9 ms·

>I am not sure if I was suddenly without money, the iPhone would be what I would want to give up. If you have an iPhone and then become poor, sure. You probabl

>I am not sure if I was suddenly without money, the iPhone would be what I would want to give up. If you have an iPhone and then become poor, sure. You probably won't get ahead much by getting rid of your iPhone. If you're already poor, then an iPhone (not a smartphone) is definitely a luxury. There are capable smartphones for much cheaper then an iPhone that could get the job done. That's what GP was likely getting at. >If anything we should work to get smart phones in the hands of the poor. I am not aware of a socialized plan to put phone in the hands of poor people, but they are getting increasingly cheaper. You can get Samsung Galaxy line (not the flagship model) phones from cheap, prepaid carriers. Wi-Fi is becoming increasingly available, which makes the limited data plans not that bad of a drawback.

JohnBooty 11y ago
> If you're already poor, then an iPhone (not a smartphone) is definitely a luxury. It's not wrong, nor necessarily economically irresponsible, for "poor" people to have a few nice things. Assuming a lifespan of 3 years, the cost difference between a $600 phone and a $300 phone is barely more than $0.25 per day - and probably even less, considering that iPhones have a higher resale value. Maybe that "poor person" carrying an iPhone just forgoes $0.25 or $0.50 of other niceties per day so they can afford that iPhone and those $100 shoes - or maybe they just work in a city, because you can literally find that much money on the ground every day if you keep your eyes peeled. If a person routinely made such purchases, to the detriment of their well-being, certainly that could be a problem. But unless we know somebody's full financial picture we should not presume to make such a judgement.
- em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
  I don't think the OP's criticism is on the "poor person", but rather on the fact that Apple's business model and marketing scheme is premised on a false need to buy some new "revolutionary" iThing which actually offers little or no functional benefit over a perfectly fine older PC or less-powerful android.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- CaptainZapp 11y ago
  I'm not sure if you have any perspective what being poor means. This link : http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ Seems quite appropriate and - I hope - illuminating.
  - JohnBooty 11y ago
    I'm glad you posted that: everybody should read it and truly try to put themselves in those shoes. I do not understand the fact that you seem to have posted it as a rebuttal to my post. My post was meant as a criticism of another indignity that the poor often face: other peoples' (often baseless, and always condescending) criticisms of their financial decisions. Their criticisms often carry the subtext that poor people are poor because they are wearing a $100 item of clothing or because they own a smartphone - in essence, those criticisms say that these people deserve to be poor and/or poor people don't deserve nice things. I find such criticisms of poor people to be incredibly classist and devoid of empathy and my post was intended to address that. I don't know how my words could have been read otherwise.
    - CaptainZapp 11y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. I think it was mostly this statement : Assuming a lifespan of 3 years, the cost difference between a $600 phone and a $300 phone is barely more than $0.25 per day that triggered my response. Rereading it: you're right. I'm still glad to have posted the link :) What really riles me up is that a lot of people have no clue how expensive it actually is to be poor and how hard is it to break the vicious circle. That's in addition that a lot of poor people work equally hard as the rest of us.
      - JohnBooty 11y ago
