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I interpreted that comment as a jab at the PC industry. The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a

I interpreted that comment as a jab at the PC industry. The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade. Isn't that the correct interpretation, considering the whole point of bringing that up is because they're positioning a new device intended to replace the PC? I seriously doubt it's intended to mean (to quote the article) "LOL poor people". Granted, this interpretation would make for a boring thinkpiece and would not get me to #1 on HN.

aetherson 11y ago
I don't think that it means "LOL poor people" either. But I do think that it's bullshit marketing talk. Apple is perfectly happy to be proud (rightly, I think) of the enduring utility of older pieces of Apple hardware -- but if some other company's hardware continues to be perfectly serviceable for 5 years, that's sad? Also, if you have a 5 year old PC that's genuinely not serving your needs any more, sure, you could pay $600 for an iPad Pro that also probably won't serve your needs, or you could pay around $400 for a new PC that will serve your needs.
- bitJericho 11y ago
  Bought a dual CPU workstation with 12gb ram and two quad core 12 mb cache xeons for under 400 bucks. It's about 5 year old tech and its awesome!
  - tdkl 11y ago
    Yep, eBay is booming with second hand workstations like this. Cousin bought a HP Z210 Quad Core E3-1270 3.40GHz with 16GB RAM for 320€. Added a SSD and cheap GPU and is an awesome 500€ machine that can last for years.
  - orbitingpluto 11y ago
    Totally there. If your electricity is cheap, it's an awesome deal. Since, oh about, 2009, there are a lot of choices that are akin to buying a '57 Chevy.
treebeard901 11y ago
I agree with your interpretation. It would seem to have more to do with the slowing sales numbers for tablets as well as the incorrect assumption we would be in a post-PC era at this point. That day will come eventually and while large tablets may not be the answer, Apple is certainly hoping it will be. There has to be a good bit of concern at Apple that they are still largely dependent on the iPhone.
slantyyz 11y ago
>> The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade Compelling reason why I had to upgrade my iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and original iPad after less than 3 years? Painfully slow and unusable. Well if the compelling reason to upgrade is "painfully slow and unusable", then maybe a >= 5 year old PC that still works isn't a bad thing. If I'm not mistaken, my 2011 MBP's quad core i7 can still outperform the CPUs in today's Macbook Airs (the most popular Mac notebooks) in terms of pure processing power.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Compelling reason why I had to upgrade my iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and original iPad after less than 3 years? Painfully slow and unusable. Exactly. Upgrading is a cost; not just money but also time. I upgraded my 1st gen iPad's OS exactly once (5 -> 6 I think) and it was a completely horrendous experience, involving PC iTunes. The main driver of PC upgrades, apart from improved games, is bloat and the slow deterioration of Windows installations. It's not as bad as it used to be but reinstalling the OS and cleaning the fans can often substantially improve an old PC. I still have my original iPad, but it's used for a very limited set of things as the browser is crashy and many apps aren't available for its OS. Users want neither forced upgrades, manufactured obsolescence, nor bogus SaaS rentalware like Adobe Creative Cloud.
  - slantyyz 11y ago
    I still have all three of those iOS devices (and my wife's now retired 4S) mentioned in my original post. The saddest thing? The iPhone 4 has only one easy job to do. Play music in my bedroom. It can't even do that reliably. My iPhone 3G (now a desk clock) is more stable than the 4. There's a reason I left iOS for Android on the phone side and Windows on the tablet side. I've been burned enough that I don't care to be burned again. Granted, Apple's devices are probably less prone to bloat now that Federighi took over from Forstall, but there's nothing compelling for me on the iOS side right now. A Pencil-enabled Mini would be very interesting, but that's about it.
    - 11y ago
Mikeb85 11y ago
> The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade Or maybe the PC world did so well 5 years ago that Apple hasn't provided them a compelling reason to switch to an iPad?
gnud 11y ago
Well, I've had my desktop computer for nearly 5 years. Upgraded the ram once, and added a new hard drive. It still does everything I need it to do. I understand this is sad for Apple, but I don't see how it's sad for me?
- dublinben 11y ago
  If you don't buy a new Apple computer every two years, they won't be able to afford to design a new computer to sell you every two years!
npatrick04 11y ago
I built my desktop from scratch (for the first time) in 2005, added a couple components from other computers as they died, and still use it with no issues. I've thought about upgrading components in it, but since they haven't died yet, and it still works just fine, there's just not much of a point.
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  Built a monster PC late last year and I see it lasting me a long time as well. I don't want to play the game of always jumping on the latest and greatest. Your pockets will always get emptied out and I've discovered accumulating material possessions and keeping up with the Joneses doesn't give me the endorphin rush like it used to. Thanks for this comment.
