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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

Never mind "older people", some Xiaomi devices have the same performance as flagships costing twice as much.

I have a Xiaomi Mi 9 SE (had it almost 2 years now), and it's the best phone I've ever owned. Previously I'd owned flagship Samsungs and an iPhone 6.

It's powerful, the display is excellent, the battery lasts 2 days even with plenty use (unusual these days!), the cameras are excellent, and the device itself looks great. Oh, and it cost £340 at a time when flagship equivalents were around twice that - amazing value for money.

Service is great too - the phone stopped charging at some point, but it was fixed within a few days of initial contact, with no quibbling.

My only gripe is the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, but that's hardly a unique issue.

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How can it really be that much better than a flagship iPhone?

This kind of reads like your a person who hates the price of iPhones? Either that or I read like an Apple fan boy; However, I'm a pretty keen Linux / PC user and I don't think I'm that bias?

A big reason why people buy iPhones is the Apple ecosystem and status signalling. A $300 Xiaomi phone also isn't as good as a flagship iPhone, but it's ~90% as good for 1/3 the price. For people who spend several hours per day on their phone, it isn't irrational to buy an iPhone. Americans spend on average 5.4 hours per day on their phone. Over two years, the savings from a Xiaomi phone come out to less than 20 cents per hour use. For these people it may well be worth the 20 cents for an hour of better phone experience. I think Samsung should be way more worried than Apple.

Note he compared it to an iPhone 6.

It is sort of like, Yes and No it depends.

There are reasons why things are little bit more expensive to make. And those add up quickly. The flexible OLED panel is more than double the BOM cost of rigid OLED even at the scale of Apple. For Apple that is ~$150+ of RSP increase form a single component. It is not only just being rigid, but they are also a higher quality panel. People often only look at "spec" on the surface without actually going it into details. Add up the cost of iOS ( $10 on accounting basis or $30 for RSP ), Face ID etc you are looking at $200 RSP extra already without going into any many other differences. Of course the main thing being Apple has a gross product margin of 60% compared to Xiaomi at ~10%. ( I think they raised this to 15%+ due to operating cost being higher outside China )

It is also worth remembering. Hardware is insanely cheap. Comparatively speaking. We talk about moore's law ending because of higher cost of making chips, at the same time we keep making dozen of billions from stupid social network and ads. The number by comparison are often comical. The cost of a product are now mostly driven by software when Apple are still giving iOS update to a phone first released 6 years ago.

It might also be worth noting, the entry level iPhone, iPhone SE, has faster single thread performance ( Very important due to Amdahl's law ) than the best flagship Android Phone on the market. You have to price this in somewhere.

Apple’s overall margins are around 35%. Where do you see that iPhone has 60% margins?

Apple over the years has an extremely consistent 60% margin on iPhone from BOM cost to RSP, that is excluding NRE, patents, Services, iOS, distribution and many other things. This distorted a bit once they introduce iPhone X in 2017 / 2018 along with their Services Revenue accounting changes.

Xiaomi has in past shown extremely innovative solutions. Just look at the battery life they achieved with mi band (3 months vs competitors 18 hours, are you kidding me??).

So while their software is basically adware and like all Chinese companies they are probably controlled by CCP, we must acknowledge that they also have some really bright engineers.

I think perhaps you're reading something into my comment that I just don't believe is there.

It's simply an anecdote from a random HN user who has a Xiaomi device, in a thread about Xiaomi; I figured they'd be relatively rare among HN users, and someone might appreciate a comment from an owner.

I don't hate iPhones, or the Samsung I've owned. They all have different attributes and values: the iPhone 6 was beautiful to look at, and the physical size was great; the last Galaxy I had was a great all-rounder; the Xiaomi I have now is a little larger than I'd like (though that's the way everyone has gone now), but otherwise it's very good in almost any regard. Is it better than an iPhone or the latest Galaxy? I'm not saying that - what I'm saying is that it does everything I need and more, and was half the price of flagships at the time. Way I see it, that's incredible value for an extremely capable device.

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