7 ms·

The only problem is that Apple is the Mercedes of mobile devices. We really need a Honda and Kia version, a more affordable device that doesn’t track you. Appl

The only problem is that Apple is the Mercedes of mobile devices. We really need a Honda and Kia version, a more affordable device that doesn’t track you. Apple is never going to give up their premium position.

carlmr 8y ago
>Apple is never going to give up their premium position. It would be stupid of them.
Waterluvian 8y ago
That's exactly the problem I have. I don't want the unblockable ads and spying but I need my phone to be some cheap thing I don't have to respect or worry about. Once I started buying $150 phones every 2-3 years, I realised how much I need a device that I don't lose any sleep over it getting beaten to death and possibly replaced prematurely.
- singularity2001 8y ago
  Get an iphone se with protector
- stephenr 8y ago
  Buy second hand iPhones. A 5S will still run the latest iOS, and with a new battery wont be under “performance management” mode, so it should be quite fast to use.
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    I'll second this. I'm still using an iPhone 6s and it works great. I just checked and there are a couple hundred listed on my local Craigslist for $100-$150.
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    I'm open to this idea. I discarded it early on because I thought it would either be too expensive or be too "used" to run cleanly for another 3 years. Are you suggesting some official refurbishment route or just find them on Craigslist or Ebay?
    - jnwatson 8y ago
      I’m not sure you’d like it. I recent upgraded from a 5s with a new battery to a 7. It was night and day in terms of performance. In particular, Siri works much better. Developers assume the performance of the latest, so they don’t realize how slow things act on older devices.
    - stephenr 8y ago
      I personally wouldn't buy something like this from a classifieds site. But that's because I expect you're just as like to get a cardboard cutout of an iPhone as you are an actual iPhone. If you've used these sites before and are comfortable with them, I'm sure there's options there. I don't know what it's like in the US, but here (SE Asia) there is a massive market for second-hand smart phones/tablets, usually from places that also do repairs of such devices. Go to any shopping mall in Thailand and (usually on the top floor) there will be dozens of places with devices of varying age. I don't think Apple's official refurbished stuff will be in the price range you're looking (they only have 7's from what I can see) but I'm sure you can find them somewhere.
    - jkestner 8y ago
      Swappa. A less shady eBay specifically for phones and like gadgets (though as it gets more popular, we'll see if it stays trustworthy). I've bought three used iPhones and an Apple Watch, never a problem.
- telchar 8y ago
  Speaking about unblockable ads, I had to set up a pi-hole to block ads at the network level because I couldn't block them on my ipad on any browser. Why does Apple make it so hard? Am I missing something?
  - krrrh 8y ago
    Safari has supported third party ad blockers for a few years. I use 1BlockerX and it works well. There are dozens of other options. Including Firefox Gocus which blocks ads by default and also functions as an ad locker for Safari. https://1blocker.com https://1blocker.com
    - telchar 8y ago
      Alright, thanks for the info. I'll look into those.
jp555 8y ago
Apple devices last a long time. My mother still loves using my old 2012 iPhone 5. Used iOS devices are the Kia version.
nerdponx 8y ago
I imagine part of the reason they can afford to be pro-privacy is that they make enough money on actual sales to matter. If your margins are how, you will start looking for other ways to generate revenue.
fetbaffe 8y ago
Sad that Apple stopped making iPhone SE, still expensive compared to other brands, but the cheapest to jump on the Apple bandwagon.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  I picked a second hand one up for SGD$200 (~USD$150)
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Not to mention it has a good fit in the (small) hand.
  - fetbaffe 8y ago
    Yes, especially if you are a kid. Perfect phone to indoctrinate them with when they are young. Not too expensive to give to a kid and a perfect size. Don’t really understand Apples reasoning on this one.
kkarakk 8y ago
why not just buy an older device? bought a brand new iPhone se as soon as the new iphones x maxx was announced. mobile phone development as plateaued imo, there is nothing out there you really need unless you're fooling yourself. photos - I bought a nice mirrorless with the money I saved. apps - se runs everything tolerably fast except for snapchat and Instagram, which I've decided to cut down on anyways.comparison is the thief of joy and all the new social media apps promote comparison as the primary feature. games - bought a Nintendo switch and it has fortnite as well. all told 300+400+300 = 1000 which is STILL lower than the cost of the iPhone x max
- jjulius 8y ago
  >why not just buy an older device? As devices age, they stop being supported by security updates.
  - CivilianZero 8y ago
    This is what always bugs me about recommendations to buy older devices as a solution to all problems. Updates = security.
  - nneonneo 8y ago
    Apple, unlike many Android outfits, supports their hardware for a pretty long time. This chart (https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility/ https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility...) suggests that they're supporting devices up to 5 years old; since the SE is just 2, it has a good 3 years of software and security updates to look forward to.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    The iPhone 5S, released five years ago, runs the latest iOS version.
  - at-fates-hands 8y ago
    Microsoft is still supporting several of their smartphones running Windows Mobile. The latest update (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4316692/june122018kb4316692osbuild15254488 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4316692/june122018k...) was in June of this year. I still have a Lumia 950 and it works fine. Compared to OnePlus who stopped updated their OnePlus2 past Marshmallow after telling subscribers they would get the Nougat update. This effectively dead ends this model for users. Got rid of my 2 when I found out: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/oneplus-2-android-nougat-update-1711067 https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/oneplus-2-android-noug...
kylnew 8y ago
I wonder if they could make a whole new company/brand that’s competes at the low end. If it ran iOS though, would that be enough to cannibalize too many iPhone users than would be acceptable? Wondering if they could accomplish the same thing many car brands do i.e. Honda <> Acura
- stephenr 8y ago