  - devcamcar 11y ago
    I did this back in 2009 and dropped a wad of cash on a Mac Pro tower. Thing is a frickin' champ. Upgraded it to 12GB of RAM and a nice SSD for the OS drive and never looked back. Turns out 4 Nehalem cores at 2.66GHz will last you quite a while if you don't do video editing work or play the latest games at full resolution.
- toxican 11y ago
  This is the way to go, if you know how. Unfortunately a lot of people's brains just shut off when they have to think about their computer on that level.
dpweb 11y ago
Just bought a like-new PC on ebay for $200. It's not about being poor because anyone who says they can't scrape up $200 if they had to, is lying to you. It's the shocking fact that (especially if cash strapped) you can live your life, without constantly buying more and newer things. Of course Apple's stance is, you must buy our new products every year. But I can get on Facebook and email and whatever else on my $200 PC just fine - the value isn't there for alot of people.
- hellbanner 11y ago
  $200? That's a lot of money for many people.
  - FireBeyond 11y ago
    As opposed to what? It's still less than half the price of a usable iPad (I know the Mini 2 is $270, but let's not pretend they're comparable), let alone Mac.
    - IanCal 11y ago
      I think that's in response to the statement: > anyone who says they can't scrape up $200 if they had to, is lying to you.
    - hellbanner 11y ago
      As opposed to someone working a minimum wage job & trying to eat decently, for example.
- Tactic 11y ago
  As someone that has lived on the street I can tell you that you are wrong about the $200. Don't read your life into others.
  - dpweb 11y ago
    There are people that extremely poor yes. They need help and society should help them. But they wouldn't be in the market for a new computer. My point is the cost of computing is about as low as it can be expected to get.
paulmd 11y ago
Yup. Clock-for-clock, Skylake is about 10-20% faster than Sandy Bridge, IPC improvements have been <5% per year. The apparent improvement since that time has been slowly cranking up the stock clockrates. If you overclock a Sandy Bridge to >4 GHz, which is extremely reasonable, then it keeps up just fine with a Skylake in most tasks. CPU performance is largely "good enough" for most users. OS bloat has finally stopped: Win8.1 is just as fast as Win7 (and is more stable) and Win10 is faster and skinnier. Most users don't do anything intensive and probably wouldn't even notice if you substituted in a low-end processor. For those that do have big needs, GPU offloading has taken off in a big way. This is kind of unfortunate in other respects. CPU performance (especially single-threaded) is extremely important for high refresh rates. At 144hz there's no margin for any weak link in the system. But I recognize that I'm kind of a niche user in that regard.
- cheald 11y ago
  > Yup. Clock-for-clock, Skylake is about 10-20% faster than Sandy Bridge Sorry, can you elaborate on this? Is Skylake somehow performing multiple instructions per core per clock cycle somehow?
  - dijit 11y ago
    Added hardware instructions for common software instruction combinations taking load of the CPU itself and offloading it into a mini-ASIC. Like AES, Floating point, h.264 etc;
    - curt15 11y ago
      Intel CPUs have had special AES instructions for a long time.
  - paulmd 11y ago
    Sometimes - there's multiple types of execution units in a CPU core (even multiples of the same type), and a thread can dispatch to multiple units at once (superscalar execution). It can also reorder the instruction stream to keep all the units occupied (out-of-order execution), preemptively execute along the most likely direction a branch will take (speculative execution), etc. Basically, it's all a massive game to keep all the units of a core busy to execute the desired instruction stream as fast as possible. Over time, successive CPU architectures have gotten better at playing the game: better occupancy, more execution units, and more powerful units (SSE, AVX, etc), which translates into a greater number of instructions executed per clock cycle (IPC). That's why a Skylake is much faster than a Pentium 4, even though the P4 might run at a higher clockrate. The Skylake has better IPC. And as a side note: what Hyperthreading does is duplicate the part of the core that manages registers and instruction dispatch for a thread. So you have a second thread that can utilize any execution units that the first thread left unoccupied. Bulldozer works somewhat similarly: two threads share a single core, and each core has a pair of integer execution units but they share a floating-point unit. So kinda like a Super-Hyperthreading, where they include a duplicate of (what they hope is) the most needed execution unit. Doesn't always work out in reality though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar_processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar_processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldozer_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldozer_(microarchitecture)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
neovive 11y ago
There is quite a large cohort of PC users with minimal needs beyond a web browser for email, news and some basic entertainment (Youtube and simple gaming). Google has also done an amazing job with the Chrome ecosystem providing web services that meet all of these needs.
