Hah, I'm the opposite. Despite having pretty great transit here, my needs don't quite line up with the transit network, and so some times are far longer than they are by car, to the point of 20min drive vs 1.5-2hr transit. Given that, I got a car... and now prefer it whenever possible.
If I want to engage my brain at all I'll listen to a podcast or something, but often those half hour periods of relative disengagement are very nice breaks to have.
That said, I do choose 10 minutes of walking over 2 minutes of driving in anything but a torrential downpour, or 2 minutes of walking over an extra 30 seconds hunting a closer parking spot. Maybe it just all comes down to not wanting to deal with (potentially unpleasant) people.
If it takes 1.5 hours longer by public transport than by car that means you do not have good public transport. Maybe good compared to surrounding areas but still bad.
I’ve considered buying an expensive car with advanced stop-and-go traffic self-driving mode, but it’s more effective to live next to the train station.
Eh. Having the car self-stop is overrated in my experience. It's really hard to trust it, and not particularly difficult to drive stop-and-go yourself, so long as you accept that you can't rush it.
Adaptive cruise control for fast but varying speeds is great, however - it makes the spacing much better, which makes things more relaxing. It also reduces the active brain load to 'what lane do I need, what's coming up in the next mile, and do I need to be preparing to stop/exit', rather than needing to worry about the car in front of you so much. For me at least, it also makes things like lane changes more deliberate, so instead of "need to change and keep speed" it's something more like "I'll get there when it's safe, and change lanes if it's really clear", which is a much better mindset.
+1 for the adaptive cruise control in fast but varying speed traffic. The variant that my Hyundai has is also really pleasant for stop-and-go traffic, too. As the space shrinks below the minimal set, it'll basically progressively slow down all the way to the point of coasting for quite a while before it finally comes to a full stop (if the traffic hasn't started going yet). A small thing, but since cruise control only disengages if it comes to a complete stop, it in effect makes for a really pleasant stop-and-go commute as it very rarely has to come to a complete stop and disengage along the way. Also has the secondary effect of drastically improving my gas mileage vs. when I manually drive the same commute.
My previous experience with adaptive cruise control with another manufacturer wasn't nearly as polished, so I didn't think much of it when I bought the car. But it quickly became one of my favorite features!
I bought an old $5000 truck, which I know I can find parts for easily. It's got 200k miles on it so far, and I expect to put another 200k on it (assuming I will eventually need to spend ~3k on a refurbished engine).
Unfortunately an old truck is one of the least safe vehicles you can drive. But as far as miles per dollar nothing beats a common $5000 vehicle, that's for sure.
The answer is similar with current computer market. Most of people in the world still choose the cheaper PC, even Mac is more beautiful, solid and fancy.
Component quality, build quality, data security and privacy and length of support/updates.
No matter how much money I pay for an Android phone, I have to fight with it to stop my data being harvested by everything from the very OS up. Sure, I can get decent quality cameras and build quality on Android phones but I’m either paying a stack of money for the likes of a Samsung or I’m paying for something from some sketchy Chinese brand.
I don’t know if any android phone manufacturer has a hardware security implementation as high quality as Apple’s and even if there were, I’m not sure how many of the manufacturers I’d actually trust to build it properly, let alone have the OS use it properly.
I’ve also got far more consistent battery life out of my iPhone X than I have out of my previous Android phones.
Am I paying a premium? Yep. Is it a premium I’m happy to pay because I actually get what I want and my data is so far, more secure than on any Android device: yep.
Anecdata: I was going to upgrade my iPhone this year, until I saw the new prices and decided I could wait one more year.
I should have been an easy sale. After a bad experience with Android, I have no desire to go back. Budget isn't an issue. But if Apple is going to price phones like laptops, I'm going to upgrade as slowly as I upgrade my laptop. (Which given how long it took them to get more than 16GB of RAM, I've gotten used to doing pretty slowly.)
Precisely the same here, minus android experience – been with Apple since the original iPhone. Money is really no object so I ordered the iPhone X the moment they became available, but the XS really doesn't seem to offer anything new at all. Even now, comparing the models I only see some minor camera changes and an A12 chip over A11. I don't even know what that means. All I know is this phone is crazy good, and it'll have to take some crazy innovation coming out of Apple to get me to upgrade. I fee the same about my MBP frankly. Crazy good hardware, I'll stick with them for sure, but I have no need for anything new because it's pretty much the same as the old.
The only thing that tempted me was the camera improvements. Which aren't so much camera hardware as them greatly improving their photo processing via specialized computing hardware, as I understand it. Still, I take a lot of photos, and everything about this change looks fantastic.
Honestly, Apple's consistent approach of "new phone design with number-bump" one year then "same design with incremental improvements and an S" next year means that outside of unusual cases buying a new iPhone every year is silly. X to XS is underwhelming, but 7 to XS (or XR) is quite compelling.
Given which... unless Apple does something outright worrying, I expect I'll buy whatever they put out this Autumn. Get the fancy new camera features, and more of a notable increase everywhere.