  Apples 'cheap' iPhone is last years (or the year before). And it works, because unlike most Android devices that get very few updates, with long delays (or no updates, ever, for the very cheap devices), they support devices with newer OS releases. A 5S will still run the latest iOS.
  - kylnew 8y ago
    I agree that appears to be the way they are going. If they are working to extend the life of devices even further in coming years that seems to support this direction.
    - stephenr 8y ago
      Over time the resources required to run the OS itself should go up slower than the hardware has increased in capability in the last few years. While the next iOS release may require an iPhone 6 or 6S, I expect it will be quite a while before it changes base requirements again after that.
      - kylnew 8y ago
        The only thing that the iPhone 6 can't do which I know of is ARKit, which seems to be one of the most hardware intensive things phones are capable.
simias 8y ago
It seems extremely hard to achieve that though. Creating a new smartphone hardware is very difficult and expensive. Creating a new smartphone OS and ecosystem is probably even harder. In order to have a proper "libre" smartphone you'd need to basically do both things. If behemoths like Microsoft couldn't pull it off I'm not sure how a newcomer could. I suppose the best path would be to create a new phone that could either boot Android or your privacy-respecting OS, this way you could still get the mainstream sales with Android and you'd target the niche users who value their privacy with your custom system. Still seems very difficult to achieve, if you want your phone to be cheap you need to target a high sale volume to dilute the cost of your R&D. I think the big problem is that smartphones never really had an healthy open source ecosystem going because it was all about closed hardware and locked bootloaders. Without a decent open source stack available it's hard to bootstrap a new system. And even if you did manage to do it you'd still need to convince people to port their apps to it (because not having Whatsapp or Instagram is going to be a deal breaker for many).
- skummetmaelk 8y ago
  https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
  - simias 8y ago
    Doesn't fit the bill yet. It's not cheap enough (you can get an iPhone 8 for the same price) and it remain to be seen if it'll manage to generate a viable ecosystem of apps around its platform. We also can't judge of the quality of the finished product yet. I genuinely hope they succeed but that's clearly not the "Honda or Kia" of smartphones the parent was talking about, at least not in this iteration.
- Ensorceled 8y ago
  Agreed. I don’t know what the solution is, data gathering is lucrative enough to completely pervert the mobile device economy. All the margin is gone.
- kyrra 8y ago
  If you want an example of how many people it takes to create a cellphone, Google bought HTCs Pixel phone team, which amounted to around 4000 people. This likely includes all the software engineers that do driver work as well, but it worth noting the size. You can get away with smaller teams if you take the full package that Qualcomm gives (they do most or all of driver work for you). You saw what Essential Products was able to create with around 120 people, but they were heavily using work from other companies to launch it.
zmmmmm 8y ago
Just buy an Android device and opt out of all the tracking? People behave as if this is impossible, but the options are all right there in the settings. There are a few places you lose some features but not super significant ones, and mostly those are because the tracking is intrinsically involved in the functions of the app.
- acct1771 8y ago
  Carrier IQ, etc. Look it up.
- spery 8y ago
  This is farm from the solution you present it to be. Opt out of google maps history and try the maps search for few days. Then turn it on again and compare the results. I've even had 'Saved Places' not render without search history being enabled. My next phone will sadly be an IPhone. Not because I love apple(I don't), but just because I'm quitting google.
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    Search for places requires knowing your current location to give you the most relevant results. Google would have the same information if you used Google Maps on iPhone. The difference is that on Android, it is possible to set a default maps app that is entirely local, which means that Android wins on privacy for location tracking. (This is before even considering that AGPS location data collection is mandatory on iOS and merely opt in on Android.)
    - ectospheno 8y ago
      You can only claim with a straight face that android wins on privacy if you completely ignore google. But since you can only do that in theory land it rings hollow. Besides, most people upload their photos without removing exif data which makes your photo archive the best tracker - every place you went that you cared about at all. Most people also keep pictures forever. You an count the people who opt out of cloud storage for photos on one hand...
Spooky23 8y ago
Not really. They own like 50% of the market. They position like 1960 GM. The $1,500 iPhone is the aspirational thing that everyone talks about. If you have money, you buy the iPhone Xs (ie the Cadillac), if you want to look "better", buy the Xr (Buick), if you don't care, you buy the iPhone 7 (the Chevy). There is almost nothing that the $1,500 phone does that the $1 phone does not. The cheapo androids are more like the Yugo of mobile devices, and the nicer Androids basically cost the same or a little more. iPhone 7 is $1 on many promo deals. If you go to companies with compliance requirements, iPhone owns the market, and is by far the cheapest solution. One of my "side hustles" in a very large org was managing about 40k iOS devices and 400 android devices... it basically cost about $9/year to manage, including staff. Staffing was basically 40-60% of two IT guys and half of 3 interns. If we broke the cost down further, the Androids would have been significantly more expensive, as additional 3rd party software was required as well as many more man-hours. The iPhone is magic in that way, with sufficient scale, you deliver almost magical capability to your whole company, including network connectivity, for less than the run cost of a PC. And it costs something like 80% less to manage than a PC. If you look at companies in industries like field service, iPhones are almost a profit center.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Where is your evidence supporting the claim that Apple owns 50% of the market? That is way above the figures I have seen. Seems to me you are just pulling metrics out of thin air in this post.
  - RandallBrown 8y ago
    https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held... Says about 44%, which is pretty close to "like 50%"
    - ProAm 8y ago
      * In the United States
  - 8y ago

