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Comment by nowooski | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty wild that Apple has held prices down the last few years in the face of elevated inflation. I decided to calculate the inflation-adjusted price of every iPhone ever, and the 15 line are some of the most affordable (in 2023 dollars).

Full table and charts are here: https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/iPhone15-price

But the take aways are: - iPhone 15 is cheapest base model since the OG iPhone in 2007 - 15 Plus is cheapest large iPhone ever - 15 Pro is cheapest pro ever (and $250 cheaper than the first Pro model, the iPhone X).

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The cost of inputs has gone down. What has happened to the cost of storage and RAM (both commodities, I assume) over the last several years? They're still shipping "Pro" iPhones — that cost as much as a computer — with 128GB. That's one way to keep costs down, and to goose the demand for Apple's iCloud backup service.

With Apple's margins I doubt they're using a cost plus pricing model.

I wasn't assuming that either. I was just pointing out that I'm not impressed that their prices haven't gone up in an inflationary period, since some of the inputs for these devices have gone down in price (presumably by a lot).

That is not the story their profit margins tell (no big material increase in quite a few years).

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-pro...

If people back up most of what’s on their phones, won’t people with more storage also want more space for backups? What things in your mind (other than apps/games) would take up a lot of space on a phone and not be backed up? Or do you suppose they wouldn’t be backed up to iCloud?

iCloud is very inexpensive relatively speaking. And even the smallest plans have a very large amount of storage.

For whoever is downvoting me, not sure why. You can get a storage plan for $1/month for 200GB and 2TB for $10. Not sure how you could possibly compare that to the price of the phone, that would take decades to break even.

I didn't downvote you but...

>iCloud is very inexpensive relatively speaking. And even the smallest plans have a very large amount of storage.

No, 50GB is not "very large". It's far smaller than iPhone storage, which means people filling up their phones (usually with photos) can't use this plan.

>You can get a storage plan for $1/month for 200GB and 2TB for $10.

No, the 200GB plan is $3/per month not $1.

Also, iCloud is lacking a lot of features that other could services have, such as file versioning or any kind of ransomware protection, block-level sync, cross platform sharing features, and many others.

iCloud also happens to be the only cloud service that ever managed to lose some of my data.

The only thing iCloud has going for it is privileged integration with Apple devices.

People have lots of photos/videos, and when your phone runs out of space, it kindly prompts you to buy iCloud storage. I have several family members who have done this, without understanding what it really meant.

That's a good thing. I suspect these people wouldn't want to lose their photos if their phone breaks.

The point of this thread is that storage costs have gone down, and Apple has maintained its nominal prices by being chintzy with the onboard storage. Whether it's good for Apple to be paternalistic by pushing iCloud on people is a separate issue. Someone who already backs up to a computer doesn't need it, but is confused by the messages that appear when their phone fills up.

Also note that photos/videos taken on new phones are much, much larger than on older phones, effectively meaning that you can store way fewer photos/videos than before.

FWIW I tried to restore my iPhone backup from my Mac last week, and it totally failed. If I hadn't had iCloud, I'd be SOL.

(This is not a defence of Apple btw - it's unforgivable that they lock down the phone so you can only use their backup feature, and it doesn't actually work).

Wait wtf, that’s how I back up my data. It’s impossible to test these backups, I might need to pay for iCloud for peace of mind then.

“One is none, two is one” when it comes to backups. If you have a service like Microsoft 365, OneDrive comes with 1TB of data and can backup photos. You can also use Google and Amazon. There’s even option like Nextcloud and Owncloud for a self hosted solution.

I do have back up of the photos and videos, but the rest of the phone can only be backed up using iCloud or Finder/iTunes on Windows. Both methods are actually impossible to test without a spare phone.

is the backup encrypted? I wonder if it's possible to extract the photos from a bad backup

Yes it was. I've kept it in case there is some way to fix/restore it in future, but since I had all the important photos/videos on iCloud, I don't really have a pressing need.

If they understood what the backup was, would they want to pay for it? My guess here is that most people do want the backups and so the on-device storage doesn’t matter that much for photos. Maybe people want to use google photos and avoid iCloud backups and that requires more storage on device? I don’t know about that

Ask and ye shall receive:

https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/12/new-icloud-big-pricey-storage...

I did not receive an answer

Also, over the years they might have also been able to make their supply-chain operations a couple or so percent more cost-efficient each year.

The iPhone is improving less and less generationally and faces stiff competition. Regarding the regular iPhone, I haven't seen Apple be this far back in display tech in such an expensive product since 2017 when the MacBook Air was still using a 1440x900 display.