        I see what you mean. And you're right: not everybody has an extra $0.25/day or $1.75/week for a nicer phone. $1.75/week for some people is the difference between having oatmeal for breakfast and not having breakfast. That is an excellent, excellent link. And this: > What really riles me up is that a lot of people have no clue how expensive it actually is to be poor Yes! This is the one thing I wish everybody could understand about being poor. Not only do you have less money, almost everything is more expensive. "Simple" things like buying food when it's on sale and freezing it for later aren't possible if you don't have a second freezer, or even a first freezer, or if you're in danger of having your power turned off, or if you live in a terrible apartment where the power goes off for reasons not even in your control. Heck, a lot of people can't even clip supermarket coupons because they don't have access to a supermarket. (For anybody scratching their heads at this, Google "food desert") Or another great example: Cost of a $150,000 home if you're rich and don't need a mortgage: $150,000 (or $0 in the long run, because you can get that money back when you sell it) Cost of a $150,000 home if you need a mortgage: $500,000+ (Not that the truly poor can even obtain mortgages, but it's a good illustration of how much cheaper things can get as you go further and further up the income scale)
- digitalsigil 11y ago
  > It's not wrong, nor necessarily economically irresponsible, for "poor" people to have a few nice things. I strongly agree with this, but if someone does choose to buy an iPhone they should know it's a luxury. It bothers me that Apple doesn't acknowledge this.
  - JohnBooty 11y ago
    I don't want to totally let producers of consumer goods off the hook here: they are certainly not blameless when it comes to the unhealthy consumer culture we have, and Schiller's comment was tone deaf IMHO. But generally I feel it's appropriate for companies to tell us how awesome their products are; it's up to us to recognize which things are necessities and which are luxuries.
- chillingeffect 11y ago
  Other responses disagree with you, but I agree with you... and I'm rather anti-consumerist (it's difficult to pull off completely...). In fact, I feel a bit silly having paid "only" $300 for my Samsung phone, having read your economic breakdown. I was imagining myself having an extra $200 for stuff... but I go through a lot of wasted time having "only" 16GB.. continuously moving stuff off of it... missed photos and videos I could have taken. Perhaps the pix didn't have economic value worth $200 over 3 years, but the time is probably worth it. I've also heard the perspective on the poor that if they have to be poor, it helps to have at least one nice thing. the nice thing of choice is the phone. The real question is, imho, how to leverage these choices to get what helps an individual. e.g. use the phone to get jobs, to shop around for the best price, to buy used things on craigslist to save money, to watch inspiring and encouraging videos, to learn new skills to get better jobs, etc.
  - JohnBooty 11y ago
    I really appreciate your reply! Yeah, sometimes (not always) the more expensive option is actually cheaper in the long run, or is at least a justifiable cost. Looking at the $/day or $/hour cost over the lifespan of a product is one way to get a better understanding of the "real" cost. The danger is that it can be easy to justify too many of those "well, it's only $0.10 a day!" purchases because they can really add up. (In fact, car salesmen will often try to sell you upgrades in a similar way. "Well, upgrading to the leather seats will only add $25 to your monthly payments...")
    - rorykoehler 11y ago
      The reason I decided to go cheap with smartphone is because I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 with the intention of using it for at least 5 years but the utter piece of junk broke stone cold dead after 2 years and 3 months. I basically got robbed for half the value of the phone because of the attitude that old hardware is bad (read unprofitable) hardware and therefore we don't build stuff to last anymore. Same with the iPhone before it but in Apples case their revolutionary new iOS update made my phone basically unusable. So I voted with my wallet and went for a mid range Android option for $250.
simonh 11y ago
I bought an iPhone 3GS in 2009, that's 6 and a half years ago and my daughter now uses it at school. It even still connects to the App Store. Other than a cracked screen it works fine. Battery life isn't great, but it gets her through the school day. These things have incredible lifetimes and also keep their resale value very well. So in terms of value, I'm not convinced that iPhones are a frivolous luxury. In my experience they're a reliable long term investment. Is that relevant to low wage earners? I think so. If iPhones stopped getting software updates 12 months (or less) after launch and ended up in a junk drawer soon after, I don't think they'd sell nearly so well in any demographic range.
- kybernetikos 11y ago
