple come out and report low demand before forming any lasting conclusion. If that happens, I'll definitely have a different opinion.

In the face of lots of evidence to the contrary, lines like this make me skeptical of the validity:

Apple is said to have trimmed its first-quarter sales forecast to 30 million units from 50 million, Taiwanese newspaper Economic Daily News reported, citing unidentified supply chain officials.

In poor countries iPhone X could be considered a status symbol but in US?

I agree. The problem with the X is that every new feature comes with a downside. It has a edge-to-edge screen but the notch is really ugly in landscape mode. It has Face ID but no Touch ID. It has wireless charging at the cost of a fragile glass back.

It is a phone beset by compromises, the only thing it does reliably is broadcast that you are rich enough to buy a $1000 phone.

>It is a phone beset by compromises, the only thing it does reliably is broadcast that you are rich enough to buy a $1000 phone.

I think most of us with engineering backgrounds have a very hard time accepting that social capital is a valid reason to buy a device. It may just not be valid for me personally.

All electronic devices are exercises in compromise.

But the X is very reliable at everything except broadcasting that I own an X. You see, like most every other X, mine is in a case. So far no one has ever noticed it's an X. And that case means I don't care about the glass back.

>"they want to be seen with it"

How does this contradict the article? Demand is limited because fewer people will or can spend $1000 on a status symbol. Seems like basic economics.

Because the premise of the article is that people are balking at the price when I would argue the price and exclusivity are the main selling points.

My 17 year old niece recently upgraded, and she could choose any phone. She chose the 8 Plus, as she perceived the iPhone X as being smaller. She said she'd happily get a "X Plus"

my fiance says the same. Her main issue is the landscape difference; she plays a lot of games.

I got the X because I like the screen to size ratio and my purchased media is resting on Apple’s markets.

A few hundred bucks either way is inconsequential.

Style-wise, they aren’t visibly much different than the last several generations of iPhones or Androids.

iPhones are technological marvels, masterpieces of engineering. But Apple software is getting worse and worse.

I have recently started playing with my Mom’s phone which is some cheap Huawei Android and surprise - I can do the same on this phone as on iPhone - Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Inbox, Google Search, Google Allo, Google Drive, Firefox, bank applications, Spotify, MS Outlook - everything works OK.

The feeling is liberating like discovering Linux after years of thinking that Windows is the only choice.

I have stoped using Apple Maps, Apple Music, Apple Photos, Apple Mail app, iCloud etc because they are all half-baked and frustrating. At least Google is trying harder with their software.

So what is the reason - excluding vanity - to pay 1000$ for a phone when I can have the same functionality for 100 - 200$. I will spend the difference on books, coffee and really good headphones.

Some areas iPhones excel in:

    - LTS Updates
    - HW quality
    - Relatively consistent UX elements
    - Foolproof-ish App store
    - Less features
        ie no App drawer, just homescreens
    - Forefront of security & privacy technology

The 5s was released Oct 2013, and still received iOS 11. It was also the first(?) phone with a Secure-Enclave device for fingerprint reading.

If iOS doesn't limit your glass-brick usage patterns, it's a very simple OS, with features that were thought about and picked for a reason. Or maybe more importantly, left out for a reason. This of course gets frustrating if you disagree with what Apple's designers have prescribed you.

But to a lot of people; Android phones these days feel creepy to be around, with the amount of Google-integration that requires much hoop-jumping and ignoring-of-gentle-pushes, just to get peace of mind over your data not being vacuumed from whatever crevices Google can find. And there are a lot of crevices on your personal smart phone.

If you're installing + maintaining LineageOS or something then you can get par with iPhones for the features that a lot of people in the HN crowd might care about, especially if you subsect for DDG-users.

>But to a lot of people; Android phones these days feel creepy to be around, with the amount of Google-integration that requires much hoop-jumping and ignoring-of-gentle-pushes, just to get peace of mind over your data not being vacuumed from whatever crevices Google can find. And there are a lot of crevices on your personal smart phone.

