5 ms·

> "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now" T

by nox101 2y ago

> "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now" That is not the proposition. A Motorola Moto G Play is $110 no contract. The cheapest iPhone is $429. It's is not 20% more, it's 4x more. My sister got a Moto G Play this summer. She's perfectly happy with it. She's got a family of 5 so $550 for 5 phones is quite a deal compared to $2145 for 5 phones. The Moto G Play also has a micro-SD slot so she can take it to 512gb for $40.

marcosdumay 2y ago
The phones market is completely distorted by several kinds of anti-competitive and purposeful social-engineering forces. For a start, it's not a given that the Moto G Play has a lower quality than the iPhone. If the market was competitive, there would be comparable alternatives on every dimension, but it isn't, and those can't be compared.
mirekrusin 2y ago
To answer this question properly she would have to use both and then make a judgement, no?
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
That is not the proposition. For $15/month savings her child will be ostracized at school because of the blue message box. Is it worth it? Phones have outsized influence on our lives. A phone costs 1/10 as much as a car per month, but we spend more time with them, and most younger people today would rather give up their car than their phone. Better screen quality will more than pay itself in optics prescriptions later in life. Batter quality photos you take today will stay with you for the remainder of our life, and past it. Longer battery life would mean avoiding a lot of unpleasant situations.
- circlefavshape 2y ago
  > For $15/month savings her child will be ostracized at school because of the blue message box FWIW I have teenage kids, and nothing like this has ever happened in their lives.
- copperx 2y ago
  It seems to me like you are an expert on rationalizing expensive purchases. If that's unconscious, I think it would be good for you to bring it to conscious awareness.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  While I disagree with your first paragraph, the other two are spot on. When comparing prices of tech products, people focus too much on the percentage difference, while the dollar difference is not that significant. Depending on the person making the purchase. Anybody who can afford a car could easily afford the most expensive smart phone for sale.
  - mathgeek 2y ago
    > Anybody who can afford a car could easily afford the most expensive smart phone for sale. This is ignoring that many people “afford” these purchases on credit.
palata 2y ago
I am not sure what point you are trying to make. I made an example to explain what would happen if consumers had a way to know, for sure, the quality of a product. I didn't mean for you to take my example, try to find smartphone models that may match and then come back to me saying "your example is wrong because I can't find those models in real life". The whole point of my example was to share an idea, not to sell a smartphone.
- nox101 2y ago
  The point is, for the example you have, the difference is not 20% and that price difference is important in the tradeoff. I agree with you, if people knew the quality was significantly better for +20% then they'd probably choose higher quality. But if the difference is 400% then no, lots of people aren't going to pick higher quality as it's out of their budget, period. A BMW/Mercedes might be a more quality car than a Kia but someone that only has a budget for a Kia isn't going to even consider a BMW/Mercedes for 2x to 8x more. On top of that "quality" is subjective. I might agree that a Macbook Air ($999) is better than a $300 window laptop (there's tons of them) but both the Kia and the $300 Windows laptop will serve people's needs. a Kia will get them to/from work. Let them transport their kids. Etc.. A window laptop will let them browse the net, view youtube, write a resume. It's not like the Kia and windows laptop are useless. Plus, for the laptop, they can get 3 of them for the price of 1 mac. So everyone in the family gets one. It's like buying a Vizio TV for every room instead of one Sony TV for one room.
  - palata 2y ago
    > I agree with you, if people knew the quality was significantly better for +20% then they'd probably choose higher quality. Right, we agree then. People do care about quality. That was my point.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> A Motorola Moto G Play is $110 no contract. The cheapest iPhone is $429. It's is not 20% more, it's 4x more. But this is the market failure. If you ask a normal person why they should care about having a phone with drivers in the mainline kernel tree, they don't even know what you're asking. But the answer is, because then it can keep running the latest version of stock Android indefinitely, instead of being forced to buy a new phone over and over. At which point a 20% difference in the hardware price will be relevant, because if you want to keep the phone a long time you'll want the one with 16GB of RAM instead of 4GB -- which is fine because RAM is under $1/GB. But since the average phone customer doesn't know this, the phone they want isn't even available and their choices are the cheap phone which will be out of support in less than a year or the one that costs four times as much up front and will still be out of support before they otherwise actually need a new phone.
- cbhl 2y ago
  A "normal person" is a Starbucks barista making $38k/year (roughly 2000 hours at $19/hour). That person doesn't spend 3 days' wages for "mainline kernel drivers" -- either they buy the iPhone because it's a status symbol, or they use the Android OS that shipped with the device for three years until the screen is cracked and the battery stops charging. To them security patches are just an inconvenience. I don't think "if only people had the right information they'd spend money on the right things" is the right thesis -- I think it's more "why is everyone so poor? how do we make it so that more people can afford our wares?" My impression (citation needed) is that globally folks have been worse off the last few years and so the median Android device spec was actually going down.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > either they buy the iPhone because it's a status symbol, or they use the Android OS that shipped with the device for three years until the screen is cracked and the battery stops charging. That's also exactly the point. Why is it hard or expensive to repair the device? Would they have purposely chosen a phone they have to throw away like trash and then pay more than a hundred dollars for a new one if they could get one where a new battery is $15 and can be replaced like they do the batteries in their TV remote? > My impression (citation needed) is that globally folks have been worse off the last few years and so the median Android device spec was actually going down. Or people have realized that they only use their phone for maps and texting and they don't need a flagship if they're just going to throw it in the trash in two years anyway.