The pricing of the 15 pro is pretty remarkable to me considering apple is paying for titanium and 3nm silicon this time around. It's also interesting how Apple has knocked down the price of the Pro and SE models every generation.

> The iPhone is improving less and less

it is hard to buck the S-curve : https://www.open.edu/openlearn/nature-environment/organisati...

I maintain that there’s no such thing as a true exponential function in the actual physical universe. Every one of them is a sigmoid function in disguise, that you may or may not be in the early phase of.

> apple is paying for titanium

only the outer trim is titanium, the frame is still aluminum

For people in the US yes, overseas they are famously overpriced. Here in South Africa the cost of an iPhone is ridiculous.

You could buy a 50x100 plot of land here in East Africa

Using that logic literally everything in America is overpriced.

Turns out different places have different costs of living.

Nobody is comparing the cost of an iPhone in the US to the cost of land in East Africa. They're comparing the cost of buying an iPhone in East Africa to land in East Africa.

Different places have different costs of living, and many consumer goods and services adjust to that in different markets. Apple is notorious for setting international price points insanely high relative relative to local price points.

Are apple prices insanely higher compared to other brands offering exactly same product? Not sure about East Africa, but quick check for South Africa shows that Toyota RAV4 (+30%)[1] or PS5 (+23%)[2] prices are adjusted up from the US counterparts.

[1]https://www.cars.co.za/newcars/Toyota/RAV4/

[2]https://cacellular.co.za/product/playstation-5-disc-version-...

Cars and electronics are expensive here. Certain things like food and property are cheaper.

50x100 in what units? There are lots of plots in the US that you can buy for under $1000/acre.

Probably metres.

Same in India, what makes it worse is the taxation. You end up paying $1000+ for the $799 iPhone. And $1000 is a lot of money. You can live a comfortable life in a tier 2 city with $500 a month. PPP adjusted, $1000 in US is around $4000 in India.

In fact, someone proved that it is sometimes cheaper to fly to and back from Dubai and buy a pro model from there than buying it directly in India.

Another perspective is that apple managed to keep prices more or less at the same level, while it has become more and more a medium-range product: there’s not even the current chip anymore and only USB2.0

The new base Pro Max is the same price as the equivalent previous model: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/12/iphone-15-pro-pricing/

They basically eliminated the lower 128GB model.

Right? Considering USB-C and the fact that they moved most of the pro features into the base model it seems like a great time to upgrade from an older model.

Hah. Hi Wally! Or, rather, I assume this is him.

I found myself reading your post, then was like, "Oh hey I know someone who came to this conclusion already... oh shit, they're linking to PerfectRec? Oh shit, I think it's Wally on HN!"

Hope you are well :)

Hi Sean! Nice to see you here! :)

Hey Joe! :D The whole gang is here, apparently!

Haha yeah we are, including you!

Hey Sean! Hope all is well. Glad the take was at least memorable enough you did a double take. :-)

Hey Sean! I don’t have a clue who you are, but I wanted to say hello with everyone else! Have a good week!

Hey Shawn! I don’t have a clue who you are, but I wanted to say hello ;)

Hah :) I was a senior/staff engineer at a startup where Wally was head of marketing and Joe was co-founder. We all worked together for several years before a successful exit. PerfectRec is their new thing and I was pleasantly surprised to see them in this thread!

Sean's a really nice guy! More people should say hi to Sean. Let's make it a meme and totally overwhelm him!

Hey Sean, really cool you’re here :)

I did the same thing, except I know Wally because I follow him on Twitter. To be honest, I don't even know what he looks like.

Technology always gets cheaper, pretty wild to think otherwise.

No they don't. Sometimes societies stagnate and things become shit expensive.

The phones are officially loss leaders for the service businesses.

nope, the phones are very profitable.

Yep, I meant this in spirit, not literally, but looks like I was wrong even in spirit:

https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/02/apple-results-and-charts-...

Not true. Apple is super disciplined about profit margins. Each business has to be sustainable on its own and each product sells with a hefty margin or is doesn't make the cut.

Apple phones are a lot more expensive than android phones of similar specs

What does similar specs mean? Just looking at cpu for the first set of results I found[1], one has to go back to the iPhone 11 (released 2019) to find one performing worse than a non-iPhone. Results are closer for multicore and maybe the comparison/benchmark I found was bad for one reason or another, or maybe you mean other specs like the size/weight or cameras.

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/mobile-benchmarks

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