The way some people use their iPhone (my partner included) and all the (cr)Apps they have and what they do, it may as well be an android phoning home to google… also ignoring when its in airplane mode, telecos routinely connect through to the phone via baseband…

Even with all the conveniences, sometimes its just better to leave my phone at home… esp with all the times something is just trying to connect to apples servers.

> The way some people use their iPhone (my partner included) and all the (cr)Apps they have and what they do, it may as well be an android phoning home to google

The difference is that with the apps installed on a phone, you can uninstall the app. With Android you can't just "uninstall" the Play Store.

Sure you can. You'll need to uninstall Google Play Services as well but it is definitely possible to run Android without the Google-specific bits. It's is the first thing I do when setting up a new Android-device.

Out of curiosity, how difficult is this to do? Would the average user be able to do this easily?

It is distinctly non-trivial. Likely part of the reason why it remains possible. Chasing down bugs is the unavoidable result, but to a geek it's manageable. MicroG works very well once sorted. It is however astonishing how much processing power Play Services gobbles up. A de-googlefied phone lasts 30-40% longer on a charge. Once done, it works like a breeze. 3-4 year old flagships Androids are titans when de-googled and with custom roms.

This looks promosing - "New company called eelo will give you de-Google-ized Android so that you can keep your privacy"

https://www.phonearena.com/news/New-company-called-eelo-will...

If the phone can get LineageOS, then it is fairly easy - just don't install GApps when flashing LineageOS to the phone. Alas, phones that are thus open are getting rarer and rarer :( .

This is not trivial and is not akin to simply uninstalling an app (coming from a google-free Android user on a pixel).

I agree on hardware quality.

Security to me seems like a sales pitch - Apple is just as sensitive information greedy as Google. And I deal in this area with Google as well as I do with Apple.

But the inferior software quality is terrible drag for Apple.

Photos - their syncing with iCloud is out of control. There are bugs that haven’t been eliminated for years. I gave up when after deleting 50 GB of RAW photos Apple re-created then and synced back to mu Mac.

Google Photos is not only more open but also smarter and better at improving picture quality.

Apple Music - I gave up after a month of getting recommended Heavy Metal albums and playlusts everyday. Nothing in my Library, listening and followed artist suggested that I might like Metal. What kind of company can’t write simple recommender?

iCloud - Google Drive is just superior, more open, integrates and exchanges files with almost everything, Google Backup just works. iCloud backup is really inferior and again out of control for user.

Apple Mail stoped beeing developed and there are well documented frustrating bugs and quirks if you use IMAP accounts.

Maps - despite Tim Cook’s promise to users it never got on par with Google Maps. The quality difers wildly from country to country but recently I have re-installed Maps, used them for a week in my hometown and got so frustrated that I have deleted Maps and went back to using Google Maps.

Oh should I mention that touch interface is full of bugs. Try selecting a piece of text in iOS...

> Apple is just as sensitive information greedy as Google

As in Apple stores the information on their servers, forever? A lot of the sensitive information like a fingerprint or face scan is saved solely on the phone, as is a lot of the ML based features like content detection within a photo. Apple doesn't use a server farm to tell you there's a dog in your photo, it uses your phone.

There aren't good excuses for some of the bugs on iOS (the most recent iOS has been out for months and they still can't fix the emoji keyboard size issue, when this issue didn't exist in previous iOS versions?) but I trust Apple significantly more than Google with my data, in part because I know Apple's money isn't from my data, it's from the sale of their phone. This isn't true for Google and it will likely always be true that Google makes its money from advertising and user data. I also trust Apple to actually do some semblance of due diligence and make sure their app store isn't full of malware, something Google seems unable to do reliably.

I agree that Google is evil regarding data collection. I have no illusions about Google. But I am dealing with it through blocking Google calling home mostly via DNS, firewall and some custom extensions in Chrome or using Firefox Focus and on the go via Raspberry Pi router and my private VPN.

Apple however is calling home no less then Google and is quite secretive about why and what information is transferred so I am blocking most of it same as Google.

How do you generate an Apple IP blocklist while still permitting access to App Store, security updates, mail, etc?

> Security to me seems like a sales pitch - Apple is just as sensitive information greedy as Google. And I deal in this area with Google as well as I do with Apple.

