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Comment by bkirkby | Hacker News Reader

i don't think it's smartphones that are considered luxury items, it's the $1000 iphones when a $50 android will provide all those benefits just fine.

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But then you can't even browse the web properly with these, though. Not with all those fat Javascript-heavy pages and the whole "RAM is cheap" prevailing development mentality nowadays.

the 80/20 rule still applies. $50 is probably too low of a price point, but the example works if you compare a $250-400 android phone to a $1000 apple/samsung flagship. I could buy those phones if I wanted to, but I'm getting by just fine with my pixel 4a. hell, my pixel 2 was still perfectly serviceable but for the lack of security updates.

$50 to $400 is basically one order of magnitude, though. So the argument changes a lot.

kinda, but kinda not. $1000 is still a lot more than $400. I consider $600 to be a meaningful amount of money. it's definitely not a good move to spend that much on a phone if $600 matters to you. in any case, this conversation is drifting off the rails (or was derailed from the start). the iphone SE exists and sells for $400. with apple's track record for updates, that might be the best value on the entire market right now. I wouldn't consider it irresponsible for anyone to purchase that phone. I'm also not sure I believe that large amounts of poor people are buying brand new $1000 iphones anyway. most poor people I know are using whatever cheap phone happens to be supported by a local MVNO.

perhaps. now that i think about it i was buying my kids $50 androids when they came of age, but with the last two that didn't seem to cut it. i spent more like $100 with an extra $20 for an extra SD card.

for myself i paid under $250 for my android and i'm a professional full stack developer with android as part of that stack. (essential ph-1 phone on clearance sale on ebay).

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