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We like to fingerwag at social media companies for knowingly negatively impacting children's mental health and self-esteem, yet Apple is aware of how their syst
by heavyset_go 4y ago
We like to fingerwag at social media companies for knowingly negatively impacting children's mental health and self-esteem, yet Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones.
It's one thing to be ostracized by strangers on social media, it's an entirely other thing to be ostracized by your own friends and peers. The latter is tragically more personal and leaks into the real world with real world consequences.
- JPKab 4y agoIt's a good opportunity to teach your kids about how crappy and shallow other kids can be, and also teach them how to respond to criticism like this. 20 years ago, you'd get shit for not wearing the cool kind of shoes your peers had.
- Gatsky 4y agoThis is it, if it wasn’t the phone it would be something else.
- AeroNotix 4y agoSo therefore we let tactics like this slide? It is an intentional mechanism to create FOMO and groupthink by a corporation. Just because kids are prone to being led in this way, doesn't mean those leading that behaviour get a pass.
- kcplate 4y agoWhat tactics are that? Would Nike have allowed the swoosh to be licensed to every other shoe manufacturer in the 90s?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- robbyking 4y agoAnd kids still get shit for not wearing "cool" shoes! When I was younger I got teased for not having a Starter brand fitted hat, and I wasn't even into team sports.
- jmole 4y agoThis is not about brand, this is more like "you can't participate as an equal in this virtual communal space". Having a single android user in a group chat means the whole group chat is essentially crippled. The kids are not being shallow here, Apple is being anticompetitive.
- fyvhbhn 4y agoActually, it just means that the app you are using sucks
- comboy 4y agoI think most kids understand that. It's just that adults reality is way easier - if you don't like some people you just don't spend time with them. For kids, if you are not friends with people you spend 80% of your time with, you can't get the same kind of friendship elsewhere. The social games they play are way more complex than anything they teach them in school.
- salt-thrower 4y agoThe shoes thing is definitely still true in some circles. It's a valuable lesson to teach, but a very hard one. And most people don't internalize it until adulthood. Most parents will shrug and just spring for the iphone rather than listen to the incessant complaints.
- localhost 4y agoThere is quite a healthy market for used iPhones if you're talking about the blue bubble phenomenon.
- robbyking 4y agoYeah, my son is entirely too young for a phone right now, but my wife and my plan is to just upgrade every few years and give him one of our old phones. It wasn't too long ago that we did the same thing for our parents.
- AeroNotix 4y agoIt's frankly insane that you think that is the solution to this problem.
- alexb_ 4y agoI don't think you actually understand the problem
- twobitshifter 4y agoIs the iPhone se really luxury? If you are starting from the idea that every teen will have a smart phone, I think apple has blanketed the market with products at all the cost points.
- Conan_Kudo 4y agoIt's pretty luxury nowadays. Decent smartphones go for less than half that cost, and good ones can be even cheaper. The accessibility and affordability of high quality mobile computing devices has risen across the board. But Apple is very much on the upper mid range to high end side of things.
- Gigachad 4y agoYou can get older iPhones for almost free. And they work fully with iMessage
- leetrout 4y agoLocally? Or is there a reputable place online?
- YinLuck- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- est31 4y agoI've bought an used SE 2 from refurbed, but it's not available in the USA. There are competitors which do deliver to the USA, e.g. refurb.me: https://www.refurb.me/refurbished/iphone/iphone-se-2 https://www.refurb.me/refurbished/iphone/iphone-se-2 It's its own entire market. Generally I would suggest looking for bigger companies and ones which have policies to replace batteries if they are below a certain health level.
- 4y ago
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoI just got a backup iPhone SE for $430. It's fantastic. Same chip as recent iPhones. Very decent camera. Better battery life than my 13 pro. Actually fits in pocket. More fun to play games with one-handed. Easily will last 5 years with a case. Not a luxury device, but pretty competitive with what a lot of young people in even middle-income countries would pay for phones.
- tannhaeuser 4y agoYou can buy SE 2020's for significantly less, it's just that Apple themselves don't sell those in retail (but are still producing those and selling in gross).
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago$430 is a lot to some people.
- garyfirestorm 4y agoAverage yearly income in India 1875$ iPhoneSE for kids - 430$ I think it’s unobtainable for most of the people https://www.statista.com/statistics/802122/india-net-national-income-per-capita/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/802122/india-net-nationa...
- Huh1337 4y agoThey mostly use Android in India. This is about the US.
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoiPhone SE in India isn't $430, it's $607 at today's exchange rate: https://www.apple.com/in/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se/4.7-inch-display-64gb-midnight https://www.apple.com/in/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se/4.7-inch-... (still, EMI somewhat easily available) 20k-30k for Android phones seems to be the norm there according to the advertisements everywhere.