I was scratching my head when I read this part of your comment. It makes me wonder if you ever owned or used an iPhone. iOS is end-to-end encrypted, and Apple doesn’t store any data on their servers, save for iCloud. And you don’t need to use iCloud to have a functional phone.

Have you ever observed amount of calls home from the iPhone?

I'll give you a couple here. You're right that Apple Maps is still streets behind Google Maps. Apple Mail should be better than it is, but Apple seems to be only interested in providing a bare-bones mail experience and leaving the fancy stuff to third-parties. And I just can get my brain around Apple Music, either.

The rest of it is either outdated or wildly inaccurate.

I have to use Android phones for work (one Sony, one LG), but I have an iPhone for personal use. I can tell you from daily use of both, the majority of iPhone software is vastly superior.

And you really need to stop spouting that line about Apple collecting information like Google. Anyone who knows anything about IT privacy knows that's wrong, and it just undermines your credibility.

I have been using Nexus phones for about the last 5 years now, and I would say that a iPhone is clearly a better piece of hardware than a $100-200 Android phone. But for the top tier Android phones I'd agree that the reasons for paying the Apple premium are dwindling.

Looking at something like the Essential phone that's retailing for $500, I think the many users would be hard-pressed to find an extra $500 of value out of the iPhone X. Then you look at a Pixel 2 XL, that's about $200 cheaper than the iPhone X while still featuring a very high level of fit, finish, and performance, and it gets to be a good deal harder to make the case for the iPhone X.

Android and particularly vanilla Android have really closed the gap on iOS while Apple has gone a bit backwards in some respects.

>> then you look at a Pixel 2 XL, that's about $200 cheaper than the iPhone X

And that's where the iPhone 8+ comes in.

Yep. I have to wonder whether the iPhone X is just Apple's way of taking advantage of the customer segment that is price insensitive and actually wants to spend more to get an iPhone that is rarer as sort of a status symbol.

The Wall Street Analysts may have just misunderstood what Apple was actually trying to do when they made their first sales estimates.

Apple photos, Apple mail, and Apple Music are amazing in my opinion. Apple maps, disappoints however

I've been applying to Apple recently and I've submitted well over 20 applications and still no replies. Clearly, they don't think I'm a good fit for whatever they are looking for in a software engineer.

I was taking a shower this morning when I realized... Apple doesn't care about software. I realized almost all the software I use on my iPhone or Mac is third party (excluding macOS and iOS). I realized Apple Music is quite possibly the worst piece of music software ever created by man. I realized iOS 11 is buggy as hell. I realized Siri is the worst "assistant" in the market. Apple clearly makes amazing hardware, but they fall behind when it comes to software. Their hardware design is the best in the game, but their software UI/UX is horrible. I know a lot of good designers who work at Apple and I know for a fact that they do amazing work on their own, yet they are unable to show this in the final Apple product. This must imply these designers' talents are wasted at Apple and they are not given a platform to shine.

So I'm going stop applying to Apple because clearly we both don't see a good fit for one another.

If you're anything like me, losing out on iMessages will be painful. I'm itching to get back to iOS.

Also being able to access all of the apps that I've purchased on my phone again will be a very nice plus.

I haven't been using iMessage for 2 years. And now I have unlimited SMS in most plans or taught my friends to use Allo.

Well, then you're not the same as me :-)

>I can have the same functionality for 100 - 200$

Because the $1,000 iPhone and a $100 Android don't have the same functionality.

Because you require a very small, Google-centric toolkit means that a $100 phone is a good fit for you. But there's a few billion other people on the planet, and some of them have different needs, wants, and desires.

But feel free to continue patting yourself on the back in public for your lifestyle choices, if that makes you feel better. Not everyone finds nobility in frugality.

Good. The phone is too damn expensive.

My middle school son has a $64 BLU phone. It was subsidized by Amazon in return for ads on the lock screen. Non-subsidized price is around $100. Last week we went to a theme park with a lot of waiting for rides. He played plants vs zombies and YouTube videos non-stop while we waited for rides. I occasionally surfed the web on my $1049 iPhone X.