pier25 11y ago
Of course one can interpret things in any way... What if instead a Mercedes representative had said: > People with cheap 5 year old cars is sad Just before presenting its new car? Would you think the same?
markatkinson 11y ago
Agreed that the "LOL poor people" is probably not the intention however I am sure the internet will have a field day with it. With that in mind it will likely generate some really interesting discussions around the quality and longevity of Apples products. Imho smart phone tech is plateauing and I get the feeling Apple is going to struggle more and more to justify the prices they charge for iPhones and other products. My iPhone 5 (4/5 years of use) broke 3 weeks ago, and after reviewing prices of phones I just couldn't bring myself to spend 3/4 times the amount on a phone when I can get one "just as good", but Android. In fact I was chatting to a friend who recently also went from iPhone to Android, something he said that I took to heart was that spending more than R3500 (about $230) on a cellphone is an unnecessary luxury. I am willing to bet that limit could be pushed down too.
- paperpunk 11y ago
  Couldn't you make the opposite argument from the same starting point? That as the technology plateaus, and the upgrade cycle becomes longer, there's much more reason to spend more on a handset because you're not going to feel like replacing it a year later? Spending a bit more doesn't seem like an issue for something that will last 4/5 years. Your friend may say spending more than an R3500 is an unnecessary luxury on a cellphone. I say that the cellphone is the single most important piece of technology I own and so isn't the area I want to be stingy on. Apple isn't necessarily the best choice even with that in mind, but that's a separate argument.
  - CaptSpify 11y ago
    Your assuming that the item your spending more on is worth more. It's really hard to qualify on iPhone vs Android, but my super-simplified calculation is: iPhone = 4 stars, Android = 4 stars If the Android is $200, and the iPhone is $400, I'm gonna go with the Android
  - markatkinson 11y ago
    That is a valid point, but if I can get a good Android phone that lasts half as long for a quarter of the price then I am afraid I am going with the Android. But really now I am just throwing around numbers with no real experience of how long this android phone will last (Moto G 3rd Gen, so far so good). Something I also found was during my transition I had two Android phones in the space of 3 months, (I used a friends spare while I replaced my iPhone), and transitioning from the one to the other was incredibly friction-less. I mean it actually made me pause and "wow" a bit. I suppose my argument was more that the quality gap of iPhone to many Android phones has closed a hell of a lot over the last few years, and I am just not sure I can justify paying so much more for an iPhone anymore. Especially as the ZAR weakens against the USD.
ignoramous 11y ago
Yes. The irony is that iPhone and iPad are no better as explained in the article(s)[0]. "Based on my experience with Apple hardware newer than my laptop, I’m guessing it’s the former. Since 2011, I’ve bought a couple of iPhones (both dead), numerous connectors and power cords (all dead; I’ve switched to knockoffs), and a replacement laptop battery (currently half-dead and in need of replacement)." [0] https://www.techinasia.com/awkward-moment-apple-mocked-good-hardware-poor-people https://www.techinasia.com/awkward-moment-apple-mocked-good-...
incepted 11y ago
> I seriously doubt it's intended to mean (to quote the article) "LOL poor people". He didn't mean to but this is the general reflection of the culture that permeates Apple as a company and the bubble in which they live. I remember once one of my wealthy friends saying "I don't understand why people live in one bedroom apartments". I stared at her for a solid minute to determine if she was joking but no, she was dead serious. She genuinely did not understand. She was born and raised in a wealthy family and she just had lost track of the rest of the world. Schiller and the Apple execs have similar blinders on and once in a while, the mask drops in a public speech because the speech writers and their proofreaders have similar blinders on and didn't realize the enormity of the implication.
- googamooga 11y ago
  This story is old as the world. "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" - "Let them eat a cake", as great princess Marie Antoinette said upon learning that the peasants had no bread.
  - yoha 11y ago
    There is no support for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
  - junke 11y ago
    There is no proof it was actually her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
  - Htsthbjig 11y ago
    She never told that. That was fictional phrase written in a novel by one famous writer, and attributed to Marie Antoinette, in order to discredit her because those who did benefit from that. You should contrast your sources.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  I wouldn't say it's a bubble so much as they just aren't motivated to consider those viewpoints. Apple's products are high cost and high status, they have no reason to consider the lower end of the economic spectrum; that's not their market. It would be like Rolls Royce running radio ads in rural Kentucky. Yeah, many people there would probably like one, but they can't get one.
yuhong 11y ago
I was thinking about selling Windows to a non-profit foundation for a while now.

