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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

#221

Post by evook »

blub wrote: post #157
noxToken wrote: post #98

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. 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…

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?

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

#222

Post by antaviana »

simonh wrote: post #146
noxToken wrote: post #98

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. 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…

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…

I still have an iPad 1 and I have the opposite feeling. Many websites kill the browser and I can't install another one. I'm gradually running out of use cases (browsing the web in a comfortable position is my main use case) and the device hardware itself is in perfect shape.

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

#223

Post by skywhopper »

kdamken wrote: post #121
petra wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> no one is forcing people to buy iPhones. It's not that simple. I once heard a lecture from a psychologist researching the effects brands have on teenagers, and she said owning a brand can deeply affect a teenager's self-assurance, create anxieties, etc.

I remember, it's tough to be a teenager. It's a shame they have to go through that. But at the end of the day if you can't afford lunch, you need to reevaluate your priorities. Maybe get a slightly older iPhone, or one of the many cheaper but comparable Androids.

Just because the school provides free lunch to everyone does not mean the family cannot afford lunch. At some point it becomes cheaper to just give everyone lunch than to deal with the hassle of deciding which kid owes $1.55 and which doesn't. In fact, providing free lunch to all children in public school is an extremely cheap way of marginally reducing kids' awareness of who's poor and who isn't.

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

#224

Post by masklinn »

croon wrote: post #214
masklinn wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Apple's slides are contextual and exist as support for the presentation. Nah, can't be it, context is not a thing.

There's not much a context can change with a sentence like "ultimate pc replacement"... The word "ultimate" doesn't leave anything up to interpretation.

Of course there is: the context of a use case or population.

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

#225

Post by XorNot »

There's a study I want to see done: take a bunch of people, dress them at a whole bunch of different overall "looks". Put them in different contexts holding several different smartphones of varying prices.

Then, bring in the subject group: and ask a question - how much do you think the phone is worth? How wealthy do you think the person is?

My hypothesis: people have no idea what phone's cost at an average viewing distance (say 3m+).

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

#226

Post by logfromblammo »

masklinn wrote: post #19
jMyles wrote: post #11

In addition to the point the author makes about the benefits of modularity, this strikes me as environmentally tone-deaf as well. Do we just expect devices to enter the waste stream every 5 years now? Can't we do better?

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.

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

#227

Post by cat-dev-null »

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…

Absolutely true... as another anecdotal example, one of my mechanics in his 20's is also an Uber driver and has a brand new iPhone 6s Plus. Also, the prevalence of gold-collar workers splurging on old (and increasingly expensive to maintain) Lexus, Acuras, BMWs, Mercedes, etc.

Contrast this with folks whom have wealth and do everything possible to look fashionably broke (or at least "if you've got it, hide it"): torn jeans, Urban Outfitter, etc.

People tend to project the opposite of their insecurities, and in so doing, reveal them, consciously or not. Peter Thiel describes a number of bad pitches whereby founders describe how big they're unlikely to be, whereas projects with actual traction tend to feign smallness.

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

#228

Post by asveikau »

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…

> What percentage of those 600 million five-year-old PCs do you really think are being thoughtfully maintained by modders?

I read the article and did not get this "modder" subtext into my head anywhere. There is simply none of that there. He is talking about regular people.

There is one small blurb about parts being replaceable. So are parts in cars. Not everybody who goes to a mechanic to have a part replaced is a "modder". When my 70-something parents, not techies, have issues with their PC they take it to a local shop and they replace a bad disk or whatever.

Maybe you just throw out entire machines when they break but I think you underestimate the extent to which other people, yes regular people, try to avoid that if they can.

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

#229

Post by rhodysurf »

matwood wrote: post #169
tdkl wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't easily download ZIP, unzip it, open some text file, edit it, send it via Mail. Probably I can do it with right apps, but it would require much more clicks or taps. > Now things I could theoretically do but probably can't, because of walled garden: using Terminal to embrace full Unix power, downloading files with BitTorrent, using BitCoin. Probably possible with Jailbreaking, I'm not sure. Also I'm not sure…

Android tablets were simply not very good. I had a N7 and it was okay for the money, but suffered all sorts of quality issues. A couple updates of Android and it takes minutes to start. The battery life also always stunk. I have a couple Samsung tablets in the office for testing and they always felt cheap compared to the iPads. I'm sure there are great Android tablets out there, but I have not found them. Speaking of…

I have an old Nexus 10 I use casually for watching videos, browsing reddit etc. Its battery usually lasts like 2 weeks without use which isn't tooooo terrible. iPads are still better though.

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

#230

Post by lfowles »

ido wrote: post #161
ethbro wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The K12 public school (I'm assuming Title 1 from the free lunches) comment struck especially close to home. A few years ago, in helping my mother get ready for a new year of kindergarten teaching at a similar school, she asked if I could do anything about the computers (slow, unreliable, etc etc). ... In ~2013, the best processor of the four machine lot was a 2.8ghz P4. With 2GB of RAM. It had obviously been cobbled…

Surely that pentium 4 has no trouble showing youtube videos?

Single core is a lot worse than I remembered. I had booted up my wife's college desktop with a P4 in it. Pretty unusable experience, I eventually gave up on trying to reinstall Windows before giving it away.
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