> In many social contexts having an iPhone is associated with either being a mindless fanboy, a basic trend-following drone or, in general, bad with money.
This is a bad take and is more revealing about your social circle.
This is a bad take and is more revealing about your social circle.
Replace iPhone with something like Vertu.
Also I happen to live part of the year in Europe. And found the price of Apple products to be within 10% of Apple US.
I don't need to know the financial situation of the iPhone owners. I need to know the financial situation of the 50% of population, to compare to the 50% penetration rate in the US.
As much as I understand, phone carriers / operators subsidize phones in Europe to a much smaller extent than in the US, too.
You can argue that your experience is different, I'm just providing mine which I've experienced consistently enough to find it worth pointing as a common divergence from what I see in the US.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/24/eu-legislation-to-make-imessa...
And the only stats I could find say that iMessage is used more than WeChat
https://www.androidauthority.com/imessage-big-deal-guide-308...
Could it be that maybe your anecdote is meaningless outside of your bubble?
The legislation is aimed at opening up the APIs of all messaging apps/companies which meet their criteria for being a "gatekeeper". Apple simply happens to meet those criteria.
> And the only stats I could find say that iMessage is used more than WeChat
Your article called their data an estimate without giving any insight into how the data was estimated, other than the caveat that it may include users who only used imessage for sms.
You mean anecdata without hard facts are meaningless??? You don’t say.
Not to mention, where was the anecdote in your article? There's no anecdote there in a 1.3B estimate, for all I know it's just some random reporter's guess (backed up by who knows what), whereas an anecdote is at least a hard fact, just one with small sample size. If I don't know how the estimate is made then I probably actually prefer the anecdote.
I take the phone unlocked, with AppleCare+, to attempt a normalization across regulations. Default warranty in the US is much weaker than in the EU, but should be the same with AppleCare+. Buying a locked phone is also cheaper in the US, but AFAIK it's not possible to buy a locked phone in France anymore.
US: 978 USD (excluding sales taxes), France: 1198 EUR (TTC, including sales taxes) or 998 EUR (HT, excluding sales taxes), so about 992 USD at current rate. So the iPhone in France costs about 14 USD more, or 1.45% more. That's not "much more" in my book, although it is a little bit more.
I think the common mistake is to compare European prices with sales taxes (20% in France) against US prices without sales taxes... Hint: prices displayed on the Apple store in the US are always displayed without sales taxes, while in the EU prices always include sales taxes (I'm not sure it's true in all 27 member states, but it's definitely true in France).
But I've read so many times (on French forums) people argue that Apple is overcharging EU citizens by forgetting to adjust for sales taxes that I defaulted to interpret "In Europe Apple stuff costs much more" that way.
In a way it makes sense, in France what you see is what you get, so the typical French consumer expects the sticker price on the US Apple Store to be the final price. In fact it's the law: in France you have to honor the sticker price, even if it's wrong (unless it's an obvious mistake, but the bar for obvious mistake is quite high).