That is indeed the trend. iPhones have in recent years been so good in every way that the need to upgrade year-on-year is reduced. With iOS 12 even a 6S feels snappy with a new battery. This trend of a slower replacement cycle has been going on a while, and that is precisely why Apple is raising prices. With slower sales that's the only way to keep revenue growing. And it's working too, iPhone sales met expectations everywhere in the last quarter except China. This isn't an "Apple is failing" story, it's a "Apple misjudged the China slowdown" story
The price is often reduced by your carrier or obscured by no interest payments included in your cell bill.
And those $300 phones don't have a mind-blowing camera, but the latest gen flagships phones finally do. That, plus the fact that phones become obsolete much more slowly now, makes those $1k phones a worthwhile investment to me.
Maybe not $300 but I can get a sony xperia xz2 compact for 3000 NOK ($345ish). Sony makes the cameras in many other phones including iphone.
I have the larger version, but my wife has this and it takes excellent photos.
And in the case of iPhone, the software takes advantage of custom-made, powerful, performant, and yet efficient chips that would make snapping photos take forever on older or non-specialised chips.
In what way does it seem that Apple is failing at that? Are you saying iPhone sales have just completely slumped? That's not what the data is saying.
Apple and other phone makers set the benchmark years ago, people don't seem too interested in going back. Even when they're buying non-Apple phones, they're buying other companies' flagships: Samsung, LG, Huawei, Xiaomi. Those phones are no slouches either.
The physical focal length of a phone lens is about 3 to 4.5mm. There's not a lot of light-physics you cam do in that much space. Even a cheap point-and-shoot fixed-lens camera will be superior and will cost much less than the phone upgrade increment.
Can't speak for other countries but in India, people buy iphones only as a status symbol. They don't really care about privacy or excellent hardware or Apple ecosystem.
Oh, you've gone and personally asked every single one of them, have you?
What a ludicrous generalization. Not only do I personally know Indians who own iPhones and Macbooks for exactly the same reason I do - we like them better - but you could make the same specious argument about anything, anywhere.
And really, does merely owning some sort of iPhone really confer status anywhere anymore, if it ever did? I haven't noticed anyone besides high-schoolers caring at all about whatever brand of phone someone happens to prefer for a decade. Time for that old trope to lay down and die.
>And really, does merely owning some sort of iPhone really confer status anywhere anymore, if it ever did?
No, but owning a newer one impresses those easily impressed. It says to others that you can afford it. The Internet, at the least, is rife with memes about Android users being "cheap". Gifts of iPhones are often also highly valued over Androids as gifts.
The same sort of person impressed by expensive handbags and highstreet designer clothing in everyday situations is the same sort of person impressed by iPhones and sport cars in cities. I don't mean to pass any judgement when I say that, but I find the notion that people simply don't think "but I'll look poor if I use that" (perhaps unjustifiably, perhaps unconsciously) to be simply absurd. The vast quantity and desire for such show off products would show you wrong.
The truth is that few people (and I know that this might sound unbelievable to a HN reader) simply don't care very much about a phone's functionality beyond availability of apps (which is almost at parity level between Android and iPhone), performance (the minimum accepted being met by almost all popular phones) and integration with other tech (which seems to matter less now that people have moved from using iTunes to Spotify, YouTube and Netflix).
The look and high price are absolutely reasons why someone might prefer to buy and iPhone. It may not confer status to you but it seems to for a lot of others.
despite all the advertising, it may surprise you to learn that it's actually quite rare for people to buy expensive clothes. i looked it up one time. i think it said less than 1% of the jeans sold in the US cost more than 50$
Off topic, but I think jeans are a great example of a product where more money leads to a better product, especially for a well informed consumer. Japanese Selvage Denim[0] (starting at ~$80)[1] uses higher quality denim, is woven tighter, comes unstretched/untreated so that the fabric better forms to the wearer's unique body shape, and often uses natural dyes which fade slower.
In my experience they last longer, feel more comfortable, hold a better shape, keep a better color.
True, but like most things, there's the law of diminishing returns. You'll extract most value out at your $100 price point (or even lower), and yet there are fads for Japanese denim costing a few times that. Same deal with audio etc.
Thats an even better example of mindless consumerism. At least an expensive phone actually has slightly better features. A tshirt is a tshirt, if it feels good and looks good thats the only meaningful statistics. The expensive ones don't last any longer than the cheap ones in my experience and its purely to show off that you have an expensive brand name shirt.
There's more to an item, especially one like a piece of clothing which involves design, than its utility value.
For a t-shirt, these things jump immediately to mind that may increase its cost:
- A limited batch
- A particular cut
- A particular print
- Supporting a clothing brand / designer you have a connection with
Why judge someone so harshly because they value some other aspect of the item differently than you? There's something incredibly ugly about being confident in your ignorance and casting judgement on other people.
I don't question that the super expensive phones are better than the cheap ones but they are better in ways that are so insignificant to the average person. I got a nexus 5x a few years ago for about $250 and it does everything modern phones do. Yes I have slightly less pixels in my selfie and my screen is still rectangle shaped but is that really worth the extra $800? I suspect its simply a fashion/trend thing pushed mostly by successful marketing telling people that what was amazing 2 years ago is now useless junk and you need to buy a new phone.