aetherson 11y ago

I don't think that it means "LOL poor people" either. But I do think that it's bullshit marketing talk. Apple is perfectly happy to be proud (rightly, I think) of the enduring utility of older pieces of Apple hardware -- but if some other company's hardware continues to be perfectly serviceable for 5 years, that's sad? Also, if you have a 5 year old PC that's genuinely not serving your needs any more, sure, you could pay $600 for an iPad Pro that also probably won't serve your needs, or you could pay around $400 for a new PC that will serve your needs.

bitJericho 11y ago
Bought a dual CPU workstation with 12gb ram and two quad core 12 mb cache xeons for under 400 bucks. It's about 5 year old tech and its awesome!
- tdkl 11y ago
  Yep, eBay is booming with second hand workstations like this. Cousin bought a HP Z210 Quad Core E3-1270 3.40GHz with 16GB RAM for 320€. Added a SSD and cheap GPU and is an awesome 500€ machine that can last for years.
- orbitingpluto 11y ago
  Totally there. If your electricity is cheap, it's an awesome deal. Since, oh about, 2009, there are a lot of choices that are akin to buying a '57 Chevy.

treebeard901 11y ago

I agree with your interpretation. It would seem to have more to do with the slowing sales numbers for tablets as well as the incorrect assumption we would be in a post-PC era at this point. That day will come eventually and while large tablets may not be the answer, Apple is certainly hoping it will be. There has to be a good bit of concern at Apple that they are still largely dependent on the iPhone.

slantyyz 11y ago

>> The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade Compelling reason why I had to upgrade my iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and original iPad after less than 3 years? Painfully slow and unusable. Well if the compelling reason to upgrade is "painfully slow and unusable", then maybe a >= 5 year old PC that still works isn't a bad thing. If I'm not mistaken, my 2011 MBP's quad core i7 can still outperform the CPUs in today's Macbook Airs (the most popular Mac notebooks) in terms of pure processing power.