By 3 PM my iPhone battery was dead. His battery ... 64%. I’m hard pressed to justify the $1000 price tag of my phone after seeing his in action. Yea it takes better pictures and the screen it a little better. But is that worth $1000 premium? Oh yea, my Son’s phone is over a year old. So compared to an iPhone 7 the differences are even less.

Why not ask Apple to replace the battery and see if that helps?

I would also look at

1. Battery save mode

2. Lower the brightness

3. Disable most, if not all, background refresh.

Apple does queey a lot of things in the background itself... but I feel you.

Generally these tricks would save you a lot of power and should last an few hours longer for a low-mid usage.

Too expensive? It’s $10 a month more.

Phone contracts are 2-3 years. $10 a month would mean $240-360 in total. Is that correct?

Here is Canada, the price tag from Apple is about $1300 (Canadian dollar is worth less than US dollars). I can buy it from a carrier for $1000 upfront plus $15 a month for 24 month. There are other options to pay less upfront and more each month, but the total is always the same.

Can you really buy an iPhone X in the US with less than $400 total?

He must mean $10 a month more for the iphone X, rather than the iphone 8.

In the US, in USD.

An iphone X will be worth around $500 in two years. Your total cost (ignoring service costs obviously) of ownership would be $20-$25 a month (depending upon depreciation and interest costs).

Buying an iphone 8 for $650, and having it worth 50% in two years costs you around $13 per month. Hence iphone X costs only about $10 a month extra.

If you buy a super cheap android phone for $200, it essentially going to be nearly worthless in 2 years. Your cost of ownership is around $6-$8 a month.

And these are devices we use heavily every day. If the benefits of s particular device are useful at all to you, it’s trivial to get the right one. Your monthly service costs are far higher than any specific phone costs.

If you're on the Apple plan in the U.S., the $10 works out to $120 because you can upgrade to a new phone after 12 payments.

AT&T has a similar plan. I don't think I've seen any two-year lock-in plans anymore in a couple of years.

When she's old enough, I think paying more for a phone will be worth not exposing my daughter to ads on her lock screen.

I hope you won’t stay complacent about the battery issue. I would have 70-80% left in your scenario. Is it possible that sweat was leaking into your pocket and keeping the screen active?

Could you describe the sweat more? The screen is always active, that’s how the tap to wake works.

Listening for touch events but not displaying anything. If your pocket is wet, it records touches from your leg (or just the water?) and keeps the screen on. I’ve had this happen on other phones; the home button would get pressed in the pocket and then sweat would keep the screen on, draining the battery. Just something to look into.

What do people buy $1000 smartphones for? For gaming I can get a pretty good gaming PC for that amount, or Xbox One X with a VR headset.

I've never seen anybody do anything really cool with their phone - everyone browses the internet, checks the email, does chats/videochats, maps, take photos, and some silly mobile gaming. I do that all on my sub $200 phone.

> What do people buy $1000 smartphones for?

Consider the iPhone X a smartcamera instead of a smartphone.

Consider the "portraits in low light" at the end of the side-by-side comparison section that Vanessa Hand Orellana and Lexy Savvides did for CNET here:

https://www.cnet.com/news/iphone-x-vs-iphone-8-plus-is-the-c...

If I want a low-light camera, I will buy a DSLR/mirrorless, and no smartphone comes even close to something like Sony A7s (~$1100 used). I used to do commercial portrait photography, so I know.

I also dislike the fake background blur / bokeh trend. I understand why the companies are doing it, but it's insanely hard to implement it right, and no phone has achieved it. Every time there's hair involved, they all fail.

Maybe for a specific event, but carrying around a DSLR everywhere you go is no fun. For candid shots, or traveling without carrying around a backpack everywhere, a phone that can take amazing pictures is awesome.

My DSLR is terrible at browsing the web and getting my emails. Don't get me started on trying to play angry birds on it.

JS-heavy sites are night-and-day faster on iOS, thanks primarily to faster CPUs (which is mostly due to better L2/L3 caches). The iPhone X has 8MB of L2 cache; your sub $200 phone likely has no L2 at all. Even high end Android phones have, at most, 1MB of L2 cache. This shows up pretty clearly in Speedometer scores.

