I really wish there was more competition in this space. Here's hoping someone like Canonical tries again now that the open-hardware world is starting to expand.
Anyway, it just popped into my mind that I dreamt about buying a phone last night and the shop's owner just found a box with 60 iphones 13 that a customer finally didn't buy. But he had opened each box and the cardboard was ripped for each box so it was a massive loss for him. Funny coincidence.
I'm honestly dumbstruck that people like you are dumbstruck. It's not very hard, and whether you your self use powerful handheld computers/cameras much it's objectively obvious others do a lot. Just do the normal ROI calc. Apple makes a feature for this called "ScreenTime". How many hours a day is the average iPhone user on their phone? A quick google search indicates over two hours. So that's over 700 hours per year, with a life time of at least two years on average.
Do the math. What is so shocking about spending <$1/hour on something so heavily used and important? What price privacy/security focus and long term upgrades? Subtract too the resale value. What is surprising here?
What's surprising is that for the vast majority the same can be done for <20ç/hour.
If you're spending that much time with a device, you would probably prefer the experience to be _nice_, not shoddy.
To be fair, the reality distortion field rarely works on me.
But just look at Apple ads to see what their real market is. Their ads don't argue that they're a good value. Apple established themselves as a luxury good that indicates wealth and social status. Their ads look like other ads for wealthy people. The reason Apple doesn't make a cheap phone is the same reason Porche doesn't make a cheap car. They could, but it would drop total profit as the luxury premium evaporates.
The funny thing is, I've heard people make the exact same argument people are making here but for Louis Vuitton bags. It's something they use every day! They're so well made that they last a long time! They have great resale value! And all of those things are true, but people who spend $100 on a purse are still going to give side-eye to people who spend $1000 or $10,000, and I think that's fine. In my view status goods are a plague upon humanity.
Why? I'd argue that status goods have driven technological and artistic progress throughout time. So many innovations were the result of someone trying to make a new higher status good, or trying to make a status good cheaper(so they could have more wealth/power).
Living in the 21st century, almost every good you can buy would have been a status good to someone at a time in the past.
I also think you're confusing "did contribute to the creation of" and "was the only possibly way we could get". E.g., it's true that early cellphones were status goods. But given the massive market for them today, it's clear that was not a necessary step toward their existence and perfection.
The resale prices on used Apple hardware is pretty good. When you factor that in, an iPhone may very well be less expensive than a competing Android device.
They start at $400, right? Only really, really budget Android phones come in much under that.
> Yet people buy them in bulk. The brand is that strong. Apparently people also rush to replace their old models every year or two.
I have encountered three major species of iPhone owner:
1) Breaks a screen every couple of years, just replaces the phone when it happens.
2) Upgrades every year or two but leverages iPhones having a much better used market than Android to recover half or more of the original price via resale or trade-in, so they only pay full price for the first phone. (some of these now simply lease their phones, for convenience)
3) Holds on to each phone 4+ years, since the phones receive updates for so long. Pays full price every time, but goes a long time between upgrades.
> They start at $400, right? Only really, really budget Android phones come in much under that.
More like 489€. I don't know what's apple most sold devices for this year though.
I have an old not-budget phone (z5c) from 6 years ago that is still going strong. Stuck on android 7.1, bought used for 250€ 4 years ago.
I am still living in a world where a 200/250 phone should be okay, things might have changed.
But we were talking about the whole offer, not the least expensive phone.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/f/xperia-z5-compact-android...
Even for the first time buyers, if all their friends are on iMessage, they practically have to buy an iPhone.
Signal tries to offer that but isn't as polished. The Facebook services like WhatsApp are good and cross-platform but that involves trusting Facebook heavily.
I don't use an iPhone. This is the reason I heard from iphone users.
With iMessage you can send high resolution photos and videos, which may seem like not a big deal. But it is. Sending a message between Android and iOS uses mms and the photo/video is compressed to an unusable state. I can airdrop a 1GB+ file instantly to any Apple device. How do I transfer a 1GB file to somebody on Android or on a PC? Upload to google drive? then re-download it thru the App? That takes minutes and 5+ steps. When I've already Airdropped the file in seconds on my Apple device by tapping "send".
iMessage/Apple products are about convenience and ease of use. Apple is the best in both of those categories.
