I've purchased flagship Android phones from Samsung/Google for a while. The biggest differentiator for me is the quality of the camera. I've owned budget phones before, and even though I'm not much of a photographer, I find the (relatively) poorer photo quality a big turn-away.

Other smaller reasons include convenience features like wireless charging, a fingerprint reader, water resistance, a nicer screen, and faster Android updates that are available for longer.

Water resistance is easily prioritized if the previous device failed due to water damage -- this was a big factor in my last purchase

Security. My phone is the root of trust for my life. It has my password manager (I never use a PM on a full computer) and is my only truly trusted device.

I wouldn’t trust your Motorola’s timely security updates or hardware trustzone implememtation.

The vast, vast majority of people who buy new phones don't care about security. They buy them because they're the "new shiny thing."

Funny you say that. I'm the exact opposite. I consider my laptop to be much more likely to be secure than my phone.

Most laptop OSes, like Windows, macOS, and Linux, are a decade behind mobile OSes in terms of application sandboxing and also still lagging behind on restricting OS tampering and implementing reliable chains of trust from the system software to the hardware level, e.g. features like secure enclaves.

Unfortunately, those restrictions also make mobile OSes less useful for the sort of technical work that people use "real" OSes for. However, those restrictions make such devices much more compelling roots of trust for our digital lives.

An iOS app can't extract my contacts unless I grant permission, yet an application installed on Ubuntu via `apt` can casually start rummaging around my home directory which I won't know about unless I spend considerable time on mandatory access control profiles, isolation through containerisation or virtualisation, or something equally esoteric for the average user.

I suppose a phone does hold more sensitive information though, like location and mobile payments, making it a more lucrative target.

These desktop OSs don't, however, run a baseband known to be littered with bugs that listens for commands over the EM spectrum amd has low level access to the entire system. Even airplane mode just means it doesn't transmit.

Good point. The lack of visibility into today's blackbox commodity hardware is frightening, such as Intel ME. It's even worse when that hardware is listening to external commands via the EM spectrum and the like, as you point out.

> An iOS app can't extract my contacts unless I grant permission, yet an application installed on Ubuntu via `apt` can casually start rummaging around my home directory which I won't know about unless I spend considerable time on mandatory access control profiles, isolation through containerisation or virtualisation, or something equally esoteric for the average user.

Fwiw, this is becoming increasingly less true on macOS. And the newer Macs also have secure enclaves.

I'm generally not a fan of the trend, as it means more hoops for me to jump through, and I'm not convinced I benefit from this level of security. But, it is much closer to iOS.

Yes, macOS seems to be heading in the right direction (even if it means frustrating legitimate usage patterns at times).

In particular, I like that it kept it simple by either an application being sandboxed with explicit user permissions for certain features, or not being sandboxed at all. Contrast with Linux FlatPaks where even "sandboxed" programs can have a wide range of implicit permissions based on the image configuration, which aren't obvious to end users when running `flatpak install` in the same way that macOS's privacy settings are for each sandboxed macOS app.

I remember some FlatPak applications defaulting to allowing unsandboxed home directory access without prompting me on installation, which seemed to defeat the purpose somewhat. It does block nefarious control flow attacks against programs that declare a strict sandbox, but that doesn't seem to go far enough in my view.

> Most laptop OSes, like Windows, macOS, and Linux, are a decade behind mobile OSes in terms of application sandboxing and also still lagging behind on restricting OS tampering and implementing reliable chains of trust from the system software to the hardware level, e.g. features like secure enclaves.

Desktops/Laptops come with decades worth of software that I do trust. Applying trust at the application level or at a permissions prompt is too late, for the average user it has to be handled by the OS vendor, much like linux distros and apple do. Users mostly just click to allow everything, even most tech savy ones.

The android and possibly iOS sand boxing also does a poor job of protecting against things like user tracking.

The constant availability of a phone is a big incentive to make it the central device.

Why's that? My Moto G5+ bought in January 2018 gets updates of some sort or another every few months.

