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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

#361

Post by jinst8gmi »

rileymat2 wrote: post #60
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 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.

Poor is when you have to dig through other peoples' trash to find food (I see this every week). I'm pretty sure you you really ended up poor you wouldn't give a damn about your iPhone except to sell it to buy food.

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

#362

Post by elipsey »

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…

If you carefully read the fine article, you will notice that the author states:

"There are really only two reasons why people might have a computer that’s more than five years old: 1. They can’t afford an upgrade. 2. They don’t need an upgrade."

and then proceeds to examine and _dismiss_ #1 as a plausible motive for these comments.

What he is complaining about is disposable hardware. I am also bothered by this trend, and I'm concerned that it may become more difficult over time to avoid it. I'm typing this on a T430 with a removable hard drive, two SSD's, new RAM, new keyboard, new screen, new fan, and new OS. Try that with MacBook.

If _certain_ tech companies have their way it will be impossible to do anything useful with a machine that hasn't got a crypto-locked boot loader and soldered on hardware. It's debatable whether planned obsolescence is a motivating goal for this.

(It is arguable that semi manufactures are mostly competing with their own older hardware, and they aren't competing as well as they used to; phones still improve like PC's in the 90's, but that's not sustainable in the long run.)

In any case, planned obsolescence is at least a side effect of building non-upgradeable hardware, and that means you'll be compelled to throw away your hardware more often, whether you can afford to or not. For Apple, this means that 5 year old hardware _has_ to pathetic, and they obviously wouldn't admit that anyone else's is less pathetic than theirs.

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

#363

Post by morgante »

cballard wrote: post #62
ricw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPad clearly isn't for your use cases. The vast majority of people only want to browse, look at photos, read emails and occasionally write some text. For them it's a cheap ($280 for the cheapest iPad) and easy solution.

Even those tasks are irritating on an iPad - outside of the limited multitasking, viewing multiple things at once is impossible. I can't look at an email and reference a website linked in it. I can't look at a few websites while composing an email. Comparing multiple travel booking sites side-by-side? Nope. If I try switching back and forth, the iPad has probably unloaded one of the tabs in the meantime due to memory…

This is anecdotal, but my mother has an iPad and she vastly prefers using it to the computer for everything from email to images to web browsing.

I bought her a brand new iMac and it's basically been unused.

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

#364

Post by skc »

It's not the comment that was absurd. It was the fact that Apple seemingly has no answer as to why there are over 600 million people still using old PC's.

Instead of exploring why that might be the case they instead decided to mock these people.

Just bizarre.

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

#365

Post by amalcon »

ratbeard wrote: post #200
simonh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought an iPhone 3GS in 2009, that's 6 and a half years ago and my daughter now uses it at school. It even still connects to the App Store. Other than a cracked screen it works fine. Battery life isn't great, but it gets her through the school day. These things have incredible lifetimes and also keep their resale value very well. So in terms of value, I'm not convinced that iPhones are a frivolous luxury. In my exp…

We've got an iPad 2 that is not useless, but much worse after upgrading to ios9. I still play Kingdom Rush games on it but its so slow now its too frustrating to use for internet browsing and other things.

I know Kingdom Rush isn't exactly the latest high-end 3D thing, but I did a double-take at the notion that hardware that's fine for gaming is too slow for internet browsing.

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

#367

Post by neovive »

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…

Very true. It could also be due to the long-term contracts that parents commit to as part of the family plans with iPhones attached. It's just another monthly expense that has become like a hard to give up utility.

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

#368

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#369

Post by JohnBooty »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #338
JohnBooty wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" car…

I'm not sure if you have any perspective what being poor means. This link : http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ Seems quite appropriate and - I hope - illuminating.

I'm glad you posted that: everybody should read it and truly try to put themselves in those shoes.

I do not understand the fact that you seem to have posted it as a rebuttal to my post.

My post was meant as a criticism of another indignity that the poor often face: other peoples' (often baseless, and always condescending) criticisms of their financial decisions.

Their criticisms often carry the subtext that poor people are poor because they are wearing a $100 item of clothing or because they own a smartphone - in essence, those criticisms say that these people deserve to be poor and/or poor people don't deserve nice things.

I find such criticisms of poor people to be incredibly classist and devoid of empathy and my post was intended to address that. I don't know how my words could have been read otherwise.

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

#370

Post by petra »

SonicSoul wrote: post #320
petra wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing most of us here might agree on - beyond everything else - the iPhone is a status symbol - carrying some social value. So one interesting question is - how can this be disrupted(by a phone costing half the price) ? Is it even possible ?

good question. by definition status is achieved by something hard to obtain. Either based on price ore availability? I can't even think of any example of the latter. Growing up all the "cool" things were out of my reach entirely based on cost..

That's a good way to look at it. Maybe Google can create a good $300 brand, but sells it only to people with certain qualities/experiences ? For example, if you volunteer - that could be one kind of status?
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