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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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?

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