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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't stand up to reality. You can't market your way into billions of sales over such a long period while a superior product exists at a lower price sold literally right next to it. You just can't hide the lack of signal for that long. The "iPhones are a status symbol" hasn't been true for a long time because everyone has them.

They are the better software and hardware product full stop. Whether that makes them worth the premium they charge or whether the restrictions they impose make it less useful for the tasks you want to do is an individual decision. But the narrative that Apple has been pulling the wool over everyone's eyes for 20 years doesn't work because people are using the product constantly every day.

Source: Long time Android user from the Droid days who was fully convinced iPhones were a marketing scam until I actually used one in like 2022.

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> You can't market your way into billions of sales over such a long period while a superior product exists at a lower price sold literally right next to it.

Microsoft's "Internet Explorer" would like a word with you...

Internet Explorer was my preferred browser as an end user for more than a decade, for its native UI and text rendering. It was mostly only a pain for web developers.

Which lines up exactly to the current state of iOS so it's no wonder HN's opinion is what it is.

If you don't use iOS but have to develop for it it's completely understandable that you end up resenting it.

Consumers and companies will give up a lot for “free”. Look at social media and advertising. When one has to pay there is more scrutiny on a purchase.

That's actually a great example of my point. For a long time IE was the best game in town, that's where all those pixeley "Works Best in Internet Explorer" banners came from. They got a boost from being the default but the bigger boost was because it was free. You had to pay for Netscape and later on Firefox/Opera were about the same. It wasn't until a truly better browser showed up, Chrome, that IE was unseated and that information spread like wildfire. It had a long tail of death from the perspective of web devs but they stopped being the market leader right quick.

> You had to pay for Netscape

>> The "N" evaluation versions were identical to the commercial versions; the letter was intended as a reminder to people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it.

>> This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#Origin

You _could_ pay for Netscape for a brief period of less than a year after initial release. You never _had_ to, and I was a user from some time in 1995, all the way through the Mozilla Application Suite, then later Phoenix / Firefox. I never paid a penny for the privilege.

> You can't market your way into billions of sales over such a long period while a superior product exists at a lower price sold literally right next to it.

Of course you can! This is the point of marketing! You don't need to make the best product, you just need to make people think you make the best product (you can't skimp completely on quality). Apple has always been extremely good at that.

It's especially true for expensive gadgets that require familiarity, because 99% of people won't spend a lot of time and money testing each option. They will buy whatever seems to be best and stick with it.

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