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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next.

Maybe Nokia was simply too early for the vision, or the execution was somehow lacking in some other aspect, as Apple made basically the same bet but seemed to have pulled it off. Maybe the design wasn't designy enough.

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Nokias problem was exactly what OP described. The whole company didn't talk to each other.

Software did their own thing, design their own and the poor industrial designers tried to keep up.

Apple's secret sauce was proper vertical and horizontal integration so that every design feature was also supported by software.

Sauce: Worked at Nokia in the "let's release 200 phones a year" -times.

I don't really think that the average iPhone user (at least in Europe) gets a new device every season. Actually the opposite is true: Apple does gives you the opportunity to stick to your old device, if you want. iOS 15 still gets updates and can run on an iPhone 6S.

I just went from a 6S+ to a 15 Pro, so I'm an example of this. However, there are some apps that just don't work on the older devices. Snapchat would not work on the 6S+ with the latest OS available. Eventually, the camera took enough tumbles that I'm assuming the lenses were no longer aligned as nothing was in focus.

Also, an iPhone provides so much more utilitarian purposes than anything Nokia ever released. Something as simple as those devices would be much less noticeable if replaced by mood.

> Also, an iPhone provides so much more utilitarian purposes than anything Nokia ever released.

You never tried symbian I guess.

I went back from a launch day iPhone (original) to an N95. Symbian was ace for its time.

This is how I'm hoping my 13 Mini works out. I can just keep using it until it's ancient.

I switched to Apple specifically because Androids I owned aged quickly and badly. Some people can’t drop the kool aid drinking caricature view on iPhone users they hold.

Interesting. I have 3 years old Pixel 6 Pro I use as a phone, 6 years old Redmi MIUI I use to control my various gizmos and 8 years old Galaxy S6 Edge to do yet another set of gizmos. So far all work like charm.

Do tell me what kool aid did I drink?

None at all. I switched since my personal experiences with Android phones were lackluster, typically the software becoming sluggish and unresponsive, usually within 3 years.

I'm using the Essential PH-1 - hasn't had a software update since 2019 and I can still play games that just came out

You got the nicer Androids. Most of the Androids on the market unfourtently aren't very good in terms of using modern hardware, using the latest Android OS (shops continue to sell Android phones running versions of Android several years out of date), receiving security updates, etc. My experience of Android had been incredibly poor until I got my S21. My S21 is the first Android phone I've owned (out of several from different manufacturers) that works on par with (if not better than) Apple in terms of keeping the OS up to date and porting back new features to older models. I now only recommend the Samsung S-series to people considering Android, anything else is just asking for trouble.

Ah the old compare expensive iPhone to bare bones android comparison

I guess downvoting confirms how superior Apple smartphones are.

Or how people disliked you going defensive over your own misreading of the comment you replied to.

> Do tell me what kool aid did I drink?

As I read it, "people can’t drop the kool aid drinking caricature view on iPhone users" says not that people who hold the caricature view are kool-aid-drinkers, but that they hold a view of iPhone users as kool-aid-drinkers. So I don't think there was any claim that you drink anything at all. (Though I'm fairly sure you do: At least water, or you'd be dead.)

I'm not sure they are that similar.

There were so many significantly different Nokia phones at one point. I'm talking about after 3310, like 3220, 6600, 7610, 3660, 7600, each design is unique.

Apple has like two models (small and larger) at a time, and you can get them in a couple of different colors. The big design revolution is that they add rose gold or purple or whatever color each year so that the few people who care about showing off their latest model can do so.

Apple has 8 different phones you can buy right now counting all the max/plus models (SE, 13, 14, 15, 15 pro). If you add in the storage differences it is 24 unique circuit boards/phone internals, and colors bring it to over 100 different unique products.

From an inventory and logistics perspective, that's actually pretty wild!

Maybe it's a matter of doing things in order ? Nokia had no strong image, they were well established but not like Apple, and also iPhones are flagships with a lot of advanced capabilities.. nokia lineups at the time were very much mainstream/average (the notion of advanced device was also limited at the time).

When you're on top of the industry, you may have a shot at selling lifestyle.

> SE, 13, 14, 15, 15 pro

This more analogous to different model years of a car, rather than entirely different car models.

The customer immediately and intuitively understands 14 is better than 13, 15 is better than 14, etc.

The main thing clear to me is that the "mental flow chart" involved in selecting an Apple phone is much, much clearer than it would be for selecting a Nokia.

Yeah, but they only release like 4 or so new models a year, excluding storage/color differences, which are relatively trivial, despite making many billions of dollars.

Apple made almost $200B from iPhone in 2023, for example; per model, even including the older ones, that's an insane revenue per model. Not sure I can think of any other product at that level.