  Most of the things my family used an original ipad for stopped working after a very short amount of time. It is now essentially garbage that I can't bring myself to throw away.
  - pc86 11y ago
    And my wife and I still use our iPad 2 without issue aside from the noticeable sluggishness switching apps or updating. Anecdotes!
    - kybernetikos 11y ago
      Not sure what your point is. My point was that the original iPad was nearly unusable in less than 3 years. This is not an anecdote, it's a simple matter of fact. The original iPad was launched in mid 2010. In September 2012 Apple released iOS 6, which didn't run on the original iPad. Shortly afterward, the apps we used all required a forced update to their iOS6 version (which of course didn't work) and it became a doorstop. YouTube lasted a little longer than most, but eventually it stopped working too. It's quite possible that the iPad 2 you mention has had a longer life than the original iPad, but this in no way diminishes the fact that the original iPad, a not inexpensive piece of hardware was useless for most purposes after a little more than 2 years (assuming you bought it on release, which I did not).
cthulhujr 11y ago
>I am not aware of a socialized plan to put phone in the hands of poor people "Since 1985, the Lifeline program has provided a discount on phone service for qualifying low-income consumers... The Lifeline program is available to eligible low-income consumers in every state, territory, commonwealth, and on Tribal lands."[1] [1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-consumers https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
blub 11y ago
The problem with those cheap phones is that your private information will be mercilessly sucked into the Google cloud. Some of that is disguised as perfectly innocent and helpful features: contacts syncing, back-ups, connecting more easily to WiFis, etc. The end result though is that your entire digital life will be on some Google server. Preventing this requires significant effort and technical expertise. We got windows phones at work: the activation process is a comical list of "turn off this", "deactivate that", "say no to so and so" data sync policy. But, I guess you can in the end disable the thing. iOS is probably the least bad in this respect. I won't say it's good or anything, but at least they show some respect towards customers. The conclusion is that the poor will get abused either way, be it through price gouging or in more difficult to recognise ways.
- sasvari 11y ago
  The problem with those cheap phones is that your private information will be mercilessly sucked into the Google cloud. Some of that is disguised as perfectly innocent and helpful features: contacts syncing, back-ups, connecting more easily to WiFis, etc. if you truly value your privacy (most people don't; which solves the problem for them), it is trivially easy: buy a cheap phone (i.e. Moto E/G) and install a custom ROM like cyanogenmod without the gapps on it. then just run a Card-/CalDAV server (radicale, owncload, ...) on a computer in your home network (can be your laptop/server/raspberry ...) and you get the syncing you want without the google part. of course it's extra work, but it's not rocket science. so if you really care about privacy, it's trivial to do. but as pointed out: most people don't, no matter if they have a cheap phone or not.
  - pc86 11y ago
    I think you grossly overestimate the technical aptitude of... 99.8% of the population?
    - sasvari 11y ago
      no, not at all. I know most people are not capable of setting this up. but this is not the point: the parent claimed that you pay for these cheap phones with your private data, which is not true. if you care about that (which > 99.8% of the population don't do) you are able to use those phones with those features without handing over your data to google.
skywhopper 11y ago
Unfortunately named website, but: http://www.obamaphone.com/what-is-the-obama-phone http://www.obamaphone.com/what-is-the-obama-phone
skywhopper 11y ago
> There are capable smartphones for much cheaper then an iPhone that could get the job done. That's what GP was likely getting at. True enough. And yet, if you yourself are not actually poor, you may not realize the value that a marginal luxury like an iPhone or Air Jordans or a top brand purse (sorry, I don't know what the hot brand of purses is atm) can bring to someone in that situation. Spending a few hundred dollars will not get them a better place to live or a better job or out of debt, but it can get them something that helps them appear less poor to the people around them, who can't see their bank balance or their house, but they can see what phone they are carrying around.
