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That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

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Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#271

Post by bluedino »

type0 wrote: post #80
bluedino wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother has been using exactly that - a 4 year old black Friday Acer laptop. 2 years in, she complained that it was painfully slow so I stuck an SSD and an extra 2GB of RAM in it. This past year the trackpad quit working, so we connected an old USB mouse. Finally for Christmas I bought an iPad Mini for $199. It's so much smaller than the 15.6" laptop she had, so much easier to use, turns on/off instantly, the batte…

Why didn't you upgrade her to desktop pc? Laptops, especially old ones with bad heat dissipation suffer immensely in performance. With middle of the road desktop + ssd she would not need to upgrade in many years, better ergonomics too. The way I see it, even non techie user can gain a lot in productivity just by learning a couple of keyboard shortcuts and using simple automatization tools that are more readily availa…

>> Why didn't you upgrade her to desktop pc?

She doesn't want a desktop. She replaced the Pentium 4 Dell desktop I gave her 10 years ago with the Acer laptop.

You can't use a desktop on the couch, etc.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#272

Post by scrollaway »

logfromblammo wrote: post #226
masklinn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, sadly, is something Apple really doesn't support or encourage, by and large they've kept moving away from reparable and upgradable products[0] even though that's by far the most ecological option (short of not using industrial products in the first place) [0] to trade them for form (soldered RAM, fused display panels), for assembly convenience (tons of adhesives, thankfully they've at least started moving to ad…

Interestingly enough, mandarin oranges are used by medical students as practice for laparoscopic surgeries. The task is to remove the pericarp (white stringy stuff) from the orange with minimal damage to the outer peel, then suture the opening. So oranges might, in fact, be more repairable.

I don't think you're doing it on purpose, but you are comparing Apples to oranges.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#274

Post by vidarh »

pc86 wrote: post #197
skywhopper wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are capable smartphones for much cheaper then an iPhone that could get the job done. That's what GP was likely getting at. True enough. And yet, if you yourself are not actually poor, you may not realize the value that a marginal luxury like an iPhone or Air Jordans or a top brand purse (sorry, I don't know what the hot brand of purses is atm) can bring to someone in that situation. Spending a few hundred dol…

At the expense of being more in debt, or worse, skipping a rent payment or a grocery run.

Skipping a rent payment or a grocery run might very well have much less impact on their lives.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#275

Post by JohnBooty »

noxToken wrote: post #98
rileymat2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if I was suddenly without money, the iPhone would be what I would want to give up. The utility of the device is incredible: Mapping. Phone. Internet. Email. Alarm Clock. Calendaring. Photography. If anything we should work to get smart phones in the hands of the poor. It would be a great way to improve their lives for a somewhat modest cost. I am not sure it is all for looks. Maybe we could quibble abou…

> I am not sure if I was suddenly without money, the iPhone would be what I would want to give up. If you have an iPhone and then become poor, sure. You probably won't get ahead much by getting rid of your iPhone. If you're already poor, then an iPhone (not a smartphone) is definitely a luxury. There are capable smartphones for much cheaper then an iPhone that could get the job done. That's what GP was likely getting…

> If you're already poor, then an iPhone (not a smartphone) is definitely a luxury.

It's not wrong, nor necessarily economically irresponsible, for "poor" people to have a few nice things.

Assuming a lifespan of 3 years, the cost difference between a $600 phone and a $300 phone is barely more than $0.25 per day - and probably even less, considering that iPhones have a higher resale value.

Maybe that "poor person" carrying an iPhone just forgoes $0.25 or $0.50 of other niceties per day so they can afford that iPhone and those $100 shoes - or maybe they just work in a city, because you can literally find that much money on the ground every day if you keep your eyes peeled.

If a person routinely made such purchases, to the detriment of their well-being, certainly that could be a problem. But unless we know somebody's full financial picture we should not presume to make such a judgement.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#276

Post by zepto »

waspleg wrote: post #41

I completely agree with the author of the article. Apple is the real-world incarnation of the economic premise of Huxley's "A Brave New World". This was just the mask dropping for a second to pander to the faithful. I'd like to add, as someone who works at K12 public high school, that I've seen the reality of the article played out. My building is 100% free lunch, most are extremely poor, and yet there is a sizable n…

You and the author make the assumption that smartphones are commodities of equal value. This may not be true.

