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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

$2K starting price is rough. I’ve upgraded my iPhone every year since my first phone, the 3GS. It’s one of a few “splurge”-type things I allow myself. It’s a hobby and just fun to play with the new hotness. This year might break the cycle.

I don’t care for the 18 Pro colors, I still love my orange 17 Pro, and I’m not sold on the Duo (functionality or price).

I might still end up with a Duo but I’m very much on the fence. I’ll tell myself it’s for development/testing reasons, or just to play with the newest offering but I’m just not sure. I worry this will suffer from the same lack of developer interest as the AVP did. Yes, it’s very different from the AVP and SwiftUI will almost certainly make this process easier but I’m still not sure.

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> I worry this will suffer from the same lack of developer interest as the AVP did

Pretty sure that developer interest is not to be a problem. The Duo will sell more units in a month (or less) than every AVP ever sold.

Apple told developers in June at WWDC to not assume fixed screen sizes. Well-written apps will work on any screen size thanks to Apple's APIs.

Some apps will need to be tweaked to take advantage of some Duo features no doubt, but I suspect that's not going to be a deal breaker.

Agree - this is going to have pretty wide adoption.

The iPad has had great adoption for 16 years and there are still plenty of apps that don't adapt to its screen very well.

I’m in the exact same situation. Been upgrading every year for a long time (via the Upgrade Programme, making doing so more or less “free”). I was absolutely jazzed they finally did an orange phone, and this is the first year in a while that…I just don’t care. The Duo is far more expensive than I could ever entertain (plus buying a first-gen Apple product has never been a good idea), and there is quite literally nothing in the 18 Pro that makes me want to upgrade.

I may be swayed by a second gen Air in the spring, as I would like a lighter phone that feels less of an imposition in my pocket and my life in general. But it almost certainly won’t have the zoom camera, which has unexpectedly become one of my favourite and most used features of the 17 Pro. Why the two-camera phones all come with the ultrawide instead of the telephoto is baffling to me. Perhaps I’m an anomaly, but I never use the ultrawide lens.

> making doing so more or less “free”

except for those monthly payments you never get to stop making, yeah it's free.

Why do you think I put “free” in quotes? Realistically I was never going to keep the phone longer than the two year finance term anyway, because back when I started doing it a two-year old phone would be really starting to show its age running newer software. So I could either pay monthly and get a phone every two years, or pay monthly and get a phone every year.

Of course, these days a three or four or more year old phone is often still perfectly usable even for a tech enthusiast.

Just checked the price in my home country (Brazil) and it's fantastic: the Duo starts at BRL 21999, which is roughly USD 4300.

Even in Canada, it starts at $3000

This is decent used car territory.

This is decent brand-new mountain bike territory.

Will be interesting to see what this bought on Epstein Island, once the files are out /s

> upgraded my iPhone every year

Honest question: why? Why every year?

Because it's fun. That's it. I like new tech, I like playing with the "new hotness", it's fun to always try out the newest features. That's 100% the reason.

I could tell you it's because I always wanted to have the best camera, best battery life, etc and those are true too but the bottom line was: it was fun and I could afford it.

I've always known it wasn't the smartest financial decision but no one acts 100% financially "smart" and joy is something you can't measure the value of quite so easily, I got a lot of joy out of having the newest phone. Not as a "look at me, I have the newest phone", I never would shove it someone's face or even call attention to it, buying the new phone was for me, not for anyone else or some kind of "status".

It's a toy and I decided that it was worth the "waste" due to the excitement/joy I got from it.

To be honest, the phone is probably the piece of tech that most people use the most so per hour of use it's not that expensive. I guess the main question here is what you do with the old phones. Do you keep them as a museum or do you sell them/hand them down to family?

I'm still rocking my iPhone 12 mini but am planning on getting an 18 when the normal one is released :-)

as someone who upgrades frequently i keep two one as a backup for travel and what not so my past two gens i keep third oldest trade in.

Yeah like why did you upgrade last year or even the one before. I have a 15 and I can’t see anything I’m missing out on. I upgrade for the jumps. This year is the jump!

It's high, but Apple's financing arm has it at $84/month, which is a bit more stomachable if you really want it.

I don’t think it’ll face the developer interest problem. Devs go where the money is and consumers seem to love foldables.

You could do the leasing route if you upgrade every year. Might pinch less.

If leasing a fucking phone isn't a sign of the times then I don't know what is.

People have been leasing phones since at least the mid naughties, they just did it via their carrier. I distinctly remember standing in the Alltel store in 2006-ish, before it got gobbled up by ATT, and wondering if I could afford the extra $15/mo that the new Nokia candybar phone would run me. The only thing that's new is that Apple is offering it directly.

