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With a $1k Price, Apple’s iPhone Crosses a Threshold

nytimes.com

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Re: With a $1k Price, Apple’s iPhone Crosses a Threshold

#201

Post by stephengillie »

alkonaut wrote: post #189

A lot of people just get the best iphone every 24 months (e.g. rich people, or people who have a generous smartphone policy at work). Having a model that gets another couple of hundred bucks from those people is pretty clever I think. This is basically the S-class phone (To make a car analogy, because that's what we do). The S-class Mercedes costs twice as much as the "Normal" E-class, and each time they launch a new…

This makes the S-class sound like the Nightly branch of a repo, and the E-class sound like the Stable branch of the same repo.

Re: With a $1k Price, Apple’s iPhone Crosses a Threshold

#202

Post by jacquesm »

Razengan wrote: post #150
jacquesm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, guess what, my elderly Nokia actually has a browser, no whatsapp but then again I wouldn't use that even if my phone supported it.

How well can you access HN on it?

Works like a charm, better than most other sites (it uses an older version of Opera mini).

Re: With a $1k Price, Apple’s iPhone Crosses a Threshold

#203

Post by disiplus »

saagarjha wrote: post #130
disiplus wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im still rocking my nexus6 because i dont see a reason to upgrade. before that i was rocking note line from samsung. the only thing that im missing in comparasion with current phones is camera.

Nexus 6 isn’t even 3 years old. Many people keep phones that long.

that was not the point, the point was that the phones crossed some threshold in performance/features where cheap phones are good enough or flagships from 3 years ago, that you do not get that much more from current flagship vs older ones/cheap phone in comparison to some years ago

Re: With a $1k Price, Apple’s iPhone Crosses a Threshold

#204

Post by monsieurbanana »

varjag wrote: post #138
Symbiote wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was said before fancier soft drinks were sold, I assume. For example, some bars round here sell this cola: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentimans_Curiosity_Cola

But is is really… unaffordable to anyone but the richest?

Nop

http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/tesco-price-comparison/Soft_D...

Re: With a $1k Price, Apple’s iPhone Crosses a Threshold

#205

Post by yladiz »

erikb wrote: post #182
otalp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eric Schmidt has said he uses an iPhone. Elon Musk uses an iPhone 7. Mark Zuckerburg uses a MacBook Air. Travis Kalnick uses an iPhone. Most people who I know that work as engineers at Google and Facebook in the US use iPhones. But sure, they are weak and stupid and you are enlightened. The iPhone 7 which released last year is more powerful than the Galaxy S8. Android phones lag embarrassingly behind in terms of CPU…

A) You don't know what an engineer is, obviously. So your examples had exactly zero impact. lol. B) The Galaxy S4 with Android 2.2 is more powerful than the iPhone 7. C) There are two reasons. Both may apply to you, though. Reality is really hard to accept, I know. D) Macbooks are really good. That doesn't give any additional points to the iPhone, though. I use one myself and am happy with it. It is well designed and…

A) I am an engineer, and at my previous company almost every engineer (9/10) had an iPhone. You should also know better than to insinuate that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or Eric Schmidt aren't engineers, considering the companies they've created.

B) Citation needed.

C) What are the two reasons, specifically?

The biggest argument I hear about using Android is that it's customizable, but I would argue that 99% of people, engineers or not, wouldn't customize their phone enough to matter. I would much rather get an iPhone because, even disregarding or accepting the customizability argument, iPhones are less intrusive on your life (I don't want Google to know where I am at all times or know my phone habits), and get updates and work years after they are released. Those two objective reasons alone are enough to warrant me buying an iPhone.

Re: With a $1k Price, Apple’s iPhone Crosses a Threshold

#206

Post by jdietrich »

dannysu wrote: post #18

Nobody looks at a top of the line PC with the best graphics card(s) and say it's crossing a threshold. Everybody understands it's for a certain demographic. According to rumors, they're still going to have various models and price points. Also, iPhones are extremely economical because no other phones receive OS updates for as long. My iPhone 6, which cost $749 at the time, is coming up to 3 years old. It's still flaw…

Diminishing returns kick in at a remarkably low price point, especially outside the US.

$250 gets you a Xiaomi Mi A1 - a phone with a 1080p display, a full metal body, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of flash, a fast 8-core processor and guaranteed software updates directly from Google.

http://www.mi.com/in/mi-a1/

Is a $750 iPhone really three times better than that phone? Is it even 5% better? If I were an Apple shareholder, I'd be giving some serious thought to Apple's future in the growing middle-income economies. Apple are clearly going gangbusters right now, but I'm highly sceptical about their continued relevance.

Re: With a $1k Price, Apple’s iPhone Crosses a Threshold

#208

Post by johnpowell »

alkonaut wrote: post #177
devwastaken wrote: post #90

After recently doing a bit of research into a new smartphone, I begun to understand why people buy Iphones, even if they're really really expensive. Firstly, you can explain it away financially with monthly payments, like any phone through a provider, but the biggest pain point I had is proven reliability. Take any popular Android phone, and you'll see a history of unsolved hardware problems from the manufacturer, su…

> proven reliability This. I buy iPhones because I know that every released version will be bought by several tens of millions. I don't want a smartphone that only a couple of million bought. If something is wrong with it I don't want to find a few unhappy souls on some forum complaining about the same thing, and a manufacturer that's already pushing ten new models. The "Just works" feature is worth so much to people…

And also when you have 100K broken screens you have 100K of all the other parts that are cheap. I had to replace the lightning port on my iPhone and I called around for a few minutes and bought one locally for 5 bucks I replaced myself. That gets harder when you have 100s of random phones that are slightly different.

Re: With a $1k Price, Apple’s iPhone Crosses a Threshold

#209

Post by [deleted] »

bambax wrote: post #167
sho wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> competition is such that you can get an excellent product [..] for $1,000 The really interesting part is that for ~$1000 you get the best product available at any price . That's the magic of economies of scale in consumer markets, especially technology. It's so incredibly expensive and largely fruitless to step out of the economy of scale, that practically speaking no-one does it. I don't have a yacht like Paul All…

I wonder what phone Bill Gates uses nowadays!?! He said many times he's very loyal to MS but they have all but stopped making phones, so every choice left is a bad one...

[deleted]

Re: With a $1k Price, Apple’s iPhone Crosses a Threshold

#210

Post by alkonaut »

stephengillie wrote: post #201
alkonaut wrote: post #189

A lot of people just get the best iphone every 24 months (e.g. rich people, or people who have a generous smartphone policy at work). Having a model that gets another couple of hundred bucks from those people is pretty clever I think. This is basically the S-class phone (To make a car analogy, because that's what we do). The S-class Mercedes costs twice as much as the "Normal" E-class, and each time they launch a new…

This makes the S-class sound like the Nightly branch of a repo, and the E-class sound like the Stable branch of the same repo.

In a way it is (there are new features). But the difference is that nightly is for people who accept that something might be broken. In our car analogy MB had to spend one gazillion dollars making sure the features on nightly (S-class) are as stable as you'd expect from the battle tested version. Apple will have to do the same thing. Even though the oled screens and facial recognition is new tech, their $1k-paying customers aren't happy if it doesn't just work perfectly anyway.
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