- DickingAround 11y ago
  Poor people don't need to 'seem less poor'. They need to be less poor. And admitting you need to save is the first step to doing so. I wonder if this need to seem less poor so often is actually part of how some of them get poor; wasting money/effort trying to influence perception instead of spending it trying to change reality.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    You're close, the poor in most cases have self-defeating money habits. Any time they get money, they spend it immediately on things that have a short term feel-good effect, because their life has so little of that otherwise. This might be junk food, cigarettes/booze/drugs, lottery tickets, restaurant meals, gadgets or other "bling" etc. They rarely have a person in their life who models delayed gratification and saving behavior, let alone strategic investing, so they never see the benefit of doing that.
    - specialist 11y ago
      No. The singular defining quality of the poor is that they lack capital. This makes everything about being poor more expensive.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>If you're already poor, then an iPhone (not a smartphone) is definitely a luxury. Depends where you get it. I've known some teens who have managed to pick up iPhones on the second hand market really cheap. There are enough people always wanting the shiniest new thing that more enterprising individuals can pick up a generation old iPhone for less than many cheaper Androids. The luxury is being able to pay full price for a brand new device.
ryao 11y ago
> I am not aware of a socialized plan to put phone in the hands of poor people https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-consumers https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
fabianhjr 11y ago
Google/Android has the Android One Program. https://www.android.com/one/ https://www.android.com/one/
samstave 11y ago
I think the real problem is that new updates to iphone software are not capable of being run on old iPhones. Thus, the older, yet still physically capable, phones are softly obsoleted. There is no reason there shouldnt be a 3G, 4, 4S capable of owrking and in the hands of "the poor" Why not a turn-in system where older yet still functioning phones are given to anyone who wants them. I personally am guilty of not properly handling my old phones. I've had every single generation of the iPhone since the initial launch. I've broken 17 of them to date. I have no clue where the other 16 are now, aside from one. I'd happily have contributed my old phones to some program where either poor or kids can have them freely.
- ryao 11y ago
  > I'd happily have contributed my old phones to some program where either poor or kids can have them freely. I asked a Roman Catholic priest I know to give my household's old iPhones to the poor during his trip to India last year. I had originally planned to sell them when I had a chance after upgrading myself and my parents, but I changed my mind when I heard he was going to visit his village in India where there are many poor people. You could ask your local Roman Catholic parish if any of the priests plan to travel to poor places. They tend to be from all over the world, many are from poor places and they tend to visit family every year or so. They would definitely be able to give your phones to the poor. Just make sure that the phones are unlocked, supports GSM internationally (if it is a US phone) and have a charging cable. In my case, I neglected to realize that the NEMA outlets used in the US are not typically used in India and included the US chargers. Compatible AC to USB chargers are cheap enough that it was not a big deal. Also, models like the Virgin Mobile iPhone 4S whose baseband is programmed to only connect to US CDMA networks would only be useful for parts in many other countries. Phones that are locked to CDMA in the US, but support GSM when unlocked for international use, like the Sprint iPhone 5 will work fine, provided that they are unlocked before they are sent. If it is a CDMA only phone that is not locked to the US, you could check to see if the country where the priest is going has a network compatible with it, although it is hard to find coverage maps for CDMA outside the US to know if those networks would actually be relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks http://www.memphissoftware.net/img/coverage1.jpg http://www.memphissoftware.net/img/coverage1.jpg

