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Comment by olegkikin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GearVR is really good for watching movies on flights.

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