carlmr 8y ago

>Apple is never going to give up their premium position. It would be stupid of them.

Waterluvian 8y ago

That's exactly the problem I have. I don't want the unblockable ads and spying but I need my phone to be some cheap thing I don't have to respect or worry about. Once I started buying $150 phones every 2-3 years, I realised how much I need a device that I don't lose any sleep over it getting beaten to death and possibly replaced prematurely.

singularity2001 8y ago
Get an iphone se with protector
stephenr 8y ago
Buy second hand iPhones. A 5S will still run the latest iOS, and with a new battery wont be under “performance management” mode, so it should be quite fast to use.
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  I'll second this. I'm still using an iPhone 6s and it works great. I just checked and there are a couple hundred listed on my local Craigslist for $100-$150.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I'm open to this idea. I discarded it early on because I thought it would either be too expensive or be too "used" to run cleanly for another 3 years. Are you suggesting some official refurbishment route or just find them on Craigslist or Ebay?
  - jnwatson 8y ago
    I’m not sure you’d like it. I recent upgraded from a 5s with a new battery to a 7. It was night and day in terms of performance. In particular, Siri works much better. Developers assume the performance of the latest, so they don’t realize how slow things act on older devices.
  - stephenr 8y ago
    I personally wouldn't buy something like this from a classifieds site. But that's because I expect you're just as like to get a cardboard cutout of an iPhone as you are an actual iPhone. If you've used these sites before and are comfortable with them, I'm sure there's options there. I don't know what it's like in the US, but here (SE Asia) there is a massive market for second-hand smart phones/tablets, usually from places that also do repairs of such devices. Go to any shopping mall in Thailand and (usually on the top floor) there will be dozens of places with devices of varying age. I don't think Apple's official refurbished stuff will be in the price range you're looking (they only have 7's from what I can see) but I'm sure you can find them somewhere.
  - jkestner 8y ago
    Swappa. A less shady eBay specifically for phones and like gadgets (though as it gets more popular, we'll see if it stays trustworthy). I've bought three used iPhones and an Apple Watch, never a problem.
telchar 8y ago
Speaking about unblockable ads, I had to set up a pi-hole to block ads at the network level because I couldn't block them on my ipad on any browser. Why does Apple make it so hard? Am I missing something?
- krrrh 8y ago
  Safari has supported third party ad blockers for a few years. I use 1BlockerX and it works well. There are dozens of other options. Including Firefox Gocus which blocks ads by default and also functions as an ad locker for Safari. https://1blocker.com https://1blocker.com
  - telchar 8y ago
    Alright, thanks for the info. I'll look into those.