This idea that anyone who isn't buying some cheap Android phone is doing it for fashion/trend reasons is ridiculous, insulting and condescending.
The fact is that I care about my privacy and security and only Apple seems to take it seriously. They also support their devices for years so I look at it like its an investment. That is easily worth the extra $10 or $20 a month I pay for my mobile phone plan.
This isn't an iOS vs. Android thing. Plenty of people would be happy with an SE 2, or even a 8S (a proper iPhone 9) that retains the home button and/or brings back the earphone jack. This drive for more pixels, more cameras, less buttons, and thinner size- it's hitting diminishing returns unrelated to privacy or security.
Well most people do drive Corollas and use mid-tier GPUs and buy cheap clothes and all those similar things.
And we're seeing this on the mobile market as well, especially in lower income places like China and India - the 300$ phones these days can do pretty much everything what an iPhone does. With a bit less pixels, slightly worse camera and less words like "Magical!" in the marketing pitch.
So it's getting really hard for people to throw away several months of their savings to get a marginally better product with an Apple logo on it. And you can see this in sales - people go for Huaweis and Xiaomis in Chinese market in droves. Even in Europe, Huawei is gaining a massive piece of market due to their cheap and good offerings.
Nexus 5X is a bad example. I got one two years ago and it was a piece of shit out of the box. No longer supported so I had to trade it in (work phone).
I paid $849 for an iPhone 6s 128GB in 2015. Not only is it still getting OS updates over 3 years later, according to benchmarks, it is faster than any Android Phone in single core performance that was released in 2018 - including the flagship Galaxy S9.
Since the 2013 iPhone 5s is still getting updates, I suspect that the 6s will still get updates at least through 2020.
But right now, you can get an iPhone 7 for $449. Again, if history is any guide, it should get OS updates through 2021.
The reason people want iPhones is the branding/marketing.
Where I live iPhone is a status symbol. People buy them because they want to show off that they can afford it rather than because there is some special functionality they use. To me iPhone is like Rolex Watch most people who own them probably don't need them and could make do with something much cheaper.
edit: Good example my coWorker told me about her 14 year old daughter begging her for an iPhone. It's the "cool" brand people want. When I was that age I remember Nokia 3210 was the phone everyone wanted. When you have that sort of luxury appeal you can charge more for the product and people will pay.
Well in most industrial nations, the iPhone has 30%+ market share, in the US it hovers around 50%. Nothing with that type of market share is a “status symbol”.
I've been buying/using iPhones since 2009. The last iPhone I bought was a 7+. Right after that I had sensed that Apple is messing around with us on the CPU thing, and it finally came out that they did. I now have a Honor X8, I am super content about this, it cost me 229 pounds, takes 2 SIM cards and a 128GB SD card.
I can also have a firewall NoRoot Firewall), more granular privacy controls, I can root and and replace my hosts file, and some other nifty security/privacy things for paranoids like me.
Is it as polished as an iPhone? No
Does it cover all my needs fully (and them some)? Yes
Did I pay 1/6 of the price? Yes (trust me I can affort any smartphone)
Do I think Apple is milking it and offers nothing new? HELL YES
I am happy that their stock is getting slapped, Apple put themselves in that position.
As for the Chinese economy, at some point many countries will reduce imports from China for a variety of reasons, and the slowing dowin is inevitable. Apple messed it up on many domains. Now they are paying for it.
> Apple is messing around with us on the CPU thing
Are you referring to modulating the power usage to avoid random shutdowns? If so, I don't understand why people have viewed that as a nefarious scheme. Seems completely reasonable to me. The newer user-visible stats on battery health and power usage are also a good idea, but don't change the physics involved, you still need to modulate power usage to match what is available or shut down.
They lost me the moment they kept it a secret and they practically monetized on this.
I would gladly pay for a new (£50-£70) battery every 2 years to keep my phone up and running. It is the lack of transparency that made me angry. I do have the technical skills/knowledge to understand the reasons. I also have the critical thinking to (imho) dismiss their BS answer that they force me to spend £1000 instead of £50. And this is where they killed my 'loyalty' to their products.
Every other manufacturer of battery powered devices, including laptops, does CPU throttling based on battery degradation, and doesn't mention anything about it. It sounds like you were just looking for an excuse to jump ship.
I don't buy the Marketing lingo. I like the touch & feel. I am one of those people who don't feel "special" or "good for myself" because I have a £1000 phone. I am happy/content because a 'machine' adds value to my life. My phone helps me listen to my podcasts, and helps me navigate when I travel. My Nutribullet helps me make great Paleo smoothies.
I am sure that I am not 100% immune to marketing, but I like to prefer the function over the plush.
Luxury is for other people. I prefer F.I.R.E instead :)
I do understand that Marketing creates artificial needs, and I want to believe that I avoid it :)
while 8X it's great deal it has extremely mediocre baskets compared to iPhone, heck even Xiaomi Mi A2 for like 160€ has better camera
and no you can't root Huawei phones without unlocking bootloader, not unless you are willing to part with significant fee to shady third party for something which was provided for free by Huawei