pjc50 11y ago
Compelling reason why I had to upgrade my iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and original iPad after less than 3 years? Painfully slow and unusable. Exactly. Upgrading is a cost; not just money but also time. I upgraded my 1st gen iPad's OS exactly once (5 -> 6 I think) and it was a completely horrendous experience, involving PC iTunes. The main driver of PC upgrades, apart from improved games, is bloat and the slow deterioration of Windows installations. It's not as bad as it used to be but reinstalling the OS and cleaning the fans can often substantially improve an old PC. I still have my original iPad, but it's used for a very limited set of things as the browser is crashy and many apps aren't available for its OS. Users want neither forced upgrades, manufactured obsolescence, nor bogus SaaS rentalware like Adobe Creative Cloud.
- slantyyz 11y ago
  I still have all three of those iOS devices (and my wife's now retired 4S) mentioned in my original post. The saddest thing? The iPhone 4 has only one easy job to do. Play music in my bedroom. It can't even do that reliably. My iPhone 3G (now a desk clock) is more stable than the 4. There's a reason I left iOS for Android on the phone side and Windows on the tablet side. I've been burned enough that I don't care to be burned again. Granted, Apple's devices are probably less prone to bloat now that Federighi took over from Forstall, but there's nothing compelling for me on the iOS side right now. A Pencil-enabled Mini would be very interesting, but that's about it.
  - 11y ago

Mikeb85 11y ago

> The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade Or maybe the PC world did so well 5 years ago that Apple hasn't provided them a compelling reason to switch to an iPad?

gnud 11y ago

Well, I've had my desktop computer for nearly 5 years. Upgraded the ram once, and added a new hard drive. It still does everything I need it to do. I understand this is sad for Apple, but I don't see how it's sad for me?

dublinben 11y ago
If you don't buy a new Apple computer every two years, they won't be able to afford to design a new computer to sell you every two years!

npatrick04 11y ago

I built my desktop from scratch (for the first time) in 2005, added a couple components from other computers as they died, and still use it with no issues. I've thought about upgrading components in it, but since they haven't died yet, and it still works just fine, there's just not much of a point.

stuxnet79 11y ago
Built a monster PC late last year and I see it lasting me a long time as well. I don't want to play the game of always jumping on the latest and greatest. Your pockets will always get emptied out and I've discovered accumulating material possessions and keeping up with the Joneses doesn't give me the endorphin rush like it used to. Thanks for this comment.
- devcamcar 11y ago
  I did this back in 2009 and dropped a wad of cash on a Mac Pro tower. Thing is a frickin' champ. Upgraded it to 12GB of RAM and a nice SSD for the OS drive and never looked back. Turns out 4 Nehalem cores at 2.66GHz will last you quite a while if you don't do video editing work or play the latest games at full resolution.
toxican 11y ago
This is the way to go, if you know how. Unfortunately a lot of people's brains just shut off when they have to think about their computer on that level.

dpweb 11y ago

Just bought a like-new PC on ebay for $200. It's not about being poor because anyone who says they can't scrape up $200 if they had to, is lying to you. It's the shocking fact that (especially if cash strapped) you can live your life, without constantly buying more and newer things. Of course Apple's stance is, you must buy our new products every year. But I can get on Facebook and email and whatever else on my $200 PC just fine - the value isn't there for alot of people.

