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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

> Chances are good that if you’re in the market for a smartphone, you fall into one of two very clear cut categories. Either: a. you’ve decided that your new phone is a very important item in your life, so you’re going to buy the nicest phone available at whatever price. (Usually this means an iPhone, although some flagship Android phones qualify for this category.) Or, b. you’ve decided that just about every phone out there is ‘good enough’ and is more than adequate for your needs, so you’ll go with whatever one costs $0 with your existing wireless contract.

He doesn't provide any figure, he just says things and consider them to be true.

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I don't think it is true. Just a cursory google search suggests that the market, at least globally, is a lot flatter and is likely flattening. Not everyone has an iPhone or Samsung. [0]

Similarly, those large cities he lists (LA, New York and San Fran) have relatively low population growth, at 0.67%, 0.25% and 1% respectively [1]. Large cities like Phoenix, and Austin have around 2% growth.

This makes more sense to me. As these cities become crowded and expensive, people will naturally look for a better deal.

These types of articles are just lazy. The author doesn't even seem to bother doing basic research.

[0] http://zindagi.online/2018/12/03/gartner-global-smartphone-s...

[1] http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/

Large cities seem to also depress fertility.

https://twitter.com/Cicerone973/status/1124426697972092928

That's kind of irrelevant; city growth has always been more a question of internal migration than fertility.

(Rome and many pre-industrial cities usually had negative population replacement rates because disease was such a problem. People still came.)

Yes, it's just a wrong intuition sold as fact. Millenials have increasingly started to buy larger cars and moved from the big cities to the sunbelt and the suburbs.

(https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/why-is-...)

The idea that everyone will be riding around in shared cars and live in the LA megalopolis is a tech industry fantasy.

It’s worth noting that it’s unclear whether or not this is a generational preference for the suburbs, or rather a result of a lack of suburban-equivalent amenities for families like safe parks, good, not-overcrowded schools, and available daycare options. Not to mention a lack of housing at the 2+ bedroom size.

It’s still a reversal of the ‘60s and ‘70s where the cities were being abandoned wholesale.

>The idea that everyone will be riding around in shared cars and live in the LA megalopolis is a tech industry fantasy.

It's also nowhere near anything TFA says.

What he says is that where people want to live is not very gaussianly (normal) distributed, but there is a peak for major urban centers (LA, NY, SF), and a large plateau of smaller places.

>I don't think it is true. Just a cursory google search suggests that the market, at least globally, is a lot flatter and is likely flattening. Not everyone has an iPhone or Samsung.

He doesn't say that "everyone has an iPhone or Samsung". Quite the opposite. That there's a large flat base of sub-300 phones, and a 10% (or more, depending on country) of people with high end (say over $800 phones), and not much in between.

> That there's a large flat base of sub-300 phones

No, actually he doesn't say that. He says that people who don't care about their phone will take one for $0, any phone:

> Or, b. you’ve decided that just about every phone out there is ‘good enough’ and is more than adequate for your needs, so you’ll go with whatever one costs $0 with your existing wireless contract.

People buy many different phones (including high-end Android phones, and second-hand iPhones); the reality he describes doesn't seem to exist.

Also, including people who don't care about Taylor Swift in a study of the value of Taylor Swift concert tickets' value, is absurd: that some people (or even most people) don't want something, doesn't have anything to do with the price of goods. What matters is who wants it and how hard they want it.

Some people like Taylor Swift a lot, some like her a little, some like to go to concerts, some like to go out, some are looking for a place to bring a date, etc. etc. The author's binary division is completely artificial.

He speaks generally, not absolutely.

You can see all between price points, but not all have equal peaks -- it's a larger "cheapo" and a smaller but significant "expensivo" segment that dominate, that's the author's point (whether it's true or not).

He doesn't say that there are absolutely no cases that fall in between, just that the distribution of them is not normal, but bifurcated to those two extremes.

You’re looking at 1% population growth, but much higher real estate growth costs. Looking at real estate demand is probably a better way to measure demand in cities since it’s so hard to build new homes these days.

That's not even vaguely true. I don't get the supposed dichotomy between giant $1000+ slabs of glass and plastic junk.

A few years ago, a friend gave me his old mid-level Samsung phone for free. It was a piece of garbage, and I hated using it, but I put up with it until it died. Afterwards, I looked around for something decent that wasn't too expensive, and settled on a refurbished iPhone SE. It cost a couple hundred dollars, and still works just fine. It doesn't have all of the latest bells and whistles, but it's good enough, and actually fits in my pocket.

IIRC it is true, but it's a quirk of the phone market. People either go for the the flagship or for an economy phone, but it's a weird quirk of the mobile market (since most people assume that the cheapest phones are basically as good as midrange phones, or that they're better off with a cheaper phone and more frequent upgrades, so there's no middle).

Cars are different. Not everyone buys a Porsche or a Kia.

The vanishing middle is actually happening in many, many markets IMO. You can either get cheap plastic junk or overpriced glam. MacBook Pro or Chromebook. The high quality, no frills, moderate price product- it's gone from most markets.

Cars are perhaps one of the few exceptions, maybe due to sheer price setting hard limits on the high end and basic safety setting limits on the low end.

Not to mention that a person who’s cost conscious about their phone won’t have a contract that included “free” upgrades anyway.

And, indeed, Apple's pricing strategy (selling old phones on discount, having multiple versions of the flagship, e.g. "Max" and other) suggests they're trying to hit a broad section of the demand curve.

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