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks

As devices get faster, developers use more compute budget, leaving other devices in the dust. Developers write code against high-end devices.

Not if their site needs a large audience, e.g. ecommerce.

You would think so. But man, even sites like newegg and amazon would drag terribly on my old phone. And many news sites were sooo painful with all their ads.

Can you post a few links of websites that are painfully slow on low end machines? I would like to test with my Son’s $64 Android vs my iPhone X.

Try browsing the web on your son's phone at all. You'll find that just about every website is slower to begin with.

You are not wrong, but that's like arguing that a Porsche is the only way to drive.

Well, it is.

If you can afford one.

And if you can, can you give me a ride?

I could afford a more expensive car, but I'm very happy with my Honda... and my Android phone.

Which websites are you talking about? I'm yet to encounter any important ones that are really slow.

My semi-budget android phone has 1.5mb of L2 cache.

I used to like sub $200 phones as well. However, I prefer something more expensive for the better build quality. However, not $1000 more expensive.

Because it's a nice device? Fast, sleek, good camera, stylish etc

Why do people buy nice cars instead of the cheapest, most economical models?

To be honest more expensive car are miles ahead of a cheap one in many ways: usability, drive support systems, safety, etc. After owning fresh Mercedes C-Class i started to fear economical cars much much more than crazy BMW next to me since the last one is most likely will be able to stop in the case of emergency than a cheaper one.

I understand it's "fast", but what do you use that speed for to justify spending so much more money? I understand if you're so wealthy, you're willing to pay $800 more to open Facebook a second faster than me, but I don't get why an average person would do something like that.

I bought it because $1000 is not a large expense for me and I use my phone all day long so I prefer to have the nicest experience possible (for me that means the best iOS device, for someone else it might mean the best Android device on the market).

For middle class people in the first world (and upper middle class people in China), spending $1000 every 1-3 years is not enough to make a meaningful dent on finances.

A phone is used hours every day. If you buy a $200 phone, it costs around 20 cents per hour of use. If you buy an iPhone X, it’s goung to cost around 50 cents per hour of use.

The $20@ phone is worth zero on 2 years, the iphone will retain about half its value.

Why does anybody buy an $800 graphics card when it will be obsolete in under two years?

Because they plan on dealing with it being outpaced by newer hardware but not by enough to care about upgrading for a generation or two in most cases.

This is why I’m still rocking my iPhone 7+, I don’t know if I’ll upgrade to the 9 when it comes out at this point because the phone still runs great - just like I plan on skipping Volta since I just bought a 1080 Ti and there’s not a game in the world that taxes it enough yet at 1440P.

And yet I'm still rocking my $350 Oneplus after two years.

Future proofing and spending exorbitant amounts of money do not necessarily have to go hand in hand.

It's ok to admit you spent the apple premium because you like apple phones.

An $800 graphics card has an immediate use case: high FPS for games at high resolutions and high settings. Which is very important in competitive gaming, for instance.

I don't see such a use case for a $1000 smartphone. What important task does it solve that a $300-400 phone doesn't? A slightly better camera, slightly smoother scrolling, slightly faster web page rendering. None of that impresses me in the slightest, these improvements are marginal.

Camera is hugely important to me, as is web browsing performance - the two tasks I use my phone most heavily for. In fact, these are the only two reasons I jumped from my iPhone 6+ to the 7+. You can find a decent phone for $400 these days, but there's always tradeoffs and I'm not willing to compromise (and to be honest, I have an investment in the Apple ecosystem, so unless I plan on figuring out an entirely new workflow there's not much choice for $400 phones right now).

That's what I don't get.

Which websites are radically slower on iphone 6+ compared to 7+?

And the camera - what use case are you talking about? Taking family photos to post on Facebook? If so, how is that "hugely important"? Taking professional photos?

Apple will eventually ruin the performance of the 7+ like they did with the ipad 2 and the iphone 6. I would advise you to wait a few months for reports to come in regarding what implications to your ux the next ios update has.

