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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

The cheapest second hand iPhones that run the current version of iOS (but are right at the tail of any support) are on the high side of the price range of what I’ve ever spent on a new, primary phone that I expect to last me at least several years. (And although it’s not as common as the alternative, I’m hardly alone in not spending much on phones; now laptops, on the other hand—.) I don’t want to spend more on a device that I might use once every few months.

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You can buy a used SE (2020) for only about $150 and that'll probably be supported for another 4 years.

I've spent more than that from shopping at Costco on an empty stomach (rookie mistake).

For Canada, it looks to be hard to acquire a used one for less than $250-280 CAD. So about $200-$220 USD.

Still a solid choice. I find it hard to imagine there's any android phone that can beat this phone for the same price (used or not!), OS support, camera quality, speaker quality, CPU speed & task switching speed, overall responsiveness, etc.

Ability to install a free software distribution, side-load software, run a plethora of Linux apps through Termux, fix the screen if you happen to break it without the thing complaining about "non-genuine parts", build, run and distribute software for the device without needing to pay a third party for the privilege of doing so, hook the thing up to a keyboard and display to use it for real work, install a full firewall blocking outgoing as well as incoming traffic...

Oh wait, those are all things you can not do with those iOS devices. Since these happen to be things I do it seems that iPhone won't be myPhone. Also, why don't these friggin' iOS devices support Ogg/Vorbis? I just added a transcoding option to Spodcast [1] to allow those poor souls using such devices to follow Spotify-hosted podcasts through RSS. None of my devices had any problems with Ogg/Vorbis but it turns out iOS simply does not support it. VLC on iOS does as do some other apps but those are not podcast players. Bad Apple.

[1] https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast

I’ve yet to see anyone distributing music only in Ogg Vorbis save for some backdoored Spotify thing.

Ogg is unfortunately not a mainstream codec. 10 years ago, SomewhatWellKnownMusicTrackerThatShallNotBeNamed supported Ogg Vorbis. They discontinued support due to lack of interest and seeding (this was before the French authorities raided them and caused the tracker to be shut). To me, when that tracker stopped supporting Ogg, that’s when it died. Even the music nerd pirates thought it wasn’t worth supporting.

As I understand it Vorbis is the codec and Ogg is a container.

Vorbis was popular with video game developers who didn’t want to pay for MP3 or MP4 licensing but outside of that nope.

Spotify’s probably the most (only?) prominent Vorbis user out there… but they probably hardly count since everything they distribute gets wrapped up in their proprietary DRM.

Yes. Opus "replaced" Vorbis, and has several advantages over older and common formats. Many popular streaming and voice-related apps and platforms use it as codec.

Anyone who does will have Apple users complaining in no time.

Bandcamp does this for all of their paid and free downloads. They also do FLAC.

Bandcamp doesn’t do it exclusively and I wonder if they’ll keep supporting it.

I don't see why they wouldn't, it's one of their selling points and they offer about a half dozen different codecs and containers.

Hope so.

I would change (back) to android in a heartbeat if the hardware was actually on-pair and I knew that I don’t have to basically throw away my phone in a few years.

I almost went with the new pixels as that is one of the few android phones actually having a non-locked bootloader (to not have to deal with Google’s privacy violations on my probably most used device), but the many bugs and hardware issues I heard about (plus the terrible support!), as well as not having it sold in my country made me stay with apple, even though GrapheneOS is a spectacular project I wanted to use.

So don’t make it seem like a trivial choice - the fact is, we have basically only 2 options and both suck for different reasons. (Unfortunately, the third one of linux phones are not truly usable as of now)

I'm still using the first Android device I bought in 2010, an Ainol Novo 8 Advanced tablet. I bought it back then for my wife to use while preparing for her specialist exam because of the high-res screen which made it a good fit for reading PDFs. It still works fine for that purpose, it still plays movies just fine. Someone is still releasing "new" software releases for the thing (where "new" means "new rehashed Android 'Gingerbread', but still). After that I bought a Motorola Defy phone which is still in use as well. Then my whole family jumped on that train when they got similar phones, all of which are in use in some way or another. Even my daughter's phone which she left in her pockets when she put her clothes in the washing machine and was washed a full cycle still works - I had to replace the ear piece (cost: $0.50 so I bought 10) but for the rest it kept up. Since the Defy (released in 2010) never went beyond Android 'KitKat' (4.4) I had to get a newer device in 2019 when the Swedish electronic ID provider "BankID" ceased support for that release. Had they not I would still be using a Defy as "daily" phone since the things keep up remarkably well. Now I'm using a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5, again running a custom ('Google-free') distribution like I've always done. I do not know for how long I'll keep on using this device but I see no reason to change as of yet.

