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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

> I get that Apple stuff is generally a nice experience and there is genuinely lots of cool technology, but people need to understand the future they are buying into with Apple.

Can't speak for all Apple users, but the way a lot of my friends talk about their phones - it is crystal clear they think they're better than you if you don't have an iPhone.

I imagine this subset of users would be glad that people without iPhones can't listen to podcasts.

I think they're aware of what they're buying into and like it.

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As someone who loves Apple stuff: what kind of people are you hanging out with?

I’ve never heard an adult I interact with express that. My Android using friends don’t care.

There are people who get iPhones just for iMessage. They don't want to be the one person who puts the entire group chat into "green bubble" mode. People accuse Apple of doing this intentionally, but you know, it's not their fault SMS is terrible; even Android users tend to use WhatsApp or something for group chats.

So I totally understand that. But does that rise to the level of “I’m a better person than you”?

I guess I haven’t heard it put that way.

I know it was a thing in middle school, and I'll bet some people never grew out of it. I've never heard an adult directly say that having an iPhone makes you better, but I have seen groups exclude people based essentially on income, and none of those people would be caught holding an Android phone.

It's dumb, I hate smartphones.

At least WhatsApp can be used in iOS.

Can iMessage be used in Android? No.

I think the SMS fallback makes this fair. Apple saw how bad SMS is, they made it so iPhone-iPhone convos use an upgraded mode or fall back to SMS automatically, and I don't see why it's their job to give the upgraded mode to everyone for free. You can still talk to Android users in the same app.

They even put early effort into making Macs send/receive SMS via the iPhone. Google didn't do something similar until recently, or did they, hard to tell with their chat app naming.

I cannot tell you the amount of times my friends mentioned Green Bubble to me as an insult.

I just call them sheeple

Are you the person who made up that insult? Or do you just go along with all the other people who use it?

When did I say I wasn't a sheeple?

I just think the adult iPhone users that care about the color of a text message are pretty brainless. Care about something important.

As a person insult? Or an insult against your phone choice?

What is a person beside the sum of their choices?

If having Green Bubbles is a negative connotation. It would seem it's because Blue Bubbles have a positive connotation.

It does not seem like a stretch that someone talking like that feels elitist because they have an iPhone - which they express by your lack of Blue Bubbles.

And that was basically Apple's strategy to begin with. That user can say he doesn't experience it in his friend group but its been well documented and accepted at this point [1], especially among teenagers.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...

I think it's local phenomenon. It seems to be the case in the US at least. Where I live (Switzerland), most people are using WhatsApp (or Threema or Signal) anyway, even if they have iPhones.

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