jp555 8y ago

Apple devices last a long time. My mother still loves using my old 2012 iPhone 5. Used iOS devices are the Kia version.

nerdponx 8y ago

I imagine part of the reason they can afford to be pro-privacy is that they make enough money on actual sales to matter. If your margins are how, you will start looking for other ways to generate revenue.

fetbaffe 8y ago

Sad that Apple stopped making iPhone SE, still expensive compared to other brands, but the cheapest to jump on the Apple bandwagon.

rorykoehler 8y ago
I picked a second hand one up for SGD$200 (~USD$150)
Fnoord 8y ago
Not to mention it has a good fit in the (small) hand.
- fetbaffe 8y ago
  Yes, especially if you are a kid. Perfect phone to indoctrinate them with when they are young. Not too expensive to give to a kid and a perfect size. Don’t really understand Apples reasoning on this one.

kkarakk 8y ago

why not just buy an older device? bought a brand new iPhone se as soon as the new iphones x maxx was announced. mobile phone development as plateaued imo, there is nothing out there you really need unless you're fooling yourself. photos - I bought a nice mirrorless with the money I saved. apps - se runs everything tolerably fast except for snapchat and Instagram, which I've decided to cut down on anyways.comparison is the thief of joy and all the new social media apps promote comparison as the primary feature. games - bought a Nintendo switch and it has fortnite as well. all told 300+400+300 = 1000 which is STILL lower than the cost of the iPhone x max

jjulius 8y ago
>why not just buy an older device? As devices age, they stop being supported by security updates.
- CivilianZero 8y ago
  This is what always bugs me about recommendations to buy older devices as a solution to all problems. Updates = security.
- nneonneo 8y ago
  Apple, unlike many Android outfits, supports their hardware for a pretty long time. This chart (https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility/ https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility...) suggests that they're supporting devices up to 5 years old; since the SE is just 2, it has a good 3 years of software and security updates to look forward to.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  The iPhone 5S, released five years ago, runs the latest iOS version.
- at-fates-hands 8y ago
  Microsoft is still supporting several of their smartphones running Windows Mobile. The latest update (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4316692/june122018kb4316692osbuild15254488 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4316692/june122018k...) was in June of this year. I still have a Lumia 950 and it works fine. Compared to OnePlus who stopped updated their OnePlus2 past Marshmallow after telling subscribers they would get the Nougat update. This effectively dead ends this model for users. Got rid of my 2 when I found out: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/oneplus-2-android-nougat-update-1711067 https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/oneplus-2-android-noug...

kylnew 8y ago

I wonder if they could make a whole new company/brand that’s competes at the low end. If it ran iOS though, would that be enough to cannibalize too many iPhone users than would be acceptable? Wondering if they could accomplish the same thing many car brands do i.e. Honda <> Acura

stephenr 8y ago
Apples 'cheap' iPhone is last years (or the year before). And it works, because unlike most Android devices that get very few updates, with long delays (or no updates, ever, for the very cheap devices), they support devices with newer OS releases. A 5S will still run the latest iOS.
- kylnew 8y ago
  I agree that appears to be the way they are going. If they are working to extend the life of devices even further in coming years that seems to support this direction.
  - stephenr 8y ago
    Over time the resources required to run the OS itself should go up slower than the hardware has increased in capability in the last few years. While the next iOS release may require an iPhone 6 or 6S, I expect it will be quite a while before it changes base requirements again after that.
    - kylnew 8y ago
      The only thing that the iPhone 6 can't do which I know of is ARKit, which seems to be one of the most hardware intensive things phones are capable.