- reiichiroh 4y ago
- bmitc 4y agoThis seriously concerns me. I'm almost of the opinion that teenagers should not have phones for anything other than strictly communicating: voice and video calls and messaging. But that cat is out of the bag and now we have people growing up literally addicted to devices that are very detrimental to brain development and intelligence, emotions, socialization, etc.
- bink 4y agoI remember my parents saying that TV was going to rot my brain... then video games... before that it was comic books. Are there any reputable studies that show having a smart phone is detrimental to the health of a teenager? I've seen studies suggesting social media has a negative influence on the mental health of certain teens, but they aren't one and the same.
- nomel 4y agoI think the difference is that there are fairly conclusive studies showing that social media use, for all ages, can negatively influences happiness. Studies for TV, comics, and games never seemed to be conclusive. They're all very different things. An understanding of one doesn't give an understanding of another. They each deserve their own conclusion. I suspect VR will be the next one in that list.
- bmitc 4y agoThat's true, but are TVs and comics in your pocket or beside your bed 24/7 like phones? Are they computers that also directly attach you to several friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers instantaneously across several avenues? Do they notify you that you are "missing" something? I don't think there's any example in human history of things that have garnered the daily and sustained use of human attention more than smartphones, tablets, and the Internet. There is the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr that covers this stuff and points to research. There's also the Wall Street Journal article by him called Does the Internet Make You Dumber?. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704025304575284981644790098 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704025304575284...
- threatofrain 4y agoWhat is the difference to Nike providing kids with flashy shoes when the sole purpose is class and coolness? According to the same report, Nike is the most preferred fashion brand among teens. At least with Apple's message indication you know you're getting encryption and thus privacy from carriers. Would it be less problematic if Apple simply mentioned "warning: this is unencrypted SMS"?
- camhart 4y agoOnly reason its not encrypted is because Apple won't allow it to be.
- gleenn 4y agoCitation needed. Is this really true? I keep hearing about RCS etc but I also keep hearing it's not actually a good standard. Not even sure it does encryption frankly.
- iamthirsty 4y agoYou haven't looked that much into it then; RCS has encryption[0], and works great for me. (I have an iPhone 13 Pro & a Pixel 6 Pro. RCS works as well as iMessage for Android-to-Android devices, for me.) [0]: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf
- threatofrain 4y agoIs that RCS having encryption or is that Google providing an extension to RCS only with their Messages app? And to what degree does RCS with encryption have buy-in from American carriers?
- iamthirsty 4y agoRCS is an open source protocol that can be run by different 'operators'[0]. So it's not so much as an extension, as Google's implementation of the protocol (which is open source and can be added by other operators). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
- crazygringo 4y agoiPhones aren't luxury phones, sheesh. Their flagships are, sure, but the SE is extremely competitive in the US, especially when you consider their longevity and support. And then of course there's the used market. I mean, if 87% of teens own an iPhone, then that's very much by definition NOT luxury, as luxury is necessarily exclusive to some degree.
- password1 4y ago> I mean, if 87% of teens own an iPhone, then that's very much by definition NOT luxury. Yeah this is the point. Apple has a strong brand and pricing tactics that places itself as a high-end company. This branding works really well and Apple is perceived as luxury by many people, but the truth is that it creates consumer products and there's no luxury in that. If the iPhone was a luxury you wouldn't find it everywhere in almost all high schools. Luxury doesn't dominate a mass market. Some tech guys seems to think that value comes solely by a sort of price/performance ratio. If you can get MORE POWER for less money then you are getting ripped off. The rest of the price is not justified, you aren't paying for anything else so you must be paying a luxury premium. That's really a shallow way of analysing apple products. You pay more because the following is included: long time support (software updated and that continues to work without random behavior for 5yrs), really high quality control and higher quality components (no things that randomly stop to work after one or two years), great customer and tech support (yeah, non-tech people actually need it), seamless software integration, privacy and security guarantees. There are so much more things included in apple devices beside than tech specs and people find a lot of value in that.
- alvarezbjm-hn 4y agoIf the situation goes on, the US will go back to the spot when ATT was a monopoly for anything telecomms. Humans never learn.
- heavyset_go 4y agoYou can get a new Android phone for $20. The charging cables alone for an iPhone, which don't come with the phone, cost $19 each by themselves.
- purpleblue 4y agoAbsolutely absurd statement. Is this similar to the "trauma" suffered by teens that wore Levi's Jeans that didn't have the Red Tab, back in the 80s and 90s? To compare a green text bubble to mental health issues is offensive.