Yeah, but from a software perspective, it's just 2-3 form factors to support (Square Screen, Notch, Cutout). Even those are very well defined that those developing software for it doesn't have to bother with it at all. But you're right, the fact that a red iPhone 15 128 GB is one of the over 100 combinations available is wild. It seems like a smaller pool

Any other company, if they had the iPhone, would have failed selling it in numbers. Because only at Apple it was preceded by the iPod that set a unique precedent in how much more expensive than all competitors a device could be. And that shift in price perception was deeply connected to the brand. It's easy to forget just how much more expensive the iPhone was than other phones that reached a meaningfully wide audience (or would have, in absence of the iPhone).

Not indulging in the fancy moodboard stuff wouldn't have helped Nokia the tiniest bit.

(edit: reply might have better fit GP directly)

The success of the iPhone was not due to a price anchoring effect. Sure, if you just wanted to make calls the iPhone was (is) rather expensive. But they were really selling a computer in your pocket, which among other things could browse the web like a computer, display maps from pretty much any location on earth, and replace those bulky Franklin Planners. Not to mention take phone calls. There was nothing like it for multiple years.

I am a pretty late adopter, but I bought the original iPhone. Totally worth it. Two years later when everyone's phone contract was up, they all got iPhones.

Not sure if it's a difference to era, or a just a earlier stage for Apple in the same cycle. Apple made good phones that work and last well, then 'fashionedised' them with different colours leaning into the newest model as a status symbol.

But arguably Nokia did the same, at the time Nokia was a decent phone even if they had no standards between models - no one else did either. Blackberry found more consistency then lent into the status symbol approach.

I suspect that there's probably a common pattern with brands building a decent product, becoming renowned for that, then becoming more fashion like to play up their new status. Eventually someone else able focusing on the product features over the name steals the market.

I’d heavily dispute that - I’m not an Apple fanboy, and also not sure where the Apple regular replacement fallacy comes from.

Back in the day, phones would be sold on 12mo contracts. Now, I’m surrounded by people (who are of very sound means) rocking iPhones from 5+ years ago, which are able to function in the tasks most adult phone users care about just as well as a recent model. Friends are passing old iPads down to kids instead of binning.

They brought a plastic case to a machined metal fight.

Unlike Apple Nokia built their devices to resist breaking and be 100% serviceable down to the smallest parts. Apple uses metal because it's significantly heavier than plastic and makes phones heavy enough to shatter glass screens and damage their internals when dropped.

Any iPhone could replace its metal housing with an equally strong polymer and become exponentially more difficult to break.

They tried that a few years ago with the iPhone 5C. We saw no difference in repair rates at the time.

Ah, the strong load bearing case and impact resistant glass are just a clever rouse! Their real purpose is to...break more easily! It makes so much more sense now.

Their real purpose is to look "premium". How else would you explain the use of glass on the back of the phone? It's certainly not ergonomics - there are materials that are both stronger and grippier. But it's certainly shiny.

iPhones are built with super tight tolerances. Using the same (or similar enough) materials on opposing sides means not having to deal with different thermal expansion properties. Glass is also radio transparent which makes the NFC radio and wireless charging much easier. It likely doesn't hurt with cellular and WiFi reception either. It's also not going to interfere with the MagSafe magnets.

Somehow Android phones manage to do NFC and wireless charging just fine without glass back panels. And tighter tolerances are exactly that - "premium look".

Tight tolerances are premium construction. Loose fitting parts are cheap and easy. They also lead to increased wear and decreased durability. Dismiss everything as "looks" if you want.

You know what else leads to increased wear and decreased durability? More glass that breaks when you drop the phone.

The scratchproof "gorilla glass" (a Dow Corning invention) is extremely shatter resistant. Metal is of course more shatter resistant than polymer.

There was a tragic brief era when we might have had synthetic sapphire / "transparent aluminium" screens: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/3/18528920/sec-charges-apple... (sapphire is aluminium oxide)

The 3210 era devices had easily replaceable polymer covers; they definitely did break and scratch, but these operated as disposable ablative shielding for the phone itself. Which also had a much smaller screen that was away from the corners of the device. So what people do nowadays on all of these devices is add third party cases to absorb the everyday wear .. but you can always take the case off for a "dress" phone, which like party or formalwear trades durability for looking good.

The Nokia 1040 (Windows, glass screen) was also pretty good at damage resistance. My wife stuck with hers until the Flash started wearing out round about five years in.

> Metal is of course more shatter resistant than polymer.

Yeah, but that doesn't help when the phone lands with the glass hitting something. And a heavier metal phone will have accumulated more kinetic energy during the fall than a lighter plastic one, so have a greater probability of shattering the glass.

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