Additionally the author takes Schiller's comments out of context. He went on to explain that the reason they think the new iPad will appeal to the people who have old windows computers is that it is more suited to a world which has the internet.

The implication is that nobody, including Apple, has actually offered a product that has enough extra value for PC owners to decide to buy until now.

The awkwardness and insinuations about class are just being read in by the author.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#277

Post by LanceH »

skywhopper wrote: post #206
zanny wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was going to say this. If you are legitimately poor, you can get a used Moto G 2013 for $35 and activate it on Freedompop for some free data each month and use wifi wherever possible. That would be a phone on a budget. iphones are absolutely just for prestige, the same way Macbooks in universities are.

If you're poor and don't want everyone around you to know it, why would you buy the phone that screams "hey, I'm poor and got the cheapest possible phone!" Everyone has something they do to stand out from the people that surround them. It's cruel to suggest that folks living in poverty can only be deserving of assistance if they embrace their poverty and advertise it to the world. There are real costs to appearing po…

And you will remain poor and some people will continue to say it is everyone else's fault.

I've been there (before smart phones). Watching people wait for payday so they can go drinking. Everyone had a nicer car than necessary. Clothes or shoes to look like the situation is improving instead actually improving their situation.

Yes there is a marginal improvement in lifestyle. But there is always a marginal improvement available so that you can be in the bottom of that next group of Joneses.

I'm 45 and this is now making me remember some of the conversations I had with people who lived through the great depression. That generation was stamped with a frugality and practicality that just isn't being passed along anymore.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#278

Post by xlm1717 »

rockshassa wrote: post #12

I just can't bring myself to feel the author's anger, in any capacity. He wants to position this as a jab against those who build their own PCs, but that is utterly irrelevant. What percentage of those 600 million five-year-old PCs do you really think are being thoughtfully maintained by modders? Does the author realize that most people do not want the responsibility of maintaining their own hardware? Or that they do…

>A properly configured iPad, leveraging iCloud for device backups, photo backups, email credentials etc, solves all of these problems.

The iPad first came out in 2010. How many of those iPads are still being used? The original iPad can't even run the latest iOS anymore, while you can still load Windows 10 on five-year-old PCs, or many modern versions of Linux.

To add to your grim picture, those PCs that came out five years ago were starting to get Windows 7 installed by default. Maybe in the time since, people owning those PCs didn't upgrade to Windows 8 because of the cost, but Windows 10 was released as a free upgrade to Windows 7 users. Either way, Windows 7, 8 and 10 are still receiving security updates, and Windows 7 still looks and feels like a modern operating system.

Also, buying a replacement drive and copy of windows will still come out a lot cheaper than buying an iPad, and with an iPad there's no way in hell you're going to "install everything exactly as it was before you got there".

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#279

Post by omaranto »

Spooky23 wrote: post #186
waspleg wrote: post #41

I completely agree with the author of the article. Apple is the real-world incarnation of the economic premise of Huxley's "A Brave New World". This was just the mask dropping for a second to pander to the faithful. I'd like to add, as someone who works at K12 public high school, that I've seen the reality of the article played out. My building is 100% free lunch, most are extremely poor, and yet there is a sizable n…

I would disagree that the iPhones in your school represent a keeping up with the Joneses. Smartphones are swiss army knives that provide a ton of benefit to folks without the resources to buy lots of different devices. Through the myriad of purchasing schemes available, the real cost difference between an iPhone/Galaxy and a cheap android device amounts to a couple of bucks a month. When I was a kid in the 90s, kids,…

I agree that a smartphone can be a useful investment, but aren't iPhones really expensive (as are "flagship" Android phones)? My smartphone cost me about $90 unlocked, my wife's $130. I thought we were saving several hundreds of dollars compared to buying iPhones or a fancy Android phone.

Re: That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

#280

Post by zepto »

evook wrote: post #221
blub wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with those cheap phones is that your private information will be mercilessly sucked into the Google cloud. Some of that is disguised as perfectly innocent and helpful features: contacts syncing, back-ups, connecting more easily to WiFis, etc. The end result though is that your entire digital life will be on some Google server. Preventing this requires significant effort and technical expertise. We got win…

But you know that the iCloud is moving from aws to the Google Cloud at the Moment?

Yes but the data is encrypted by Apple and Google can't read it.
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