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Comment by nvoeiah | Hacker News Reader

>Among iPhone owners, a striking 91% of respondents indicate that they would prefer Apple to release the iPhone every other year rather than every year. Among respondents not owning the iPhone, this fraction is even larger, at 94%.

I wonder why the 94% care so much about a phone that they do not even intend to own.

I can't help but think that this study simply shows that more people should mind their own damn business.

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Perhaps some of those 94% believe Apple shouldn't waste the physical resources to create an iPhone every year. If they used an extra year worth of time and resources on making the phone better, maybe it wouldn't be such an incremental upgrade, use less precious physical resources, and create less waste.

If I felt that an investment had a 2-3 year life before being semi-formally deprecated, I would feel more like buying it. The thing is, that I can't think of consumer objects I routinely buy where the pressure to show I have the "newest" one is so strong. Nobody cares if my kindle is old.

Amongst my colleagues, like me it's a badge of honour to run an old phone. The last nokia standout only ditched it when they turned off 2G. He went with a minimalist phone which could do google maps acknowledging GPS was useful. He does nothing else. On the whole, chosing to run a phone with high MaH battery life and at least some commitment to update is a good choice. Apple actually can conform to this, because the older models are 7 years in, with software support.

> The thing is, that I can't think of consumer objects I routinely buy where the pressure to show I have the "newest" one is so strong.

Let me introduce you to the Garment District (Fashion Industry).

People spend thousands for clothes they only wear for a couple of nights out, over a few weeks.

It's a fairly wild industry.

Good point. Perhaps I should have qualified to tech. That said, I bet amongst the gamers there is significant pressure over GPU, and which generation of Playstation you're on.

> The thing is, that I can't think of consumer objects I routinely buy where the pressure to show I have the "newest" one is so strong. Nobody cares if my kindle is old.

Honest question: who cares if your iPhone is old? Maybe I'm in a wrong demographic but flashing top new smartphone in front of acquaintances stopped mattering around the time when everyone graduated and got a job (so everyone could buy one and it stopped being "cool").

That’s the point of the study ?

Social media is a near zero cost good. Seeing the ratio of preferences indicates something about what buyer behaviors are driven by.

The iPhone example is likely a reference or contrast point.

Finally - marketing is industrialized poking your nose in someone’s business is, and selling them things.

I tend to agree with your conclusion, but this this was a survey, and people were being asked their opinion. Was there even an "I dont care care" option. How much do they care, and have they ever thought about it before being asked?

Real opinion surveys are hard and you cant infer much from the results.

Mind your own business

I mostly just dont see why it’s relevant. What decision is this supposed to inform? Whether or not Apple releases a new phone? Clearly Apple will do what they see fit, which is releasing more often, and if they are wrong Apple will pay the price. And they clearly have not been wrong.

Apple do what’s best for their bottom line, not what’s best for the public.

Many are conscious about not having the newest stuff and would prefer the pressure not exist.

Would that really help? There's a virtually unlimited supply of "stuff" one could desire & buy. There might not be a new iPhone this year, but would you look at that shiny new watch/console/TV/etc.

Either you care about owning status symbols or you don't, I don't think taking one of them off the market would make a difference.

The peer pressures to have an iPhone within a lot of groups are very real and strong. Having a "Blue bubble" is shunned in many circles [1]. It's a sad reality. A part of it is likely iPhones managed to create a class of their own whereas nobody cares what brand of 65" TV someone has or who designed their 300 m^2 house.

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

I'm not sure if this is directly relevant since parent was discussing the pressure of owning the latest iPhone, not just an iPhone.

That said, I've read about the "blue bubble" phenomenon and it's truly a bizarre manifestation of consumerism. I'm European and the Android market share is really high over here, so I haven't witnessed it first hand.

The blue bubble thing isn’t about iMessage as much as it is about android messages sucking so hard it affects iOS users. SMS/RCS don’t support large files, (There’s no practical limit with iMessage) and video / images look like garbage. It intentionally corrupts the shit out of gps coordinates. It can’t even make decent audio or video calls. It’s tied to a phone number, and there’s no way to know if the recipient number even supports sms without sending one.

Also, green bubble messages are not e2e encrypted, and their contents are sold en masse to (or simply slurped up by) surveillance organizations.

iMessage has none of those issues. Signal only has a few of those problems. Its bubbles are blue (not by Apple’s doing, but still, blue bubbles, cross platform, and it is not intentionally a royal pain in the ass like android messaging).

Since you are in Europe, you probably don’t use SMS, and are therefore shunning the green bubbles just as much as any iOS user.

My impression was that you could send SMS through iMessage but when it's between iphones it doesn't use old school phone tech at all and just goes through the internet like other web based messaging apps. But only between apple devices of course.

Yes. It auto upgrades to a decent protocol when you are sending to an apple device. You can associate any combination of phone numbers and email addresses with it, so you don’t need a phone number to send iMessage messages.

I thought it was green bubbles which are shunned. In any case, it seems like a good way to get vain and vapid people to self-select their way out of your life. Would you really want to be friends with the sort of people who exclude others for consumer choices like that? Dreadful.

That's their own damn fault

The unhappy feeling caused by "keeping up with the Joneses" in a society rife with "conspicuous consumption" is not the fault of an individual, but rather the result of a complex interaction between personal, social, and environmental factors. For example, in unequal societies, where there is a large gap between the rich and the poor, people tend to have less trust in each other and in the institutions that govern them. Living in a less trusting society is obviously detrimental in ways that are hard to ameliorate for oneself as an individual.

Even counteractive techniques such as mindfulness, or gratitude journaling must first be acquired—and not "for free," either!

You insist, vehemently, that the fault lies with the insecure so, from whom are you trying to deflect blame?

Perhaps consider that for you to be relatively rich, someone, could be anyone, has to be relatively poor.

Not like they do much to the iPhone anymore. Why would a 14 Pro owner care about the 15 Pro?

Agreed, and maybe that's what the respondents are thinking too.

Who do you think popularized that release cadence, and paired it with a yearly conference?

> I wonder why the 94% care so much about a phone that they do not even intend to own.

People around you see if you have the shiniest, most expensive toy or not. It's stupid to care about it — but we're stupid and that's nothing we can really do about it. Comparing yourself with others and caring about social status is something that's built-in very deep in our psyche by evolution. It's irrational to try to ignore or completely conquer something so foundational to our being; the best we can hope for is to channel it to something better.

Of course, HN is full of people on autistic spectrum or adjacent (me included) who may not feel the same emotions or psychological reactions as a neurotypical. But, once again, it's irrational to judge an average human being by yourself in this case.

It's irrational to expect humans to not have any irrational thoughts or inclinations.

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