Leasing, as in long term renting, required to give it back after the lease period, in near perfect condition, or face a penalty?

Or financing, paying it off over a fixed term, after which you own it outright?

The latter, I understand. And I'm also familiar with it.

But the former, I find hard to believe. Although, I'm not from the US. Are you telling me people rented nokia bricks in the aughts?

You could and still can do both from your carrier, it's pretty standard. In my experience, it's somewhat uncommon for people to actually buy their phones outright unless you make a lot of money (like the folks who tend to frequent HN). Every two years, my wife and I would sign up for a new 24-month contract, which would include two new phones. After those 24 months, we could keep paying off the remainder of the phones and keep them, or we could return them and start a new contract with new phones.

> Are you telling me people rented nokia bricks in the aughts?

Myself and my family did, for sure. My parents made me pay my own phone bill too, so I spent a long time in the Alltel shop staring at the different phones and probably annoying the clerk.

> it's somewhat uncommon for people to actually buy their phones outright unless you make a lot of money

Or like many of us, you buy cheaper phones outright for your prepaid phone plans. The fact that people still go for contract phone services and finance a new phone every two years blows my mind. Especially when I can get all the data/minutes/texts I need for $15 a month on a service like Tello, and just get a phone for $200-400 that I can use until it dies. Which is currently a used iPhone 11 I recently opened up to replace the battery.

See my comment elsewhere in this thread, but you are blowing my mind. I'm not from the US and I did not realize that renting a mobile device was actually this common. I'm one of the lucky 10,000 today, thanks!

I mean, you might find this hard to believe since you have a fixed view, but I'm old enough that we had one of those old-school rotary phones. My family literally leased that phone as part of our phone bill up until the late 90s. I recall at one point we were forced to trade the rotary for a push button since the telecom was discontinuing support. When "caller id" became a new feature it only worked for the first while on the rented phones.

To this day, I suspect many people have a line-item on their Internet bill for their modem/router rental/lease.

Why you would find this hard to believe is actually the curious thing to me.

1. You can buy it outright at the end of the term by paying the remainder of the sticker price if you really want to keep it.

2. If you’re upgrading your phone on a one or two year cycle, you end up paying the sticker price minus the trade in value at the end of the term.

I don’t really see an issue in either scenario?

The near perfect condition part is not strictly enforced though. For example if your screen broke you could replace with a cheap third-party screen.

Like leasing a car, the residual value may differ, which can either make it worthwhile or not. Around ten years ago the lease deals were really good. Nowadays my carrier has all but discouraged them.

It's a hybrid - the Apple Upgrade program (both the old and new ones) let you keep the phone and pay it off over time like zero percent financing but also give you the option of returning the phone and getting a new one.

If leasing a fucking phone isn't a sign of the times then I don't know what is.

People have been leasing and renting phones since the 1930's. I guess you missed out on the Ma Bell century.

I honestly did not know this was a thing until today. I'm not from the US.

Where I'm from, it is common to finance a phone as part of a mobile contract: your monthly payment includes a device payment and the network subscription cost. Typically 24 months, but in recent years I've seen 36 month contracts as well. But at the end of the term the device is yours outright. No further down payments needed. Usually the device payment is effectively 0% APR over the 2 years, so it's a pretty lucrative deal. I've purchased all my phones this way over the past 20 years.

Then you’d like the upgrade program? The only difference is there is a final balloon payment for it to be yours. You end up paying exactly the same as paying up front.

Most people are short-term thinkers if you talk to anyone around you at work, school or at home and if you merely suggest saving and controlling their spending briefly to buy something in the future good luck. I have given up.

I just buy more shares of blue chip companies and let them pay in the future for anything I want to buy.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that, we know the average, but we don't know how much time each of us has on this earth.

> I worry this will suffer from the same lack of developer interest as the AVP did

Apple can force iOS devs to do whatever they want. It may be basic support, but Apple devs will do whatever Apple tells them to do.

It's because people who drop $2k on a new phone will also spend $$$ for cool programs to go with it.

Wait for 2nd gen, always

I like that blue though.

I don't know, $1999 seems almost kinda reasonable considering how much an iPhone Pro costs and how utterly fucked the current memory prices are.

But the display prices are very low, in comparison, so this and some mechanical engineering cannot possibly cost 900 USD.

$2k for a new product line isn't rough. It's on par with other competitors.

To get close to the same functionality as the Duo, you'd buy an iPhone 18 Pro ($1199) plus an iPad mini ($599); that gets you to $1,798. If you want more storage than the entry level iPhone 18 Pro or iPad mini, you're going to surpass $2000 pretty quickly.

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