It's happening everywhere in the world apart from the USA so that's clearly not where the blockage is. It has more to do with iMessage having a critical mass of users in the USA.
> I can airdrop a 1GB+ file instantly to any Apple device. How do I transfer a 1GB file to somebody on Android or on a PC? Upload to google drive? then re-download it thru the App? That takes minutes and 5+ steps.
Apple competitors have technology which are similar to airdrop notably Huawei and there are plenty of apps offering solutions to this issue. I like airdrop but generally speaking Android sharing options are superior to iOS. It is easier to send anything towards any apps on Android which makes your point about the 5+ steps kind of moot in my opinion.
> iMessage/Apple products are about convenience and ease of use. Apple is the best in both of those categories.
iMessage is mostly about captive markets and network effect. Then again, I like my iphone. It's well made and it somewhat works as a status symbol which I have nothing against. I just don't try to pretend that Apple wins by being the best.
Outside of the USA people are "switching" messaging Apps? Or just continuing to use what they have always used?
>Apple competitors have technology which are similar to airdrop notably Huawei.
Nobody uses Huawei here in the US so that point is moot.
>and there are plenty of apps offering solutions to this issue. I like airdrop but generally speaking Android sharing options are superior to iOS.
What are these Android sharing options that are superior to iOS? Do they have to be installed? iOS has Airdrop built in requiring no installation or configuration. If they have to be installed they are automatically not superior.
>It is easier to send anything towards any apps on Android which makes your point about the 5+ steps kind of moot in my opinion.
No it isn't? I have used both Samsung and Apple devices for 10+ years. It is always easier to share between iOS devices and Macs.
I find analogies useful. When I was young I started eating fries with ketchup. As an adult, I don’t get to say ketchup lacks competition because I don’t like other condiments. Even within the ketchup vertical, I have a brand preference. I could buy a store brand and save 50% but I don’t. I like what I like and I pay for it. Non iPhone users either don’t like iOS or just don’t want to pay the premium Apple charges, otherwise I’d argue many more people would be on iPhone.
And the point about iMessage and the other iWhatevers is important. Apple intentionally avoided interoperability. This goes beyond lock-in to contagion. I know people who didn't really want to get their young kids iPhones, because they weren't really old enough to be responsible for something so expensive. But they felt they had to do it anyhow because of the lack of interoperability. So they ended up buying multiple kid iPhones as the phones were lost, smashed, etc. I get that's not very expensive for the kind of people who hang out on HN, but it's real money to most.
For me, it's the existence of a player that can squeeze the margin for others.
With only seller giving people access to iMessage and app store, I don't see this condition fulfilled. Even if there is a well made phone that offers better utility for half the price, most users would just wait for iPhone to catch up rather than switch.
I don't want to draw very bad comparisons: but this is very similar to the AWS lock-in with egress, except instead of data, you have iMessage and apps you've already bought..
So you’re segmenting luxury phone market and saying Apple has no competition in that space except Samsung and others have tried for years to make luxury phones. iPhone users do not want them and it’s primarily due to preference. They don’t want to have to learn another os, they don’t like the look/feel, they don’t get a test drive option, etc. I just believe that’s their personal risk assessment that Apple benefits from but it’s not lock in because I just don’t think people really give a shit about iMessage that much. I have to believe the true perfect competitor you want them to have will have an acceptable solution as well.
Surely former reasons are valid and those people do exist.. but anecdotally most companies that I know are the latter.
Maybe most iPhone users would stick with iPhone even if there's no lock in, but we don't know that because there is a lock in.
What I think it's really showing is that the Android economic model creates different incentives: Apple gets money when you buy the phone, apps, purchases in apps, and things like music or movies through their services. They certainly like it if you buy a new phone every year but all of those different groups share a common leader who wants to keep you as an Apple customer.
