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Comment by PacketPaul | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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