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Comment by salad-tycoon | Hacker News Reader

I finally convinced some in-laws to get an se2 after telling them it wasn’t really cheaper to keep buying terrible no name Samsung phones every other year. They have also both become photographers now and can FaceTime easily to see grandkids. So mark me down for contributing 2. Your welcome Apple.

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Samsung also makes quite a few phones with decent cameras.

Are you saying the SE2 specifically fills a hole in their line-up?

Long support (5+ years), physical first-party stores for support every 100ish miles in the USA, compatibility with Apple's proprietary iMessage and FaceTime protocols. An OS that's generally considered easier to use, with more walls in place to protect users from malware. A simple $400ish price point.

Not a huge difference from Samsung's cheaper offerings on paper, but a lot of little things that add up to a better experience for many older users.

My limited experience with the Apple store seem a reason to stay AWAY from Apple.

They wouldn't look at the phone. They made me stand in line to make an appointment to come back, all the while their team of "experts" stood around chatting. It came across to me as horribly elitist, and one of the worst retail experiences I can recall.

To you, that’s elitist.

To the average person, that’s just… how things work.

Also, entry level iPhones and iPads don't have anemic SoCs. They're just a generation or so behind what gets put in the flagship Pro models, which are still more powerful than what you'll find in many less-than-flagship Android phones.

I have an upper-entry-level Android tablet I bought for development/testing which has a price that's within spitting distance of that of a refurbished iPad, and it's stunning that something as weak as the SoC it's built with is on store shelves in 2023. It lags and stutters all over the place, and even an entry level iPad from 4 years ago carrying around the extra weight of the latest version of iPadOS would destroy it in terms of performance.

It’s honestly not even funny how much ahead iphone CPUs are to the at the time flagship android offerings. There is like 2, sometimes 3 years of difference.

Low end iPhones are in the 100-300 range for 11s and 12s and generally work well for non tech users.

11s we’re running less than 100$ per phone. By far the best low end phones

FaceTime and iMessage always work very well and out of the box. No installation/configuration required.

This, in my mind, is the biggest selling feature for iPhones to baby boomers. Locks them in forever as well.

WhatsApp takes about two clicks to setup. My 60 year old and generally technophobic mum and all her friends have managed to set it up and use it themselves (including group chats and profile pictures)

> mum

This is perhaps a giveaway that you're not in the US, where WhatsApp is generally not something people use to communicate. (Anecdotally, I have seen it primarily used among people who have families outside the US.) FaceTime, on the other hand, is widely used here.

Yeah, iMessage just lost in Europe and pretty much everywhere outside the US.

Part of the issue is the Apple only lock-in, part of the issue is the branding, being branded as an SMS app when SMS are dead certainly doesn't help.

But he was talking about how hard it is to set up, not whether people use it.

What matters is what your friends use. If grandmas friends already got setup on iPhones she is better off with one as well

The SE 2020 being extra cheap (and even the 2022 model if you look well enough) is only a product of the used market and the fact that that line of iPhones is often overlooked, so people selling them really lowball the price more often than not. Apple doesn't actually have a lot to do with it.

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