Keep in mind this is intentional destruction of your property.

Yea, there is no evidence they have ever done anything like that. Throttling CPUs so an old phone won't reboot during use is actually improving performance, and you can get rid of throttling with a new battery. Apple should be criticized for poorly communicating the choice users had to make, not for the throttling itself.

And an iPhone 6 only has 1 Gb of RAM, and it's multicore performance is less than half of an iPhone 7, and one quarter of an iPhone X. And an iPad 2 only has 512 Mb of ram, and it's multicore performance is one quarter that of an iPhone 6, and around 1/18th of an iPad Pro.

It's basically impossible to add useful new OS features without impacting a three year old devices performance, so the only choice is whether to withhold those features from older phones or accept the tradeoffs. And you control whether you accept those features by accepting the upgrade.

I don't care about new bells and whistles. How about this, your update makes my ux poor, let me go back to the previous version when that os was selling that phone.

GearVR is really good for watching movies on flights.

I have been using a Xaiomi Mi4i for a couple of months and at the beginning it was great. The camera was awesome and it was worth the 200$ I paid for it. But after few months it became slow and the storage became a bottleneck. After that I've switch to an iPhone SE and never looked back. I've been using if for almost a year and it is smooth and perfect for my day-to-day work and not to mention it is worth every penny I've paid for it. I think I'm gonna stick with it for a couple of years.

Good? I feel like these "analyst" reports are often completely wrong and generally not useful. Who knows what Apple's goal with the iPhone X is, but as an observer I see it as a low volume, premium product, that allows them to innovate. If you have a crazy high volume product you can't do anything risky...even if you could you'd run into volume issues (acquiring parts) and any bad choice would affect a majority of your profits for the year.

Why doesn't anyone call out that these are Grade Z analysts? Come on, Sinolink and JL Warren?

I agree with this analyst analysis.

Goodness. Everyone is speaking with such authority. I bought my X because I wanted to switch out of Android and because I only buy a phone once every three years it pays to buy the best phone I can buy. Why should I care that it’s 1000$ when I buy a phone once every three years?

Because $1000 is a lot of money to most people.

That's true, but why should that color someone's decision on what they buy?

Because people who budget responsibly live within the constraints of that budget.

I wonder if these analysts actually get out in the world or just sit in cubicles closed off from the real world. Traveling this holiday season, I saw the characteristic notch all over the place. Rural areas of flyover country included, saw them everywhere. In the month prior while in NYC, I saw them being used by folks of virtually every division of socio-economic background. I’ve not traveled internationally yet since it was released, but it seems in the US anyway that the X marks the spot of a home run release for Apple to me.

Surely shipment figures trumps your personal travel observations?

If the shipment figures were fully disclosed, sure. But the linked article is purely heresay and unsubstantiated speculation.

Yea, they never hav shipment figures. Everyone gets the same data, when Apple releases quarterly reports.

I've been in NYC, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, SF, Los Angeles over the past few months. Haven't seen a single iPhone X yet.

Well they’ve only been available for a bit over a month now, but either way, if you’ve not seen one, you are simply staring at your phone or have blinders on. Seriously, SF not seeing one!?

If you haven't seen one in nyc, then you're either blind or don't know what the iPhone X looks like.

I think Apple might have missed the mark by not adding some kind of incentive for the wireless operators to continue offering subsidized phones. Wireless operators helped create the market when the $500+ iPhone was considered costly:

http://fortune.com/2017/01/11/death-of-the-199-iphone-wirele...

Additionally, phone market is reaching maturity slowly. First few generations had real changes in terms of hardware and capability. Sure, there are new capabilities but none of them are in the category of "Must Have".

> Additionally, phone market is reaching maturity slowly. First few generations had real changes in terms of hardware and capability. Sure, there are new capabilities but none of them are in the category of "Must Have".

I've been saying this for years. I'm starting to see family and friends holding onto their phones for two, sometimes three years now. The prime movers to upgrade are slowly disappearing like you said.

Yup. I have been elegibe for an upgrade for 3 years, yet no current phone matches the featureset I have currently.

