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87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

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Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#361
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We like to fingerwag at social media companies for knowingly negatively impacting children's mental health and self-esteem, yet Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones. It's one thing to be ostracized by strangers on social media, it's an entirely other thing to be ostracized by your own friends and peers. The latter is tragicall…

This is quite frankly utter bullshit unless there is a lack of parenting going on i.e. you brought your kids up to be judgy assholes. My kids and their friends have a right mix of all sorts of phones. They don't even talk about it. They just work out how to deal with it. Mostly that results in them picking a common platform, usually Discord or Snapchat and using that. This is not a technology issue!

Can't help but notice the irony of how much judgment is in this post

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#362
post #291

Want more data? I've got a campus with roughly 60k unique devices. 50% are iOS. Another 20% are MacOS. Android is 7%.

What are the rest? Windows laptops?

I'm assuming a long tail of "everything else"

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#363
post #2

My two oldest children - 13 and 15 - have loudly proclaimed that having a "green bubble" would be worse than death .

We like to fingerwag at social media companies for knowingly negatively impacting children's mental health and self-esteem, yet Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones. It's one thing to be ostracized by strangers on social media, it's an entirely other thing to be ostracized by your own friends and peers. The latter is tragicall…

Apple phones are cheaper and last longer than Android devices.

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#364
post #2

My two oldest children - 13 and 15 - have loudly proclaimed that having a "green bubble" would be worse than death .

It's worse than that. At our kids' school, they are required to have iPads for their school work. By default then, iMessage becomes pretty much the only game in town for them to message with their friends. If they want a phone that can also then participate in those conversations, iPhone is the only option, it's not even a choice. SMS isn't a thing, if you have any other phone, your friends with iPads only don't even have a phone number to send it to. Something like Discord is really the only other option, but that only seems to have any sort of mind share with kids who are more than just casual gamers.

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get older iPhones for almost free. And they work fully with iMessage

Locally? Or is there a reputable place online?

Best Buy has some: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-pre-owned-iphone-8-64gb-u...

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#366
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you but it's not damaging to Apple (much the opposite) so they'll continue to do it.

That is why I'm specifically advocating for us calling them out on it - that makes it damaging to them.

Here’s a crazy idea. Why not fix the problem at the source? Address the entitled behaviour of teenagers.

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A $20 Android phone is better than nothing when you're already struggling to pay bills and raise children. That's the reality many people face.

No, it's so bad it's better to have nothing for a while, save some money and then buy a better phone. These phones really are so bad. Give it a go. Usually it's a horrible mess of Chinese tracking code, shitware apps you can't uninstall, and it won't be getting any system updates in a year. Buy an older flagship second hand phone for $20, that's going to be much better experience than a new $20 one, even if it's 5+ y…

It is when you need a phone to run apps to do your job or for simple things like banking. Talked to a pest control guy who works for a large company, and he needs a smartphone to do his job. He is quite literally managed through an app, needs it to check-in to work, for time sheets, find out where the next customer lives etc. Someone like that cannot go without a smartphone, requirements like that are leaking into low-level service and retail jobs, now.

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#368
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a "green bubble"?

In iMessage, which seems to be a thing in the USA (I don't know of any other market where it's a dominant messaging system), non-iPhone users participating via SMS appear to iPhone users with a different (green) background color to their message bubbles.

Your own messages appear in a different color, not theirs. At least not on current iOS.

It's so you know that the messages you're sending are going over MMS instead of iMessage, so zero features other than sending plain text to individual recipients will work well, if at all. It's like time traveling back to the late '00s with text-chat-groups inexplicably splintering mid-conversation, adding new participants screwing everything up, and potato-quality photo and video attachments that take forever to download and simply fail a good fraction of the time.

My friend group solved this by switching to WhatsApp. But if we'd all been iPhone users I doubt we'd have bothered, because iMessage is at least as good and, if you use some of the more-advanced features, much better, provided your chats are actually going over iMessage and not MMS.

iMessage is basically exactly the same as having a good messaging app just for iPhones plus a necessarily-shitty MMS one, except you don't have to switch between them because they're combined.

I distinctly recall Google trying to do the exact same thing when I was an Android user, must have been over a decade ago: on a major OS update, they replaced the texting app with some unified MMS/other-messaging-service (who could possibly keep track of them all? May have just been gchat, at the time) app. I had to "downgrade" to the old texting app because the new one was so broken that it was unusable. In particular, it lost messages all the time, or would switch mid-conversation between MMS and other-messaging-protocol, screwing everything up. iMessage is nowhere near that bad, at least, even when in "green bubble" mode.

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because owning an Android means you‘re poor.

I think the common take on the "Apple tax" is a false impression. A sort of knee-jerk reflex when seeing the price tag, without any further thought. Every brand has a premium product segment with premium price tags. The difference is that Apple doesn't have a budget segment with budget price tags.

> The difference is that Apple doesn't have a budget segment with budget price tags.

Right... hence the status signal the GP is referring to, when you own an affordable phone "you're poor"

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two high scoolers are produ members of Android generation and apparently dong give a damn as long as they get to play games and chat on discord and text with girls. I am going to count that as a win against the industrial marketing complex.

You think giving them phones from an Ad company is a win /against/ the marketing industry?

I'd call it a win if you get them into rooting and custom distros like Lineage (which might give them a better overall appreciation of how tech works, encourage them to tinker, etc.)
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