A shorter version of this would be "the short life span of Android devices is highly exaggerated". As a bonus you get a mostly surveillance-free device, apart from the overt surveillance which comes with having a radio beacon in your pockets that is. Put the thing in flight mode and you're fine. In this respect Android devices running custom Google-free firmware (an important caveat) are the Linux PCs compared to the bolted-shut "No serviceable parts inside" Apple Mac and the increasingly invasive Windows world. Even the discussion around them is similar:

- Linux is not ready for the desktop... but I've been using it since 1993 on the desktop, from 1996 on exclusively.

- Linux does not support your hardware... while the opposite is true except for the newest hardware which can take a few weeks to months before support arrives.

- Macs just work... until they just don't work and the vendor tells you it's your fault, or the new release suddenly removes support for half of your software.

- Linux is not suitable for gaming... tell all those people running their games on Linux because they run faster/better than on Windows

- Linux users have to spend more time tinkering to get their machines to work... until it becomes clear that the tinkerers tinker because they see it as a pastime while others just install a distribution (in a few minutes) and use the thing as a tool.

- etcetera.

Even shorter because that wasn't very short either: Android devices can be used for a long time. So can Apple devices. Take your pick based on your wants and needs, ignoring the falsities being spread by the true believers.

Here in Japan, brand new iPhone SE (2020) is sold at $200 without contract. It seems that careers have too much stocks or quota so they need to sell them. I expect they are going to be exported.

Where do you see them being sold for that cheap? Cellcos?

Every electric shop like Yodobashi, and some cell career shop. Tend to be sold in weekend/holidays.

Technically it should be sold for everyone in $190 (22,000JPY), but some shops don't want to sell without contract. Govt make a regulation that limits discount for new contract to 22,000 JPY and careers must sell phones without contract. So shops should set non-contract price to 22,000, to sell for 0JPY for new sign up.

IOSYS has really cheap secondhand simfree iphones

Yes it's also easy way to get cheap new open box one.

The used ones there are usually good as new, Japanese have dislike for used things, so they don't really put out the ones that are really damaged or have lots of scratches.

Please tell me where! I'm seeing 250 on backmarket.com.

If you don't daily drive an iPhone and you don't want to buy into Apples ecosystem, why do you want to develop for their ecosystem (which of course requires $100 a year to do so)? Genuinely curious cause I see a lot of people with this sentiment, is it for work related purposes or something? Or testing of web work potentially?

I have some sideproject apps that I built with Flutter that I use on my Android phone, and I would make them available on iOS if I didn't have to pay any money to do so.

So the question is why would I as a consumer want to buy a least common denominator app using a cross platform framework that wasn’t actually tested on real hardware?

You can always uninstall it if it's crap right? It would be available to you as a choice, and now it's simply not available.

If the App Store becomes full of “checkbox ports” it’s going to be even more difficult to navigate than it already is.

Part of that is on Apple for not investing more in discovery, but copious numbers of low effort ports isn’t a good thing to have anyway. In the game world, bad ports of console games to PC and bad ports of games from any other platform to the Switch are one of the most consistent gripes — quite often the sentiment surrounding them is that they’d be better off not existing.

The app store has been full of "checkbox ports" since about 6 months after it launched

You're showing your cards as an android person ;-)

I agree with you, but nearly everyone on apple products will not. I get a (too me very perplexing) very similar respose when I ask things like, "why would it hurt people who want an Apple curated app store experience to allow a buried setting in the settings menu that allows sideloading for the few people who want that?"

You still need to pay the $100/yr to get the app out to anyone else's iPhone using TestFlight or an enterprise app store. You can build and test on your own iPhone (or an emulator) for free but that's the limit.

But that's exactly the type of thing why iOS apps tend to be of higher quality than Android apps. The whole "I do the bare minimum to support your platform" thing isn't going well with iOS users.

For myself, it’s mostly web stuff with Safari and Safari on iOS that I’d really like to be able to test from time to time.

Then macOS + Xcode + simulator would probably be the most cost-effective solution.