- blix 4y agoI'm pretty certain that a lot more interaction occurs through phones than through jeans. As an adult, some of my friends have asked me to switch to an iphone so they could use imessage features in a group chat. It's not hard to imagine being left out of a group for this reason. I don't think I've met a girl in my age group who has anything other than a negative opinion of "Android Users." This stuff doesn't bother me, but I can see how it would upset kids.
- TurkishPoptart 4y agoI'm ignorant, but what are the features in group chats that Android people don't get? The heart/emoticon bubble things? I used to do group chats with my last Android phone, but now that I have iPhone...I just have too much anxiety to open these chats and respond, because I don't want to hear the notification sound buzz in triplicate over the next hour. I dislike my phone and using it so much that it's making me socially isolated.
- blix 4y agoApparently adding a new member to a group text with an android user is a much less pleasant experience than if everyone is on imessage. I'm the android user causing problems so I dont really know the details :P But honestly that the guy singled out the "one android user" who was making his life difficult was disconerting to say the least. I almost always have my phone on silent for that reason. I like to check my phone when I want to, not when it wants me to.
- vlunkr 4y agoIt would be great if the general population would switch to another messaging app (or better yet a protocol that multiple clients support). I get the sense that this is how WhatsApp is used in other countries. It feels like a real regression to be using SMS based messaging in 2022. Seems like iMessage succeeds only by sheer numbers and ignorance of the general population.
- feet 4y agoThere are a lot of things that succeed due to the ignorance of the population
- xcrunner529 4y agoYes. WhatsApp is a hideous and bloated app and there are far better solutions.
- sho_hn 4y agoMessaging is pretty fascinating. WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Line, Telegram, iMessage all so strongly dominate their respective set of countries/regions and a lot of them have their own distinct set of user mannerisms/memes.
- warner25 4y agoI thought this was funny when I went to work in Korea for a year, as an American, with a bunch of other Americans; all of us stationed there in the military. Upon arrival, the other Americans immediately told me: "You need to get Kakao. It's how you text in Korea." I complied, but I often made the point that it was just another mobile app that they could install and use even back in the United States, and something like Hangouts would work just as well in Korea. When I moved back to the United States, I kept using Kakao to stay in touch with some of my old co-workers who were still in Korea, and this blew their minds, including some people who were otherwise quite tech savvy. Note that I don't think many of us were using Kakao to talk with native Koreans, which would be a good reason for using it. Honestly, we didn't mix much. Nearly everybody on my contact list was an American.
- Maursault 4y ago> Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones. Tell me about it. Audi, BMW, Ferrari and Lamborghini have been ostracizing me, and so have all the gas stations around where I live! Not only that, but Microsoft, developers of pro software, movie theaters, restaurants, travel agents, lawyers and hookers! The nerve of them all to exclude me from their products and services simply because I can't afford them. It's very cruel and so arbitrary.
- sho_hn 4y agoI think people here take issue with the walled garden model of an intra-device comm protocol, not the price point or desirability of iPhones. The comparison to luxury cars is especially crude because it's an industry far more tightly regulated to the benefit of customers than any section of consumer electronics.
- Maursault 4y ago> I think people here take issue with the walled garden model of an intra-device comm protocol, not the price point GGP specified ostracizing by Apple of those "who can't afford to carry around luxury phones." Now you are suggesting that Apple excludes communication from non-Apple customers by using an "intra-device comm protocol," which I believe most refer to as iMessage. I'm pretty sure it was conceived to save the user from paying for SMS and MMS, or at least being a relief to use of those for-pay protocols, and the dreaded "green bubble" merely an indicator that the cell provider may be charging for it. The idea of competing for space here seems to be very popular, and there are many alternatives, such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Signal, and many others. I just had the strongest sensation of deja vu, no, yes... something... do you at all remember IRC, IRQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, MSN Messenger, Google Talk? I don't recall anyone complaining about iChat or any of the other services mentioned for being exclusive, which they all are. Are you sure the grievance is legitimate? Where were the complaints before with the legacy chat apps? What makes Apple deserving of special scrutiny while every other message service with similar exclusivity is doing nothing wrong? I also don't see how Apple is responsible for narcissistic parents raising bullies and shitheads. Innocent kids being ostracized really could be, and I think really is, the responsibility of bad parents.
- carabiner 4y agoiPhones aren't luxury in 2022. They cost no more than Samsung and Google models today.
- karamanolev 4y agoThe low end goes way lower with one than the other. And that's important for everyone who's not as privileged as you and me. And believe me, an iPhone (any brand new unit), just as the Pixel or the Galaxy S22 are way unaffordable to a huge swath of the population. That being said, the low end of Android phones is quite good and quite quite cheap. It's like saying that there are Lamborghinis that cost as much as a Nissan GT-R Nismo. Yes, that may be so (even if it isn't in reality). But your Nissan Altima is way more affordable to way more people.
