Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazyjeff | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to hear this perspective. I feel like FLAC is to PCM as PNG is to BMP. Why not just work with FLAC directly? Half the file size in exchange for negligible processing time.

As a practical use case, FLAC is the only way I can fit my song library on my phone. Flagship phones today come with 128GB of storage, about 90GB is actually usable. Every additional 128GB is $100 more.

View on HN

>Flagship phones today come with 128GB of storage

IMO, one of the biggest scams in the mobile space currently.

My old OnePlus 3T flagship from 2016 came with 128GB of storage and it "only" cost €480. Also, best phone I ever owned by far BTW.

Today, nearly 6 years later, Apple and Samsung flagships (I'm staying away from OnePlus nowadays) are charging huge markups for more than the base 128GB of storage, on phones that already cost €1000+, despite flash storage getting significantly cheaper since 2016.

This is beyond insulting, especially since modern flagships also lack microSD expansion.

Same thing with MacBooks. Air +200$ for 256 GB of disk drive (from 256 to 512).

The market decides; people pay those rates even though there's alternatives available.

There is not much choice when the giants in the space with the majority market share are all pulling the exact shame shenanigans.

I was watching some old Apple videos one day and back in 2001 Apple asked $500 more just to have a better _optical_ drive in your iBook https://youtu.be/ZxIgyG_7jcI?t=243

It was also for double the RAM.

This’ll be because since 2016 it’s now expected you’ll stream more media than you’ll did back then, so not much much storage needed.

That doesn't make sense of why the prices increased so much despite storage offering stagnation while NAND flash getting cheaper.

Any way you slice it it's still price gouging.

Price gouging has a legal meaning and means raising prices in an emergency. Charging more than you’d happen to like isn’t ‘price gouging’.

I meant price gouging from the consumers' perspective, not being pedantic about the legal meaning of it.

So what is price gouging to you? Just being asked to pay more than you’d like to? Then it’s a meaningless term - I’d always like to pay less.

>Just being asked to pay more than you’d like to?

No, I already explained above why I consider it price gouging.

Because they make a profit margin that you'd prefer was smaller? That’s just commerce, and we'd always prefer people charged smaller profit margins.

Are you 'gouging' your employer by asking for the highest salary you can get away with? Of course not. It's a market price.

You missed the point completely.

> This is beyond insulting, especially since modern flagships also lack microSD expansion.

They'll do everything they can to push people into using their cloud services. It erodes the concept of ownership when you have to ask for permission from another party to access your own stuff. The more dependent they can make you on them the better. Plus when I listen to an MP3 stored on my phone, there's no opportunity for 3rd parties to track what I'm listening to and how often or to push ads at me.

Nothing about downloading an MP3 that says they can't put a targeted ad in it; there's podcasts that do that based on your IP. I assume the reason most don't is just how much more trustworthy it sounds when the host reads an ad script live in the episode.

(I swear there was an episode of The Weeds where they read an ad for a therapy service for dogs.)

> Nothing about downloading an MP3 that says they can't put a targeted ad in it; there's podcasts that do that based on your IP. I assume the reason most don't is just how much more trustworthy it sounds when the host reads an ad script live in the episode.

I'm in the UK and noticed both kind of happening: an ad for LinkedIn (I think) was localised to use a UK example in several episodes of This American Life during the last year. It was spliced into the programs seamlessly and sounded just like any of their usual sponsorship segments.

I'm presuming they just edited a handful of versions of the program for their largest listener regions and there was no need to do anything on the fly except pick which to serve. Of course I paid little attention to the ad as I was distracted more by it being the first time I'd noticed that kind of localisation.

Funny how a 200€ Xiaomi phone has 256 GB of storage these days. No idea though if that is fake HDD somehow.

Why would it be fake? NAND flash is cheap, that's why Xiaomi can offer 256GB on cheap phones since few people rush to buy Xiaomi. Apple and Samsung are name brands and can afford to overcharge their customers.

Isn't Xiaomi a name brand? I mean, the name is right there: Xiaomi.

Name Brand generally refers to something not being a White Label Brand. So, "Apple" is a Name Brand, but "TALK WORKS" iPhone chargers (on Amazon) are probably a White Label and, therefore, not a Name Brand.

Also it's 128GB not 128GiB.

FLAC also has no metadata interop issues since the flac container always specified vorbis comments.

> Every additional 128GB is $100 more.

Your phone doesn't support some kind of SD cards?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com