*(Small glance at QEMU)*

Yeah, because I can’t use macOS without violating its EULA or forking out even more hundreds of dollars for a Mac Mini. :-(

There's a ton of companies out there who have real iPhones, iPads etc you can rent by the minute through a web browser to test your code or web sites.

i.e.

https://www.browserstack.com/test-on-iphone

I'm just trying to find the one I use to test my emoji stuff, since Safari is the only one that displays emoji domains correctly.

Browser stack did not had the betas or the just released Safari versions, we had to depend on someone in our team risking upgrading to latest OSX to be able to debug with just released Safari that broke WebGL on desktop too. We do not target mobile users, we are fixing any bugs reported for Safari that are our code , but we only daily test with Firefox and Chrome because the developers and testers are using Windows or Linux(the team is in Europe)

I am struggling to understand where you are coming from. Can you elaborate?

The cheapest second-hand iPhone that runs the latest iOS 15.0+ is an iPhone SE 1st gen (2016). Current prices on eBay indicate a price of $70.

There is not a single Android that has been supported for this long of a time.

You can run iOS 15 on an iPhone SE (2016). They're very cheap to pick up. Around $70.

Ahh my mistake, you're right.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe...

That’s my “low-end” test device.

I run iOS 14 on it.

Cost me about $100.

Yep, I'm still using mine as my daily driver.

Second-hand iphones are expensive in asia. For example, that second-hand iphone SE 2020 you mentioned cost ~$350 here. That's more expensive than some locally-produced mid-range android phones.

Wow, I'm very curious as to why! Is it because they're imported, or because the asia-side emphasis is on export?

This also makes me wonder what the price dropoff across models is compared to the worldwide average. Is every model "oh wow" more expensive, or is there a gradient upward trend that tapers off the closer you get toward the iPhone 13 end?

Not sure why, but iphones simply has higher resale value compared to android phones with the same MSRP here. It's already that way from long ago even before the government ban import of used phones via IMEI whitelisting (Indonesia). If I had to guess, maybe because they're seen as luxury items, not just a simple smartphone.

its just trust in the brand. A 3 year old iphone has a high probability of still being a decent phone, fast enough, receiving updates, running latest apps... Also, most of all, you can expect another 2 years out of it if you're not too critical.

A random Android phone? Could be slow after 2 years, could be without software updates, could be filled with bloatware of a network provider that isn't actually yours. Could be you buy it and you'll need a different phone 6 months later. And even within the same model, there are huge differences. E.g. Samsung galaxy phones can have different processors inside, and varying amounts of bloatware installed.

iPhones are just a safer choice. Therefore higher worth

At that point it would be cheaper to order one from overseas and pay shipping, I'd think?

Import Taxed?

When I did iOS dev I could get by okay with an ipod touch, since I did not need cell or GPS testing. These are $200 new, $150 refurbed for the prev edition. The other route to go is a device farm service, IIRC AWS offers this nowadays.

That’s an iPhone 6S; I’ve seen them go for $100, or less with stuff like “battery runs out in 3 mins so must be connected to charger” which should be sufficient if you just develop.

Did you include low storage (e.g. 16GB) iPhone 6S and SE 2016 in your search?

I’m mostly just curious whether your primary phones generally cost less than those. It would be hard to find much for cheaper than those where I am.

Unrelated, but I find it interesting that storage size seems to affect second hand value so strongly. I mean that it looks like doubling would cost more than a few generations newer.

i bought an iphone 6s for this purpose for 50€. upon mentioning this to somebody i was also given a second one with a crap battery for free

An iPhone SE 1st Generation can be had for around $70.

What phones are you buying?

OK, I was looking at iPhone 6S, a glance at eBay Australia suggests they’re starting somewhere around AUD150. iPhone SE 1st generation looks to be starting at more like AUD120.

I spent around AUD150 on each of my first two phones. Last year I splurged on a PinePhone (around AUD300 including dock and shipping) which I hope will last me for the next decade.

> Last year I splurged on a PinePhone (around AUD300 including dock and shipping) which I hope will last me for the next decade.

I’m admittedly a pessimist but I’d personally be quite shocked if that happened. I simply lack faith that a small company can make a phone form factor device that can last / survive with that kind of lifetime.

Building devices of this complexity that can actually last seems quite hard.

Happy to be proven wrong!

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