JohnBooty 11y ago

> If you're already poor, then an iPhone (not a smartphone) is definitely a luxury. It's not wrong, nor necessarily economically irresponsible, for "poor" people to have a few nice things. Assuming a lifespan of 3 years, the cost difference between a $600 phone and a $300 phone is barely more than $0.25 per day - and probably even less, considering that iPhones have a higher resale value. Maybe that "poor person" carrying an iPhone just forgoes $0.25 or $0.50 of other niceties per day so they can afford that iPhone and those $100 shoes - or maybe they just work in a city, because you can literally find that much money on the ground every day if you keep your eyes peeled. If a person routinely made such purchases, to the detriment of their well-being, certainly that could be a problem. But unless we know somebody's full financial picture we should not presume to make such a judgement.

em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
I don't think the OP's criticism is on the "poor person", but rather on the fact that Apple's business model and marketing scheme is premised on a false need to buy some new "revolutionary" iThing which actually offers little or no functional benefit over a perfectly fine older PC or less-powerful android.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
CaptainZapp 11y ago
I'm not sure if you have any perspective what being poor means. This link : http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ Seems quite appropriate and - I hope - illuminating.
- JohnBooty 11y ago
  I'm glad you posted that: everybody should read it and truly try to put themselves in those shoes. I do not understand the fact that you seem to have posted it as a rebuttal to my post. My post was meant as a criticism of another indignity that the poor often face: other peoples' (often baseless, and always condescending) criticisms of their financial decisions. Their criticisms often carry the subtext that poor people are poor because they are wearing a $100 item of clothing or because they own a smartphone - in essence, those criticisms say that these people deserve to be poor and/or poor people don't deserve nice things. I find such criticisms of poor people to be incredibly classist and devoid of empathy and my post was intended to address that. I don't know how my words could have been read otherwise.
  - CaptainZapp 11y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. I think it was mostly this statement : Assuming a lifespan of 3 years, the cost difference between a $600 phone and a $300 phone is barely more than $0.25 per day that triggered my response. Rereading it: you're right. I'm still glad to have posted the link :) What really riles me up is that a lot of people have no clue how expensive it actually is to be poor and how hard is it to break the vicious circle. That's in addition that a lot of poor people work equally hard as the rest of us.
    - JohnBooty 11y ago
      I see what you mean. And you're right: not everybody has an extra $0.25/day or $1.75/week for a nicer phone. $1.75/week for some people is the difference between having oatmeal for breakfast and not having breakfast. That is an excellent, excellent link. And this: > What really riles me up is that a lot of people have no clue how expensive it actually is to be poor Yes! This is the one thing I wish everybody could understand about being poor. Not only do you have less money, almost everything is more expensive. "Simple" things like buying food when it's on sale and freezing it for later aren't possible if you don't have a second freezer, or even a first freezer, or if you're in danger of having your power turned off, or if you live in a terrible apartment where the power goes off for reasons not even in your control. Heck, a lot of people can't even clip supermarket coupons because they don't have access to a supermarket. (For anybody scratching their heads at this, Google "food desert") Or another great example: Cost of a $150,000 home if you're rich and don't need a mortgage: $150,000 (or $0 in the long run, because you can get that money back when you sell it) Cost of a $150,000 home if you need a mortgage: $500,000+ (Not that the truly poor can even obtain mortgages, but it's a good illustration of how much cheaper things can get as you go further and further up the income scale)
digitalsigil 11y ago
> It's not wrong, nor necessarily economically irresponsible, for "poor" people to have a few nice things. I strongly agree with this, but if someone does choose to buy an iPhone they should know it's a luxury. It bothers me that Apple doesn't acknowledge this.
- JohnBooty 11y ago
  I don't want to totally let producers of consumer goods off the hook here: they are certainly not blameless when it comes to the unhealthy consumer culture we have, and Schiller's comment was tone deaf IMHO. But generally I feel it's appropriate for companies to tell us how awesome their products are; it's up to us to recognize which things are necessities and which are luxuries.
chillingeffect 11y ago
Other responses disagree with you, but I agree with you... and I'm rather anti-consumerist (it's difficult to pull off completely...). In fact, I feel a bit silly having paid "only" $300 for my Samsung phone, having read your economic breakdown. I was imagining myself having an extra $200 for stuff... but I go through a lot of wasted time having "only" 16GB.. continuously moving stuff off of it... missed photos and videos I could have taken. Perhaps the pix didn't have economic value worth $200 over 3 years, but the time is probably worth it. I've also heard the perspective on the poor that if they have to be poor, it helps to have at least one nice thing. the nice thing of choice is the phone. The real question is, imho, how to leverage these choices to get what helps an individual. e.g. use the phone to get jobs, to shop around for the best price, to buy used things on craigslist to save money, to watch inspiring and encouraging videos, to learn new skills to get better jobs, etc.
- JohnBooty 11y ago
  I really appreciate your reply! Yeah, sometimes (not always) the more expensive option is actually cheaper in the long run, or is at least a justifiable cost. Looking at the $/day or $/hour cost over the lifespan of a product is one way to get a better understanding of the "real" cost. The danger is that it can be easy to justify too many of those "well, it's only $0.10 a day!" purchases because they can really add up. (In fact, car salesmen will often try to sell you upgrades in a similar way. "Well, upgrading to the leather seats will only add $25 to your monthly payments...")
  - rorykoehler 11y ago
    The reason I decided to go cheap with smartphone is because I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 with the intention of using it for at least 5 years but the utter piece of junk broke stone cold dead after 2 years and 3 months. I basically got robbed for half the value of the phone because of the attitude that old hardware is bad (read unprofitable) hardware and therefore we don't build stuff to last anymore. Same with the iPhone before it but in Apples case their revolutionary new iOS update made my phone basically unusable. So I voted with my wallet and went for a mid range Android option for $250.

