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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

I was talking with a MediaMarkt employee last week, we were talking smartphones and we both were dumbstruck about iphone prices. We agree it's good hardware/products but the price is insance. Yet people buy them in bulk. The brand is that strong. Apparently people also rush to replace their old models every year or two.

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.

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>and we both were dumbstruck about iphone prices. We agree it's good hardware/products but the price is insane.

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?

> 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.

Yes, but researching these alternatives takes time and energy. Personally, I rather spent a £1-2k more on my tech gadgets per year than leaving the Apple ecosystem, which works well for me.

Yes, I am also all for paying a bit more if it comes with the guarantee that it's less problem/questioning/time wasted researching or supporting the thing down the line.

Not really, unless you look at these devices like someone who thinks all cars are equal because they're all capable of taking you from A to B.

If you're spending that much time with a device, you would probably prefer the experience to be _nice_, not shoddy.

I am someone who has owned iphones before and still think they are overpriced for what they are.

To be fair, the reality distortion field rarely works on me.

I will grant that a small fraction of iPhone owners do a careful analysis similar to yours. And good for them.

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.

>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.

Violence and war have also driven technological and artistic progress. I don't think that makes them good.

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.

> Apparently people also rush to replace their old models every year or two.

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.

> I was talking with a MediaMarkt employee last week, we were talking smartphones and we both were dumbstruck about iphone prices. We agree it's good hardware/products but the price is insance.

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.

> > I was talking with a MediaMarkt employee last week, we were talking smartphones and we both were dumbstruck about iphone prices. We agree it's good hardware/products but the price is insance.

> 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.

Might wanna take a look at the following. I had an z3c that had a better supported android version from xda than a more recent xz2c because of their camera DRM and kernel bugs. Sony dev community has mostly dried up ...

https://forum.xda-developers.com/f/xperia-z5-compact-android...

Yeah but no. I did that at one time but it's a huge time sink and I didn't retain useful knowledge or skills.

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