4 ms·

People use their phones probably more than any other single item besides their home and bed. It’s not really that crazy, especially if you factor in camera upgr

People use their phones probably more than any other single item besides their home and bed. It’s not really that crazy, especially if you factor in camera upgrades for people that care about it.

matthewfcarlson 2y ago
In terms of percentage of my day that I spent using X, my smartphone ranks pretty highly. More so than my TV, car, etc that are high budget items that you can spend a lot on.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I think it's true for a lot of people, but not for everyone. There's not much my phone does for me that a laptop doesn't do better, and I probably use some form of desktop/laptop about 10X the amount of time I use my phone. Sometimes I forget where my (8 year old) phone is for days, and life trucks on, but I probably sit in front of a computer for hours a day and that's just for work. I guess I'm turning into an outlier. I personally could not even fathom spending $500 on a telephone let alone $1000. It's just not an important enough gadget in my life.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Fewer and fewer people own any computing device other than a phone.
    - sandspar 2y ago
      iPad is the new laptop.
      - epolanski 2y ago
        For what? Because sure as hell it's not a working machine.
    - mindslight 2y ago
      Should we be celebrating this, or even talking about it as if it's remotely sensible? Even putting aside that mobile software is designed to undermine your personal interests, getting a laptop that's good for a decade (or more) and then churning your phone less often is likely a win on straight device cost.
      - jdgoesmarching 2y ago
        Who defines sensible? For most people, a phone is a far more sensible purchase than a laptop. How many sub-$500 laptops have cellular modems? How many sub-$200? How much of the technology that people realistically use day-to-day requires a laptop? I’d even question your premise that phones churn more frequently than laptops, especially at the budget end.
        0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
        More and more of societal services “require” a smartphone. I went to a baseball game where it seemed like it was required to install their ticket app (might have been an offline workflow available). For someone with a limited budget, a phone seems wildly more valuable than a laptop.
        mindslight 2y ago
        The point of my comment was to talk about what is sensible? Your comment just seems needlessly dichotomous. I'm talking about having multiple devices, such that you aren't beholden to any single one. Nobody "requires" a laptop, just like nobody actually "requires" a phone. But if you're using up all your buy-stuff-online time looking through a tiny screen and tapping out search terms like Morse code, rather than being able to comfortably compare skus/stores far and wide, it's likely that you're drastically overpaying. I'm willing to believe this is a trap many people fall into (eg why else is Amazon always pushing Subscribe and "Save"), but we shouldn't be normalizing it as if it's effective rather than pathological and extractionary (cf Vimes's Boots). And sure, the same trash-treadmill dynamic exists in the low end new laptop market with poor hardware and poor software (eg MSWin also pushes an upgrade treadmill). But this is kind of a weird Schrödinger's argument in a thread about a phone that costs $1,000 - someone who doesn't have enough resources to buy anything beyond a phone, yet also spends an outsized amount to have the latest flagship. My larger point still stands about the longevity of good product choices, but they require research and actualization - once again, the kind better done from a laptop or desktop rather than a pocket porthole.
  - forrestthewoods 2y ago
    > I think it's true for a lot of people, but not for everyone. This is not a helpful comment. No one argued it was true for everyone! > I personally could not even fathom spending $500 on a telephone let alone $1000. It's just not an important enough gadget in my life. This is also not helpful. Can you imagine why someone else might spend $1000 on a phone? If the answer is no you have a shockingly poor ability to empathize and see things from a different perspective. I totally understand why some people spend $1500 on a new phone. And I also understand why some people want to spend the bare minimum! These perspectives are not difficult to grasp.
    - sandspar 2y ago
      Here we have OP doing an "I have better money sense than you" brag followed by a guy doing an "I have better empathy than you" brag. (Followed by me doing an "I'm more savvy than you" brag.)