hellbanner 11y ago
$200? That's a lot of money for many people.
- FireBeyond 11y ago
  As opposed to what? It's still less than half the price of a usable iPad (I know the Mini 2 is $270, but let's not pretend they're comparable), let alone Mac.
  - IanCal 11y ago
    I think that's in response to the statement: > anyone who says they can't scrape up $200 if they had to, is lying to you.
  - hellbanner 11y ago
    As opposed to someone working a minimum wage job & trying to eat decently, for example.
Tactic 11y ago
As someone that has lived on the street I can tell you that you are wrong about the $200. Don't read your life into others.
- dpweb 11y ago
  There are people that extremely poor yes. They need help and society should help them. But they wouldn't be in the market for a new computer. My point is the cost of computing is about as low as it can be expected to get.

paulmd 11y ago

Yup. Clock-for-clock, Skylake is about 10-20% faster than Sandy Bridge, IPC improvements have been <5% per year. The apparent improvement since that time has been slowly cranking up the stock clockrates. If you overclock a Sandy Bridge to >4 GHz, which is extremely reasonable, then it keeps up just fine with a Skylake in most tasks. CPU performance is largely "good enough" for most users. OS bloat has finally stopped: Win8.1 is just as fast as Win7 (and is more stable) and Win10 is faster and skinnier. Most users don't do anything intensive and probably wouldn't even notice if you substituted in a low-end processor. For those that do have big needs, GPU offloading has taken off in a big way. This is kind of unfortunate in other respects. CPU performance (especially single-threaded) is extremely important for high refresh rates. At 144hz there's no margin for any weak link in the system. But I recognize that I'm kind of a niche user in that regard.

cheald 11y ago
> Yup. Clock-for-clock, Skylake is about 10-20% faster than Sandy Bridge Sorry, can you elaborate on this? Is Skylake somehow performing multiple instructions per core per clock cycle somehow?
- dijit 11y ago
  Added hardware instructions for common software instruction combinations taking load of the CPU itself and offloading it into a mini-ASIC. Like AES, Floating point, h.264 etc;
  - curt15 11y ago
    Intel CPUs have had special AES instructions for a long time.
- paulmd 11y ago
  Sometimes - there's multiple types of execution units in a CPU core (even multiples of the same type), and a thread can dispatch to multiple units at once (superscalar execution). It can also reorder the instruction stream to keep all the units occupied (out-of-order execution), preemptively execute along the most likely direction a branch will take (speculative execution), etc. Basically, it's all a massive game to keep all the units of a core busy to execute the desired instruction stream as fast as possible. Over time, successive CPU architectures have gotten better at playing the game: better occupancy, more execution units, and more powerful units (SSE, AVX, etc), which translates into a greater number of instructions executed per clock cycle (IPC). That's why a Skylake is much faster than a Pentium 4, even though the P4 might run at a higher clockrate. The Skylake has better IPC. And as a side note: what Hyperthreading does is duplicate the part of the core that manages registers and instruction dispatch for a thread. So you have a second thread that can utilize any execution units that the first thread left unoccupied. Bulldozer works somewhat similarly: two threads share a single core, and each core has a pair of integer execution units but they share a floating-point unit. So kinda like a Super-Hyperthreading, where they include a duplicate of (what they hope is) the most needed execution unit. Doesn't always work out in reality though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar_processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar_processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldozer_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldozer_(microarchitecture)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

neovive 11y ago

There is quite a large cohort of PC users with minimal needs beyond a web browser for email, news and some basic entertainment (Youtube and simple gaming). Google has also done an amazing job with the Chrome ecosystem providing web services that meet all of these needs.

pier25 11y ago

Of course one can interpret things in any way... What if instead a Mercedes representative had said: > People with cheap 5 year old cars is sad Just before presenting its new car? Would you think the same?

markatkinson 11y ago

Agreed that the "LOL poor people" is probably not the intention however I am sure the internet will have a field day with it. With that in mind it will likely generate some really interesting discussions around the quality and longevity of Apples products. Imho smart phone tech is plateauing and I get the feeling Apple is going to struggle more and more to justify the prices they charge for iPhones and other products. My iPhone 5 (4/5 years of use) broke 3 weeks ago, and after reviewing prices of phones I just couldn't bring myself to spend 3/4 times the amount on a phone when I can get one "just as good", but Android. In fact I was chatting to a friend who recently also went from iPhone to Android, something he said that I took to heart was that spending more than R3500 (about $230) on a cellphone is an unnecessary luxury. I am willing to bet that limit could be pushed down too.