- Removable battery (huge deal, i carry 2 spares, often away from chargers for days)

- headphone jack (bt quality sucks, a lot, also battery and security issues keeping it on)

- Physical function buttons

- Waterproof/resistant, semi rugged. (Can I use it ouside in weather? Useless if not.)

- Decent camera, and audio.

- Gets regular security updates.

- Removable mass storage

- Makes and recieves phone calls without excessive dropouts.

- Internet connectivity with email and very basic browser.

Most modern phones dont even check half the boxes. They all seem to be made for people who never leave their car or office.

> - Removable battery (huge deal, i carry 2 spares, often away from chargers for days)

I thought losing the removable battery would be a huge deal when I switched to the iPhone, but in practice, switching to using USB powerbanks was actually an improvement. Don't have to reboot when you swap out, and you can charge it at the same time as your phone without carrying an extra special charger. And you can get them in massive capacities, and share them with friends who are caught out.

People are still paying monthly, just not in obscure plans their wireless providers keep interesting lace far too long.

I swear this post seems to have suddenly dropped out of HN. I saw it on the phone. Than came to laptop only to find it no where. As it can be seen, some many comments were posted in last few minutes of this post.

Is there some moderation or something?

It seems like most articles about Apple are quickly flagged off the front page by a small cadre of haters.

People still believe the shit "analysts" say?

The couple folks I know of who got the iPhone X were really keen on animojis, so Apple artificially limiting animojis to the X seems to be driving a few sales. There's no technical reason you can't do them on a regular old iPhone 8 since they only use the regular camera. It's purely a marketing limitation.

Who am I suppose to believe "analysts" or Apple who gave revenue estimates that if they met, would be a record breaking quarter for them?

By the time they gave those estimates, they were already about a month in the first calendar quarter.

I think a major mistake Apple made was assuming that it's iPhone base would be willing to accept change so quickly coupled with the fact that they charge 1000 dollars for the phone. I think psychologically , that number bothers people.

It would be interesting to see what age most iPhone users are. I know plenty of elderly people in their 70s and early 80s in the U.S., who have an iPhone because it is super simple to use. The iPhone X, with it's gestures, not so much, but what do I know.

This is not surprising. Like PC sales a decade ago phone replacements were going to slow.

Its a luxury, disposable income signalling device. I don't know many tech savvy people with iphones of any kind anymore. Its clearly image and exclusivity driving sales, not features.

I think many people see apple as a luxury brand more than a technology company now. Which might be better than the alternative. 'Anyone' can create tech, it takes years and billions to create a valuable brand.

> I don't know many tech savvy people with iphones of any kind anymore.

To present alternate anecdata, nearly every tech savvy person I know uses an iPhone, especially those who understand the privacy differences between the Apple and Google ecosystems.

This is bullshit. I just switched back from Android to an iPhone X and I'm loving it. More than half of the software engineers I work with have iPhones. None of us seem to be particularly interested in 'image and exclusivity'.

The non-metal rear back plate, and the absence of a headphone jack are really stiff turn-offs considering the price. Also, it’s kinda big and heavy in terms of the physical dimensions of the form factor, and besides, I’m just not that into photography.

Also, the whole thing with the batteries, and not so much the surreptitious performance throttling, but more the eternally non-swappable battery locked behind delicate ribbon leads inside the pentalobe-secured chasis.

So, sorted in preferential order (most desirable first), for an extra special X model, I’d have enjoyed seeing:

  - the all metal, black gloss finish introduced with the iPhone 7 (yes i’ll be clapping inside some stupid mil-spec plastic envelope because it’s $1,000 but metal doesn’t shatter into a gritty spider web on a bad drop)
  - normal wired headphones
  - USB-C replacing the lightning port, because one less dongle for my macbook pro
  - sane, toolless battery options, ...maybe a universal apple battery format? (yeah right)
  - maybe smaller and pocket friendly? i dunno... maybe the bigger screen is nice to have...
  - and whatever other extra crap they bundled in lately

Also, a watch without the weird red dot on the dial? Christ, almighty. Why the red dot? Why?

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