simonh 11y ago

I bought an iPhone 3GS in 2009, that's 6 and a half years ago and my daughter now uses it at school. It even still connects to the App Store. Other than a cracked screen it works fine. Battery life isn't great, but it gets her through the school day. These things have incredible lifetimes and also keep their resale value very well. So in terms of value, I'm not convinced that iPhones are a frivolous luxury. In my experience they're a reliable long term investment. Is that relevant to low wage earners? I think so. If iPhones stopped getting software updates 12 months (or less) after launch and ended up in a junk drawer soon after, I don't think they'd sell nearly so well in any demographic range.

kybernetikos 11y ago
Most of the things my family used an original ipad for stopped working after a very short amount of time. It is now essentially garbage that I can't bring myself to throw away.
- pc86 11y ago
  And my wife and I still use our iPad 2 without issue aside from the noticeable sluggishness switching apps or updating. Anecdotes!
  - kybernetikos 11y ago
    Not sure what your point is. My point was that the original iPad was nearly unusable in less than 3 years. This is not an anecdote, it's a simple matter of fact. The original iPad was launched in mid 2010. In September 2012 Apple released iOS 6, which didn't run on the original iPad. Shortly afterward, the apps we used all required a forced update to their iOS6 version (which of course didn't work) and it became a doorstop. YouTube lasted a little longer than most, but eventually it stopped working too. It's quite possible that the iPad 2 you mention has had a longer life than the original iPad, but this in no way diminishes the fact that the original iPad, a not inexpensive piece of hardware was useless for most purposes after a little more than 2 years (assuming you bought it on release, which I did not).

cthulhujr 11y ago

>I am not aware of a socialized plan to put phone in the hands of poor people "Since 1985, the Lifeline program has provided a discount on phone service for qualifying low-income consumers... The Lifeline program is available to eligible low-income consumers in every state, territory, commonwealth, and on Tribal lands."[1] [1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-consumers https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...

blub 11y ago

The problem with those cheap phones is that your private information will be mercilessly sucked into the Google cloud. Some of that is disguised as perfectly innocent and helpful features: contacts syncing, back-ups, connecting more easily to WiFis, etc. The end result though is that your entire digital life will be on some Google server. Preventing this requires significant effort and technical expertise. We got windows phones at work: the activation process is a comical list of "turn off this", "deactivate that", "say no to so and so" data sync policy. But, I guess you can in the end disable the thing. iOS is probably the least bad in this respect. I won't say it's good or anything, but at least they show some respect towards customers. The conclusion is that the poor will get abused either way, be it through price gouging or in more difficult to recognise ways.

sasvari 11y ago
The problem with those cheap phones is that your private information will be mercilessly sucked into the Google cloud. Some of that is disguised as perfectly innocent and helpful features: contacts syncing, back-ups, connecting more easily to WiFis, etc. if you truly value your privacy (most people don't; which solves the problem for them), it is trivially easy: buy a cheap phone (i.e. Moto E/G) and install a custom ROM like cyanogenmod without the gapps on it. then just run a Card-/CalDAV server (radicale, owncload, ...) on a computer in your home network (can be your laptop/server/raspberry ...) and you get the syncing you want without the google part. of course it's extra work, but it's not rocket science. so if you really care about privacy, it's trivial to do. but as pointed out: most people don't, no matter if they have a cheap phone or not.
- pc86 11y ago
  I think you grossly overestimate the technical aptitude of... 99.8% of the population?
  - sasvari 11y ago
    no, not at all. I know most people are not capable of setting this up. but this is not the point: the parent claimed that you pay for these cheap phones with your private data, which is not true. if you care about that (which > 99.8% of the population don't do) you are able to use those phones with those features without handing over your data to google.