      - jdgoesmarching 2y ago
        Followed by the “I have outlined how a typical conversation on this platform will play out” guy
      - forrestthewoods 2y ago
        lol, made me chuckle. It's a pet peeve of mine how often programmers argue from their niche perspective without even attempting to think of things from a broader or different perspective. It's especially annoying when it goes from "people do X" to "well I do Y so nyah!". It's not hard or difficult, you just have to try!
        sandspar 2y ago
        Does it get easier over time? I asked the most socially adept person I know about how she's so good with people. She said, "I just picture myself in their shoes." She made it sound easy, so I tried it, and phew! It's tough! It made me wonder whether part of the reason why perspective-taking is easy for her is because she's practiced it so much.
  - ghshephard 2y ago
    There's a very large community of people in which their smartphone might be the only luxury purchase they make (I'm pretty close to that). Now that we no longer upgrade every second year (or, in fact, every third year) and given I usually get 50% of the cost back by sending the old phone in, spending $1500/phone means that I'm typically amortizing a $750 charge over 4 years - or $15/month for the only luxury item I own. I'm probably more concerned about the $85/month AT&T bill than the $15/month cost for the actual phone. Never having to even think about storage, like literally zero concerns about how much I download is one reason I always grab the high-end model (now around 1TB) Also - there are lots of weeks, (in fact, sometimes a month) that my mother doesn't touch her (pretty high end, nice 4K monitor) computer system - but I doubt there has ever been a single hour that she wasn't using her phone. The Phone, for many, has become the new computer. And, with LLMs becoming pervasive, the new knowledge-system. (I can go many days without touching google - but I hit up some combination of Claude/ChatGPT pretty 7-10 times/day) I can already envision the day in which you will be able to run an LLM on your phone - but the H/W specs for that thing will likely be insane and I have a hard time seeing how the first releases of (reasonable speed, reasonable model -I'm aware you can do it today) - in a 2-3 years from now that can run an LLM will go for less than $2000-$2500. And I will be standing at the front of that line begging them to take my money. Entirely new device at that point.
- epolanski 2y ago
  Okay, but just because you use something a lot doesn't mean you need to spend huge money on it. That's the argument I don't understand. Like, Taxi drivers don't buy the most luxurious and comfortable car you can think of because they drive it all day, they get Toyotas and sometimes Teslas where EV support is decent.
  - yuppiepuppie 2y ago
    Yeah but when you get into the taxi comparison, it’s based on roi more than anything. For a phone, it’s purely esthetic, ergonomic and user friendliness that most people are buying them. Not usually roi based decision.
  - dash2 2y ago
    If you use it for 3 years, $1000 is about a dollar a day. Does a better phone generate that much value each day - about 1/5 of a cappucino? Probably.
    - epolanski 2y ago
      By which metric generates more value? It answers better on HN? Gives you more value answering messages or watching YouTube? Which far fetched edge case scenario do you need to justify the very small diminishing returns between a high end and premium phone?
      - jfdbcv 2y ago
        Personally I inject probes into my brain to measure the exact dopamine response every time I need to make a new purchase ...idk I think people just like premium phones, it's not that deep
zamadatix 2y ago
One stat that takes me out of my bubble on this one is we are closing in on 2/3 of website visits being done via mobile devices. I.e. it's not necessarily the ultra tech focused folks that make up high end mobile user base, it's people using phones constantly as their primary device that are often spending a grand on them.
georgeecollins 2y ago
That's a really good point! I spend 10x time in front of a computer as a phone and I don't think twice about buying Alienware or Razer so that makes more sense to me.
cdrini 2y ago
This is true, but I don't think the price translates. Most folks use their phones for messaging, internet, videos, camera. That's about it. And the things you do on your phone don't translate to these price tags. You're not getting a bunch more from a 1k phone than from a 500 phone. I personally try to get flagship phones, but used a few years after their release. That, and avoid upgrading my phone as much as possible :P I'm jealous of Apple folks here, they support their devices for eons longer than Android!