When you buy an Android phone, the CPU manufacturer won't see another dime until you buy a new one. A vendor like Samsung may or may not depending on whether they have some other service you use or get kickbacks from the carriers. Google likely sees ongoing revenue but they don't care about the hardware as long as it doesn't make you switch to iOS. Each of those parties adds overhead which Apple doesn't have and they will make decisions which are rational for their business but perhaps not your satisfaction.
I don't deny the SE is a better phone than a 50 pound phone, but it's also in an entirely different bracket -- I wouldn't give a 10 year old a nearly 400 pound iPhone, I'd give them a 50 pound Android, for example.
Also, nowadays, most people (the vast majority of which don't think the same way as people on HN do) see a $400 phone as a compelling budget option[0], maybe even "low-end" if you'd go so far as to say that.
0. from personal experience with the iPhone SE2, it's a genuinely amazing phone for the price (sporting the same processor as the iphone 11 pro!) and suffers only in the battery department. Touch ID is also a great selling point for it.
* yes, it is an hyperbole
[0] https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/how-much-iphone-1...
This is my parents. Between the two of them I bet they average 3 new phones per year, because they keep buying cheap Android phones, but they just can't bring themselves to spend more, even though it'd actually be cheaper and then their phone wouldn't suck. Plus because they keep buying Android and all these cheap phones run on different major versions and with different vendor customizations, they're constantly having trouble with wildly different UI for even basic things like the phone "app".
I know lots of people who have bought a cheap Android handset and used it happily for a few years, myself among them. Most Apple owners I know keep the phones until they die, so don't have hand-me-downs. Obviously it depends greatly on the wealth of people as to how eager they are to upgrade their phone.
As a matter of full disclosure, my personal phone is an Android phone.
You can speculate as to why they can wring so many extra dollars out of their customer base, but it's not clear to me that the overall handset market, itself, is structured in a way that gives Apple an unusual advantage.
Globally Apple has a marketshare of about 26%. Even in the US, Apple has just over 50% marketshare.
The fact that they are capturing the majority of the profit is reflective of business strategy and priorities.
Apple makes a lot of money from the smartphone itself. Other providers are making their money by selling out their users.
You would either need to go head-to-head with Apple on price and quality of the device and OS and distribution, or compete with Google in terms of selling out your users. Or you would need to find a back-end monetization strategy based on paid services that, so far, seems elusive. Mostly, I think, because it requires a huge portfolio of services (e.g. a "Netflix phone" won't cut it).
As an aside, I've long felt that that latter strategy could be applied in the browser market. Make a browser with a subscription-based services package. ChromeOS+Workspace is mostly there, except for the focus on crap devices and poor distribution and the never ending customer exploitation (Google's product playbook: crap sold at flea markets with AI support).
The challenge folks like Canonical face is that they try to compete with Google on price and distribution, and compete with Apple on privacy alone. So they skip out on both proven ways of making money. That's just not going to scale. Such players will always be niche players, and there are plenty of them out there toiling away without a scalable business model. Which is fine, if you accept them for what they are.
Ideas like what Canonical and Firefox tried to do were great, but didn't have enough in it for the powers that be to be successful.
It's conceptually similar to the protections in the west. Protect users, but share data with the 5 eyes. It's just that they won't block you from searching for Uyghur or Winnie the Pooh or something similar in the process.
It's kinda interesting because this concept seems to work fine in China for the simple reason that they have so many domestic services. Other countries that just try to copy the China model without the domestic information services(i.e. Iran) have a huge mess on their hands.
It may happen anyway but these scenarios are never easy or clean-cut.
Either way, it's not clear-cut. Sure China can do that. Great now they can pay those workers since companies like Apple won't be paying them...
It seems the competition still doesn't get that Android is not good enough to compete with Apple on the luxury/premium market. Most of the "extra" software developed by the competition is bloatware and spyware. The core design is developed only by Google who is weaker on design than Apple.
That's why Apple gets the bulk of the premium market and leaves the competition to battle on the cheap segment.
Agree that many manufacturers stuff bloatware onto their devices, but the Pixels don't have that problem.
I think we've now reached a point where a third player is pretty much impossible
WebOS had some real potential, too.