paperpunk 11y ago
Couldn't you make the opposite argument from the same starting point? That as the technology plateaus, and the upgrade cycle becomes longer, there's much more reason to spend more on a handset because you're not going to feel like replacing it a year later? Spending a bit more doesn't seem like an issue for something that will last 4/5 years. Your friend may say spending more than an R3500 is an unnecessary luxury on a cellphone. I say that the cellphone is the single most important piece of technology I own and so isn't the area I want to be stingy on. Apple isn't necessarily the best choice even with that in mind, but that's a separate argument.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  Your assuming that the item your spending more on is worth more. It's really hard to qualify on iPhone vs Android, but my super-simplified calculation is: iPhone = 4 stars, Android = 4 stars If the Android is $200, and the iPhone is $400, I'm gonna go with the Android
- markatkinson 11y ago
  That is a valid point, but if I can get a good Android phone that lasts half as long for a quarter of the price then I am afraid I am going with the Android. But really now I am just throwing around numbers with no real experience of how long this android phone will last (Moto G 3rd Gen, so far so good). Something I also found was during my transition I had two Android phones in the space of 3 months, (I used a friends spare while I replaced my iPhone), and transitioning from the one to the other was incredibly friction-less. I mean it actually made me pause and "wow" a bit. I suppose my argument was more that the quality gap of iPhone to many Android phones has closed a hell of a lot over the last few years, and I am just not sure I can justify paying so much more for an iPhone anymore. Especially as the ZAR weakens against the USD.

ignoramous 11y ago

Yes. The irony is that iPhone and iPad are no better as explained in the article(s)[0]. "Based on my experience with Apple hardware newer than my laptop, I’m guessing it’s the former. Since 2011, I’ve bought a couple of iPhones (both dead), numerous connectors and power cords (all dead; I’ve switched to knockoffs), and a replacement laptop battery (currently half-dead and in need of replacement)." [0] https://www.techinasia.com/awkward-moment-apple-mocked-good-hardware-poor-people https://www.techinasia.com/awkward-moment-apple-mocked-good-...

incepted 11y ago

> I seriously doubt it's intended to mean (to quote the article) "LOL poor people". He didn't mean to but this is the general reflection of the culture that permeates Apple as a company and the bubble in which they live. I remember once one of my wealthy friends saying "I don't understand why people live in one bedroom apartments". I stared at her for a solid minute to determine if she was joking but no, she was dead serious. She genuinely did not understand. She was born and raised in a wealthy family and she just had lost track of the rest of the world. Schiller and the Apple execs have similar blinders on and once in a while, the mask drops in a public speech because the speech writers and their proofreaders have similar blinders on and didn't realize the enormity of the implication.

googamooga 11y ago
This story is old as the world. "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" - "Let them eat a cake", as great princess Marie Antoinette said upon learning that the peasants had no bread.
- yoha 11y ago
  There is no support for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
- junke 11y ago
  There is no proof it was actually her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
- Htsthbjig 11y ago
  She never told that. That was fictional phrase written in a novel by one famous writer, and attributed to Marie Antoinette, in order to discredit her because those who did benefit from that. You should contrast your sources.
FussyZeus 11y ago
I wouldn't say it's a bubble so much as they just aren't motivated to consider those viewpoints. Apple's products are high cost and high status, they have no reason to consider the lower end of the economic spectrum; that's not their market. It would be like Rolls Royce running radio ads in rural Kentucky. Yeah, many people there would probably like one, but they can't get one.

yuhong 11y ago

I was thinking about selling Windows to a non-profit foundation for a while now.