skywhopper 11y ago

Unfortunately named website, but: http://www.obamaphone.com/what-is-the-obama-phone http://www.obamaphone.com/what-is-the-obama-phone

skywhopper 11y ago

> There are capable smartphones for much cheaper then an iPhone that could get the job done. That's what GP was likely getting at. True enough. And yet, if you yourself are not actually poor, you may not realize the value that a marginal luxury like an iPhone or Air Jordans or a top brand purse (sorry, I don't know what the hot brand of purses is atm) can bring to someone in that situation. Spending a few hundred dollars will not get them a better place to live or a better job or out of debt, but it can get them something that helps them appear less poor to the people around them, who can't see their bank balance or their house, but they can see what phone they are carrying around.

DickingAround 11y ago
Poor people don't need to 'seem less poor'. They need to be less poor. And admitting you need to save is the first step to doing so. I wonder if this need to seem less poor so often is actually part of how some of them get poor; wasting money/effort trying to influence perception instead of spending it trying to change reality.
- ams6110 11y ago
  You're close, the poor in most cases have self-defeating money habits. Any time they get money, they spend it immediately on things that have a short term feel-good effect, because their life has so little of that otherwise. This might be junk food, cigarettes/booze/drugs, lottery tickets, restaurant meals, gadgets or other "bling" etc. They rarely have a person in their life who models delayed gratification and saving behavior, let alone strategic investing, so they never see the benefit of doing that.
  - specialist 11y ago
    No. The singular defining quality of the poor is that they lack capital. This makes everything about being poor more expensive.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

>If you're already poor, then an iPhone (not a smartphone) is definitely a luxury. Depends where you get it. I've known some teens who have managed to pick up iPhones on the second hand market really cheap. There are enough people always wanting the shiniest new thing that more enterprising individuals can pick up a generation old iPhone for less than many cheaper Androids. The luxury is being able to pay full price for a brand new device.

ryao 11y ago

> I am not aware of a socialized plan to put phone in the hands of poor people https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-consumers https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...

fabianhjr 11y ago

Google/Android has the Android One Program. https://www.android.com/one/ https://www.android.com/one/

samstave 11y ago

I think the real problem is that new updates to iphone software are not capable of being run on old iPhones. Thus, the older, yet still physically capable, phones are softly obsoleted. There is no reason there shouldnt be a 3G, 4, 4S capable of owrking and in the hands of "the poor" Why not a turn-in system where older yet still functioning phones are given to anyone who wants them. I personally am guilty of not properly handling my old phones. I've had every single generation of the iPhone since the initial launch. I've broken 17 of them to date. I have no clue where the other 16 are now, aside from one. I'd happily have contributed my old phones to some program where either poor or kids can have them freely.

ryao 11y ago
> I'd happily have contributed my old phones to some program where either poor or kids can have them freely. I asked a Roman Catholic priest I know to give my household's old iPhones to the poor during his trip to India last year. I had originally planned to sell them when I had a chance after upgrading myself and my parents, but I changed my mind when I heard he was going to visit his village in India where there are many poor people. You could ask your local Roman Catholic parish if any of the priests plan to travel to poor places. They tend to be from all over the world, many are from poor places and they tend to visit family every year or so. They would definitely be able to give your phones to the poor. Just make sure that the phones are unlocked, supports GSM internationally (if it is a US phone) and have a charging cable. In my case, I neglected to realize that the NEMA outlets used in the US are not typically used in India and included the US chargers. Compatible AC to USB chargers are cheap enough that it was not a big deal. Also, models like the Virgin Mobile iPhone 4S whose baseband is programmed to only connect to US CDMA networks would only be useful for parts in many other countries. Phones that are locked to CDMA in the US, but support GSM when unlocked for international use, like the Sprint iPhone 5 will work fine, provided that they are unlocked before they are sent. If it is a CDMA only phone that is not locked to the US, you could check to see if the country where the priest is going has a network compatible with it, although it is hard to find coverage maps for CDMA outside the US to know if those networks would actually be relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks http://www.memphissoftware.net/img/coverage1.jpg http://www.memphissoftware.net/img/coverage1.jpg