simias 8y ago

It seems extremely hard to achieve that though. Creating a new smartphone hardware is very difficult and expensive. Creating a new smartphone OS and ecosystem is probably even harder. In order to have a proper "libre" smartphone you'd need to basically do both things. If behemoths like Microsoft couldn't pull it off I'm not sure how a newcomer could. I suppose the best path would be to create a new phone that could either boot Android or your privacy-respecting OS, this way you could still get the mainstream sales with Android and you'd target the niche users who value their privacy with your custom system. Still seems very difficult to achieve, if you want your phone to be cheap you need to target a high sale volume to dilute the cost of your R&D. I think the big problem is that smartphones never really had an healthy open source ecosystem going because it was all about closed hardware and locked bootloaders. Without a decent open source stack available it's hard to bootstrap a new system. And even if you did manage to do it you'd still need to convince people to port their apps to it (because not having Whatsapp or Instagram is going to be a deal breaker for many).

skummetmaelk 8y ago
https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
- simias 8y ago
  Doesn't fit the bill yet. It's not cheap enough (you can get an iPhone 8 for the same price) and it remain to be seen if it'll manage to generate a viable ecosystem of apps around its platform. We also can't judge of the quality of the finished product yet. I genuinely hope they succeed but that's clearly not the "Honda or Kia" of smartphones the parent was talking about, at least not in this iteration.
Ensorceled 8y ago
Agreed. I don’t know what the solution is, data gathering is lucrative enough to completely pervert the mobile device economy. All the margin is gone.
kyrra 8y ago
If you want an example of how many people it takes to create a cellphone, Google bought HTCs Pixel phone team, which amounted to around 4000 people. This likely includes all the software engineers that do driver work as well, but it worth noting the size. You can get away with smaller teams if you take the full package that Qualcomm gives (they do most or all of driver work for you). You saw what Essential Products was able to create with around 120 people, but they were heavily using work from other companies to launch it.

zmmmmm 8y ago

Just buy an Android device and opt out of all the tracking? People behave as if this is impossible, but the options are all right there in the settings. There are a few places you lose some features but not super significant ones, and mostly those are because the tracking is intrinsically involved in the functions of the app.

acct1771 8y ago
Carrier IQ, etc. Look it up.
spery 8y ago
This is farm from the solution you present it to be. Opt out of google maps history and try the maps search for few days. Then turn it on again and compare the results. I've even had 'Saved Places' not render without search history being enabled. My next phone will sadly be an IPhone. Not because I love apple(I don't), but just because I'm quitting google.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  Search for places requires knowing your current location to give you the most relevant results. Google would have the same information if you used Google Maps on iPhone. The difference is that on Android, it is possible to set a default maps app that is entirely local, which means that Android wins on privacy for location tracking. (This is before even considering that AGPS location data collection is mandatory on iOS and merely opt in on Android.)
  - ectospheno 8y ago
    You can only claim with a straight face that android wins on privacy if you completely ignore google. But since you can only do that in theory land it rings hollow. Besides, most people upload their photos without removing exif data which makes your photo archive the best tracker - every place you went that you cared about at all. Most people also keep pictures forever. You an count the people who opt out of cloud storage for photos on one hand...

Spooky23 8y ago

Not really. They own like 50% of the market. They position like 1960 GM. The $1,500 iPhone is the aspirational thing that everyone talks about. If you have money, you buy the iPhone Xs (ie the Cadillac), if you want to look "better", buy the Xr (Buick), if you don't care, you buy the iPhone 7 (the Chevy). There is almost nothing that the $1,500 phone does that the $1 phone does not. The cheapo androids are more like the Yugo of mobile devices, and the nicer Androids basically cost the same or a little more. iPhone 7 is $1 on many promo deals. If you go to companies with compliance requirements, iPhone owns the market, and is by far the cheapest solution. One of my "side hustles" in a very large org was managing about 40k iOS devices and 400 android devices... it basically cost about $9/year to manage, including staff. Staffing was basically 40-60% of two IT guys and half of 3 interns. If we broke the cost down further, the Androids would have been significantly more expensive, as additional 3rd party software was required as well as many more man-hours. The iPhone is magic in that way, with sufficient scale, you deliver almost magical capability to your whole company, including network connectivity, for less than the run cost of a PC. And it costs something like 80% less to manage than a PC. If you look at companies in industries like field service, iPhones are almost a profit center.

WhompingWindows 8y ago
Where is your evidence supporting the claim that Apple owns 50% of the market? That is way above the figures I have seen. Seems to me you are just pulling metrics out of thin air in this post.
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held... Says about 44%, which is pretty close to "like 50%"
  - ProAm 8y ago
    * In the United States
- 8y ago