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Comment by goodside | Hacker News Reader

"One simple way to look at it is that there are far more people who've never bought an iPhone and who've never bought an iPad, who will in the next five years than all of us who've already bought at least one to this point."

That's one simple way to look at it. Another slightly less simple way is that the ones that already have Apple devices are the savviest, hippest, and spendiest consumers around, and you can't possibly hope to milk as much money per person from the ones that adopt later.

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I disagree, though based on the attitude of your comment I'm not sure if you'll take my point.

Here in Dublin, at least, iPhones are becoming extremely popular, even with the losertechnicians of the world. Businessmen with no tech skills are replacing Blackberries with them, teenagers are flocking to get them, and there are even dodgy-looking iPhone accessory shops in bad neighbourhoods.

Over here, since around the start of this summer, the iPhone 4 has been available for free on a 40 euro per month contract with unlimited data and enough minutes/texts for the vast majority of people, on pretty much every network. That's a really good deal, and a huge number of people bought into it, figuring that they spend at least that on credit anyway.

When the iPad 2 launched over here, there was a period of 8 months where you could not find ANY, at all, even in the authorized resellers that Apple likes the most. At any one time there might have been one for sale in the whole city.

Android is gaining momentum here too, and I don't know figures for any of this, but I definitely haven't seem them on as many non-hackers as I have iPhones.

In conclusion, no, the people who have iPhones are not the Apple-savvy hipsters. At least in this city.

Here is how I see it:

The first wave are the tech enthusiasts, these people are not big app buyers but are interested in finding a good SSH tool, or an mail client that supports PGP. These were the main customers of the first iPhone.

I'd say we've been in the second wave for the last couple years. These people are seeing TV the ads and are curious. Their friends buy iPhones, it makes sense for them too as well. They're not "hackers", just people that are willing to try apps. These are your Angry Birds players, and where the main revenue comes from.

The third and final wave will be moms and general folk who will never sync with iTunes. It's those people that are never going to buy an app because they won't know what an app is. And that's fine, they'll like how their phone talks to them and how they can Facetime to their kids.

I don't mean to say that all iPhone 1 users are "hackers", just that a higher percentage of them were than are now iPhone 4S users. A lot of those people likely went off to Android in the recent years, anyhow.

"The first wave are the tech enthusiasts ... are interested in finding a good SSH tool, or an mail client that supports PGP. These were the main customers of the first iPhone."

Given that the first iPhone had no 3rd party apps apart from web apps, this seems highly unlikely.

It's more likely true of early Android phone buyers.

Good catch, though there were definitely apps on the first iPhone. AppTapp/Installer was introduced around Christmas time if memory serves, and there were apps, utilities, and even a few games available.

Still, those presumably required jailbreaking, which I gather was not done by the majority of iPhone 1 owners, and certainly not by the earliest buyers, who bought before that was even an option.

Your comment rests on the assumption that the savviest ones are also the spendiest ones, which most would probably disagree with.

Now that I think about it, Android has 3X (or whatever) the market share of iOS, and no one seems to be making a ton of money from Android (except Google), the future for Android developers is pretty grim if you ask me.

hippest

I have a handful of uncles/aunts who'd disagree.

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