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Comment by zolthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

>People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good.

This is quite the overarching generalization. Especially on a site like HN where there are tons of financially well off people choosing to use Android. Do some people buy Androids because they are a cheaper alternative to iPhones, sure. Do some people buy Androids because they don't like things like Apple intentionally slowing devices down, like having access to things like Termux, the ability to flash their own ROMs and root, etc? Absolutely. I don't even want to make this an Apple vs Android thing, but please don't reduce a valid choice down to people's financial situation.

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Statistically the average selling price of an Android phone is $200. Even Samsung’s ASP is $250.

An “overarching generalization” doesn’t mean there aren’t outliers. But most people aren’t buying Android phones so they can flash ROMs and run Termux.

On the other hand, the “slowing down phones” meme is outdated - it was a choice between slowing them down and then shutting off completely. All batteries degrade over time.

It was a choice between telling the users that they do and don't telling them. They chose... poorly.

I don't want to argue about Android vs iOS at all. You should buy what you like, I just provided a couple reasons why I use Andoid. I'm assuming your numbers are worldwide since you did not provide a source. If they're US centric, I'd be very surprised. Living in the US, I know plenty of people with Pixel 3s and S9s. These people did not buy these expensive flagship Android phones because they were cheap. There are plenty of valid reasons to buy them.

We have real numbers for the US also as far as people who bought Google Pixels.

https://www.recode.net/2017/10/4/16418170/google-pixel-marke...

If Samsung were selling high end Android phones in volume, how many cheap crappy phones are they selling for the ASP of all of their phones to be $250?

The high end Android market is minuscule.

I don't know how many expensive phones Samsung sells, but Google hardly sells any Pixels at all. Last time I checked, they made up less than 1% of Android handset sales.

Simple, effective, cheap and ecological solution: make phones with batteries that can be swapped easily by anyone.

Radical concept, isn't it?

So in the case of Android, you would have phones with replaceable batteries running old OS’s that the manufacturer abandons unpatched security holes.

Give me a phone that can run the latest OS for five years that I can take to the Apple store and get the battery place for $79 ($29 until the end of the year) any day.

Besides, the processors that are in most low end and midrange Android phones are so horrible compared to 4 year old iPhones, I can’t imagine them keeping up with new software.

No updates is another issue. But it is a problem created artificially. Somehow my 10 year old Core 2 Duo I'm using as HTPC is still getting updates and is working perfectly fine.

> Besides, the processors that are in most low end and midrange Android phones are so horrible compared to 4 year old iPhones, I can’t imagine them keeping up with new software.

Again - it's mostly software problem. I have Motorola Moto E LTE(2015 - 2nd gen) with 1GB of RAM and it's working perfectly fine with Lineage OS [without google services] + F-Droid. I'm using it for Jabber communication (Conversations), podcasts (AntennaPod), GPS (Osmand), e-mail checking (mostly notifications from my bank ;)), calendar (DAVDroid), searching web (Firefox) when I want to check something on the go (bus/train timetable, address etc.) and everything works fine.

My friend had same model and he replaced it because everything was slow with "official" android.

I also have to change my phone. Reason? Battery. Changing it is difficult(https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Motorola+Moto+E+2nd+Generation+...) and paying someone to do it doesn't make any sense (labor + new battery would cost more than this phone is worth...).

No updates is another issue. But it is a problem created artificially. Somehow my 10 year old Core 2 Duo I'm using as HTPC is still getting updates and is working perfectly fine.

The issue is not artificial. Before around the Core 2 Duo, processors and hardware were getting faster at such a rapid clip and the software was taking advantage of it that you really had to upgrade often to use modern software.

My Dell Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop from 2009 has:

8GB RAM - still the standard amount of RAM on most consumers.

A 1920x1200 display - it was one of the last laptops that had screens with that resolution before everyone moved to 1929x1080 and that resolution is still better than the average consumer laptop.

Gigabit Ethernet - most laptops these days don’t come with Ethernet at all and for those that do, gigabit Ethernet is still the standard.

250GB hard drive - of course now hard drives are SSD but most laptops still only come with < 500GB hard drives.

In 2009, an almost 10 year old computer would have had much lower specs than what was then a modern computer.

You see the same ramp up in mobile hardware that happen with computers. It just happened a lot faster.

And it doesn’t matter why the Android ecosystem is such a mess when it comes to upgrades. But it is.

Not only is the 6S from 2015 still getting official updates - so is the 5s from 2013.

Also, the processors in iPhones are so much better than in the typical Android phone, the phones have more headroom for upgrades.

For instance, this is where things stood in 2015.

https://hothardware.com/news/performance-preview-apple-iphon...

> Do some people buy Androids because they don't like things like Apple intentionally slowing devices down

Please read up on this point in detail instead of going by sensational headlines. You’d get a more comprehensive picture about how batteries work the same on iPhones and Android phones, and why Apple put in some software changes.

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