- mberning 4y agoYou act as if they don’t make cheap and relatively accessible phones. They do. iphone se is a perfectly good phone that can be bought new for $400. Sure it’s not at the absolute bottom end of the market, but it is fairly accessible when you compare it to their flagship phones.
- wolongong942 4y agoMaybe America is different but to me 400 for a phone isn't cheap. If poor people in the US are buying their children $400 phones then they can shut up about high living costs. I'd consider my ~$130 Oppo to be the upper end of cheap with NFC and snappy performance.
- filoleg 4y agoIn the current context, "cheap" is used in comparison to base configs of flagship smartphone models, such as Galaxy S22, Pixel 7 Pro, and iPhone 14. All of which tend to go for $700+. And that's not even mentioning the luxury models like foldable Galaxy ZFold4 going for $1.7k+. Sure, I wouldn't count a brand new $400 smartphone to be the most budget one, but it is almost half the price of a flagship. And that's not even getting into the used market.
- yamtaddle 4y agoApple phones also last long enough, barring accidents, that if the adults are using iPhones, the kids can probably get hand-me-downs that're still usable and receiving updates for at least a couple years.
- heavyset_go 4y agoYou can buy a new Android phone for $20. A $400+ phone, with a $19 charging cable that is not included, is a luxury for many people.
- systoll 4y agoThe cable is included - https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/specs/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/specs/
- jl6 4y agoOn the other hand, this seems like a teachable moment, where perhaps kids can be encouraged not to marginalize others based on trivial differences in messaging apps. The drumbeat of inclusivity is pretty loud these days so it shouldn’t come as too great a surprise that including their green bubble friends would be the decent thing to do. I don’t place much blame on Apple for completely stereotypically standard teenage attitudes. If it wasn’t green bubbles it would be uncool sneakers. The answer is not to force interoperability (though that would be great!), but for parents to help their kids grow out of these tribalizing behaviors.
- idle_zealot 4y agoIt's not just a trivial difference in bubble color. SMS conversations in iMessage lose features. The social rejection is a result of the features lost when an Android user participates in a messaging group.
- alvarezbjm-hn 4y agoThe social rejection is a result of teens being teens, as pointed out. Adults would use another more inclusive tool, like whatsapp, email, discord, rss, etc.
- gw99 4y agoThis is quite frankly utter bullshit unless there is a lack of parenting going on i.e. you brought your kids up to be judgy assholes. My kids and their friends have a right mix of all sorts of phones. They don't even talk about it. They just work out how to deal with it. Mostly that results in them picking a common platform, usually Discord or Snapchat and using that. This is not a technology issue!
- janef0421 4y agoFortunately, an iPhone isn't strictly a luxury, as there is still a healthy market of second-hand and independently refurbished models available at a variety of price points. Apple's actions over the last few years threaten to seriously undermine this, though.
- novok 4y agoHumans will invent indicators of social status whether you like it or not. Get rid of green bubbles and something else will rise to take its place.
- nomel 4y agoThey'll just look at what's in each other hands. Or what's on their feet. Or what clothes their draped in. All as they always have.
- nojito 4y agoApple phones are cheaper and last longer than Android devices.
- D13Fd 4y agoThen just buy an iPhone, or get over it? You're acting as if Android vs. iPhone is an immutable part of a child's identity. It's not. You can get a totally workable used iPhone cheap, because they keep working for so long. It's not like you need a lot of horsepower for texting. My kids take a beat up 8-year-old iPhone 6 out when they go to sleepovers and things. It still works fine.
- fyvhbhn 4y agoThe US is straight out of a dystopia from an European perspective.
- D13Fd 4y agoiPhone = Dystopia?
- fyvhbhn 4y agoNo, Dystopia = everyone must buy an iphone as solution to the problem instead of just using an app that's not restricted to iphones
- D13Fd 4y agoI guess the difference is the attitude - “I will try to change my preferences to suit others” vs “I will try to change others to suit my preferences”
- fyvhbhn 4y agoIt isn't. Two options: - everyone installs an app that can deal with multiple vendors (like 90% of the messengers) - everyone that is not having a phone of vendor x gets a new phone from vendor x and throws away the old one (or keeps both lol) The former is almost for free and the latter costs hundreds of dollars . It's so much worse that you cannot even make out this difference
- 4y ago
- voisin 4y ago> who can't afford to carry around luxury phones. The solution is to buy an older iPhone second-hand.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kaba0 4y agoWell, just use any of the litany of messenger programs out there that are available on every platform? I know there is a huge network effect, but I don’t think it is fair to blame apple here — they ought to somehow show whether a message goes from your SMS budget vs mobile data one.