People use their phones probably more than any other single item besides their home and bed. It’s not really that crazy, especially if you factor in camera upgrades for people that care about it.

matthewfcarlson 2y ago

In terms of percentage of my day that I spent using X, my smartphone ranks pretty highly. More so than my TV, car, etc that are high budget items that you can spend a lot on.

ryandrake 2y ago
I think it's true for a lot of people, but not for everyone. There's not much my phone does for me that a laptop doesn't do better, and I probably use some form of desktop/laptop about 10X the amount of time I use my phone. Sometimes I forget where my (8 year old) phone is for days, and life trucks on, but I probably sit in front of a computer for hours a day and that's just for work. I guess I'm turning into an outlier. I personally could not even fathom spending $500 on a telephone let alone $1000. It's just not an important enough gadget in my life.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Fewer and fewer people own any computing device other than a phone.
  - sandspar 2y ago
    iPad is the new laptop.
    - epolanski 2y ago
      For what? Because sure as hell it's not a working machine.
  - mindslight 2y ago
    Should we be celebrating this, or even talking about it as if it's remotely sensible? Even putting aside that mobile software is designed to undermine your personal interests, getting a laptop that's good for a decade (or more) and then churning your phone less often is likely a win on straight device cost.
    - jdgoesmarching 2y ago
      Who defines sensible? For most people, a phone is a far more sensible purchase than a laptop. How many sub-$500 laptops have cellular modems? How many sub-$200? How much of the technology that people realistically use day-to-day requires a laptop? I’d even question your premise that phones churn more frequently than laptops, especially at the budget end.
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
        More and more of societal services “require” a smartphone. I went to a baseball game where it seemed like it was required to install their ticket app (might have been an offline workflow available). For someone with a limited budget, a phone seems wildly more valuable than a laptop.
      - mindslight 2y ago
        The point of my comment was to talk about what is sensible? Your comment just seems needlessly dichotomous. I'm talking about having multiple devices, such that you aren't beholden to any single one. Nobody "requires" a laptop, just like nobody actually "requires" a phone. But if you're using up all your buy-stuff-online time looking through a tiny screen and tapping out search terms like Morse code, rather than being able to comfortably compare skus/stores far and wide, it's likely that you're drastically overpaying. I'm willing to believe this is a trap many people fall into (eg why else is Amazon always pushing Subscribe and "Save"), but we shouldn't be normalizing it as if it's effective rather than pathological and extractionary (cf Vimes's Boots). And sure, the same trash-treadmill dynamic exists in the low end new laptop market with poor hardware and poor software (eg MSWin also pushes an upgrade treadmill). But this is kind of a weird Schrödinger's argument in a thread about a phone that costs $1,000 - someone who doesn't have enough resources to buy anything beyond a phone, yet also spends an outsized amount to have the latest flagship. My larger point still stands about the longevity of good product choices, but they require research and actualization - once again, the kind better done from a laptop or desktop rather than a pocket porthole.
- forrestthewoods 2y ago
  > I think it's true for a lot of people, but not for everyone. This is not a helpful comment. No one argued it was true for everyone! > I personally could not even fathom spending $500 on a telephone let alone $1000. It's just not an important enough gadget in my life. This is also not helpful. Can you imagine why someone else might spend $1000 on a phone? If the answer is no you have a shockingly poor ability to empathize and see things from a different perspective. I totally understand why some people spend $1500 on a new phone. And I also understand why some people want to spend the bare minimum! These perspectives are not difficult to grasp.
  - sandspar 2y ago
    Here we have OP doing an "I have better money sense than you" brag followed by a guy doing an "I have better empathy than you" brag. (Followed by me doing an "I'm more savvy than you" brag.)
    - jdgoesmarching 2y ago
      Followed by the “I have outlined how a typical conversation on this platform will play out” guy
    - forrestthewoods 2y ago
      lol, made me chuckle. It's a pet peeve of mine how often programmers argue from their niche perspective without even attempting to think of things from a broader or different perspective. It's especially annoying when it goes from "people do X" to "well I do Y so nyah!". It's not hard or difficult, you just have to try!
      - sandspar 2y ago
        Does it get easier over time? I asked the most socially adept person I know about how she's so good with people. She said, "I just picture myself in their shoes." She made it sound easy, so I tried it, and phew! It's tough! It made me wonder whether part of the reason why perspective-taking is easy for her is because she's practiced it so much.
- ghshephard 2y ago
  There's a very large community of people in which their smartphone might be the only luxury purchase they make (I'm pretty close to that). Now that we no longer upgrade every second year (or, in fact, every third year) and given I usually get 50% of the cost back by sending the old phone in, spending $1500/phone means that I'm typically amortizing a $750 charge over 4 years - or $15/month for the only luxury item I own. I'm probably more concerned about the $85/month AT&T bill than the $15/month cost for the actual phone. Never having to even think about storage, like literally zero concerns about how much I download is one reason I always grab the high-end model (now around 1TB) Also - there are lots of weeks, (in fact, sometimes a month) that my mother doesn't touch her (pretty high end, nice 4K monitor) computer system - but I doubt there has ever been a single hour that she wasn't using her phone. The Phone, for many, has become the new computer. And, with LLMs becoming pervasive, the new knowledge-system. (I can go many days without touching google - but I hit up some combination of Claude/ChatGPT pretty 7-10 times/day) I can already envision the day in which you will be able to run an LLM on your phone - but the H/W specs for that thing will likely be insane and I have a hard time seeing how the first releases of (reasonable speed, reasonable model -I'm aware you can do it today) - in a 2-3 years from now that can run an LLM will go for less than $2000-$2500. And I will be standing at the front of that line begging them to take my money. Entirely new device at that point.
epolanski 2y ago
Okay, but just because you use something a lot doesn't mean you need to spend huge money on it. That's the argument I don't understand. Like, Taxi drivers don't buy the most luxurious and comfortable car you can think of because they drive it all day, they get Toyotas and sometimes Teslas where EV support is decent.
- yuppiepuppie 2y ago
  Yeah but when you get into the taxi comparison, it’s based on roi more than anything. For a phone, it’s purely esthetic, ergonomic and user friendliness that most people are buying them. Not usually roi based decision.
- dash2 2y ago
  If you use it for 3 years, $1000 is about a dollar a day. Does a better phone generate that much value each day - about 1/5 of a cappucino? Probably.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    By which metric generates more value? It answers better on HN? Gives you more value answering messages or watching YouTube? Which far fetched edge case scenario do you need to justify the very small diminishing returns between a high end and premium phone?
    - jfdbcv 2y ago
      Personally I inject probes into my brain to measure the exact dopamine response every time I need to make a new purchase ...idk I think people just like premium phones, it's not that deep

zamadatix 2y ago

One stat that takes me out of my bubble on this one is we are closing in on 2/3 of website visits being done via mobile devices. I.e. it's not necessarily the ultra tech focused folks that make up high end mobile user base, it's people using phones constantly as their primary device that are often spending a grand on them.

georgeecollins 2y ago

That's a really good point! I spend 10x time in front of a computer as a phone and I don't think twice about buying Alienware or Razer so that makes more sense to me.

cdrini 2y ago

This is true, but I don't think the price translates. Most folks use their phones for messaging, internet, videos, camera. That's about it. And the things you do on your phone don't translate to these price tags. You're not getting a bunch more from a 1k phone than from a 500 phone. I personally try to get flagship phones, but used a few years after their release. That, and avoid upgrading my phone as much as possible :P I'm jealous of Apple folks here, they support their devices for eons longer than Android!