by nox101 2y ago

marcosdumay 2y ago

The phones market is completely distorted by several kinds of anti-competitive and purposeful social-engineering forces. For a start, it's not a given that the Moto G Play has a lower quality than the iPhone. If the market was competitive, there would be comparable alternatives on every dimension, but it isn't, and those can't be compared.

mirekrusin 2y ago

To answer this question properly she would have to use both and then make a judgement, no?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

That is not the proposition. For $15/month savings her child will be ostracized at school because of the blue message box. Is it worth it? Phones have outsized influence on our lives. A phone costs 1/10 as much as a car per month, but we spend more time with them, and most younger people today would rather give up their car than their phone. Better screen quality will more than pay itself in optics prescriptions later in life. Batter quality photos you take today will stay with you for the remainder of our life, and past it. Longer battery life would mean avoiding a lot of unpleasant situations.

circlefavshape 2y ago
> For $15/month savings her child will be ostracized at school because of the blue message box FWIW I have teenage kids, and nothing like this has ever happened in their lives.
copperx 2y ago
It seems to me like you are an expert on rationalizing expensive purchases. If that's unconscious, I think it would be good for you to bring it to conscious awareness.
carlosjobim 2y ago
While I disagree with your first paragraph, the other two are spot on. When comparing prices of tech products, people focus too much on the percentage difference, while the dollar difference is not that significant. Depending on the person making the purchase. Anybody who can afford a car could easily afford the most expensive smart phone for sale.
- mathgeek 2y ago
  > Anybody who can afford a car could easily afford the most expensive smart phone for sale. This is ignoring that many people “afford” these purchases on credit.

palata 2y ago

I am not sure what point you are trying to make. I made an example to explain what would happen if consumers had a way to know, for sure, the quality of a product. I didn't mean for you to take my example, try to find smartphone models that may match and then come back to me saying "your example is wrong because I can't find those models in real life". The whole point of my example was to share an idea, not to sell a smartphone.

nox101 2y ago
The point is, for the example you have, the difference is not 20% and that price difference is important in the tradeoff. I agree with you, if people knew the quality was significantly better for +20% then they'd probably choose higher quality. But if the difference is 400% then no, lots of people aren't going to pick higher quality as it's out of their budget, period. A BMW/Mercedes might be a more quality car than a Kia but someone that only has a budget for a Kia isn't going to even consider a BMW/Mercedes for 2x to 8x more. On top of that "quality" is subjective. I might agree that a Macbook Air ($999) is better than a $300 window laptop (there's tons of them) but both the Kia and the $300 Windows laptop will serve people's needs. a Kia will get them to/from work. Let them transport their kids. Etc.. A window laptop will let them browse the net, view youtube, write a resume. It's not like the Kia and windows laptop are useless. Plus, for the laptop, they can get 3 of them for the price of 1 mac. So everyone in the family gets one. It's like buying a Vizio TV for every room instead of one Sony TV for one room.
- palata 2y ago
  > I agree with you, if people knew the quality was significantly better for +20% then they'd probably choose higher quality. Right, we agree then. People do care about quality. That was my point.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> A Motorola Moto G Play is $110 no contract. The cheapest iPhone is $429. It's is not 20% more, it's 4x more. But this is the market failure. If you ask a normal person why they should care about having a phone with drivers in the mainline kernel tree, they don't even know what you're asking. But the answer is, because then it can keep running the latest version of stock Android indefinitely, instead of being forced to buy a new phone over and over. At which point a 20% difference in the hardware price will be relevant, because if you want to keep the phone a long time you'll want the one with 16GB of RAM instead of 4GB -- which is fine because RAM is under $1/GB. But since the average phone customer doesn't know this, the phone they want isn't even available and their choices are the cheap phone which will be out of support in less than a year or the one that costs four times as much up front and will still be out of support before they otherwise actually need a new phone.

cbhl 2y ago
A "normal person" is a Starbucks barista making $38k/year (roughly 2000 hours at $19/hour). That person doesn't spend 3 days' wages for "mainline kernel drivers" -- either they buy the iPhone because it's a status symbol, or they use the Android OS that shipped with the device for three years until the screen is cracked and the battery stops charging. To them security patches are just an inconvenience. I don't think "if only people had the right information they'd spend money on the right things" is the right thesis -- I think it's more "why is everyone so poor? how do we make it so that more people can afford our wares?" My impression (citation needed) is that globally folks have been worse off the last few years and so the median Android device spec was actually going down.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > either they buy the iPhone because it's a status symbol, or they use the Android OS that shipped with the device for three years until the screen is cracked and the battery stops charging. That's also exactly the point. Why is it hard or expensive to repair the device? Would they have purposely chosen a phone they have to throw away like trash and then pay more than a hundred dollars for a new one if they could get one where a new battery is $15 and can be replaced like they do the batteries in their TV remote? > My impression (citation needed) is that globally folks have been worse off the last few years and so the median Android device spec was actually going down. Or people have realized that they only use their phone for maps and texting and they don't need a flagship if they're just going to throw it in the trash in two years anyway.