So who do you trust?

As is the 2013 iPhone 5s. What are the chances that you will still get updates in 5+ years?

how are those updates going to look in January 2020

What's your plan if you lose the phone, or it gets stolen?

You could just as well use pass [1] or something on a USB stick.

[1] https://www.passwordstore.org/

You can't check your email on a USB stick. You still very much need a phone for most uses.

Generally it's the camera which incentives my friends with better phones, more expensive phone = much better camera.

Apart from that, it's also the same argument about why would anyone buy an expensive watch or a branded handbag or expensive clothes? It's to show off.

Some people use their phone for things other than web surfing. Some examples: shooting high quality video. Taking high quality photos. For many people, the high quality phone has taken the place of a camera. The sub-$1000 digital camera can be replaced by iPhone. You can record music using GarageBand. An iPhone can also replace a Zoom recorder in many contexts. You can use an iPhone to measure rooms, plan furniture and even plan how paint will look on your walls with AR. You can create Keynote presentations pretty easily. You can create documents using Pages or update spreadsheets. You can use iPhone as a POS system: when I had a small hotel, we used iPhone to check in guests and take payments. I also occasionally use it to SSH into servers when I need to do something quick and I’m not at my computer. I use it to read books, so the screen quality does make a difference. The screen quality also makes a difference when editing photos.

The Civilizations AR App is pretty incredible and isn’t possible on low quality hardware. The Chalk AR app for live tech support is also not possible on a cheap Motorola. There are also “fun” aspects, like games, and the Dance Reality app that uses AR to teach dance steps. You can use iPhone to launch model rockets, control drones and a bunch of other cool things. Not everyone is going to care about all of this stuff, but for those that do, iPhone is far more than a websurfing, texting device. The criticism around why would anyone “need” so much power in a phone isn’t unlike the old days when nobody “needed” a hard drive or more than 16kb of RAM. Or a color screen. Or anything other than a dot matrix printer. These expensive phones are essentially supercomputers in your pocket; that people choose to use them for the proverbial solitaire isn’t the fault of the tech. It’s like people that use pocket calculators lamenting why anyone would ever need a Cray.

Status. Being part of the cool kids with their airdrop and animojis that the proles can't use.

Is that a factor beyond high school?

Scott Galloway, a marketing professor, and an interesting guy, thing that it is the main factor, even after high school.

It is if you make it a factor. Some do.

it is a factor in high schools?

Well, kids do have silly rivalries and "clubs" based on things like their family's income and how much designer stuff they wear.

It wouldn't be much different in adult life too, but unlike kids, richer / upper middle class people are not forced in the same space for half of their day with people making less (unless they're their subordinates in an office). Often they don't even live in the same areas of a city (or in the same area of the country). So they just signal their superiority over their poorer brethren on social media mostly (that's where expensive branch pics and holiday instagrams and other consumption showcases come from).

Two things for me.

One, as mentioned numerous times here, is the camera. I'm honestly still wanting someone to just release any old smartphone internals that comes with a leading-edge camera receptor and the ability to snap my 35mm lenses to. I'm certain it's not that hard a task.

Two, however, is application development. I generally roll with the latest and greatest smartphone, as well as a handful of various vendors cheap burners, so I can have a clear impression of how my apps work across these devices.

Of course, if I wasn't a dev, I'd still fall back to point one, and still sit here bitching that every new phone release doesn't match my annoyingly specific want/need.

I was in the "$100 phone, cheapest possible carrier" camp for years before getting a Pixel 2. I was using my phone for work and really needed something with clearer reception. It doesn't seem like call quality is really affected much though. I honestly regret the decision. I don't do anything that actually requires my phone to be this quick, and I haven't noticed any change in call quality, at all.

The midrange Moto G released in 2018 is much less responsive than my old iPhone 6s from 2018 that my son “upgraded to” and it will get updates a lot longer.

Normal people have stopped using desktop and laptop computers and replaced them with smartphones (why don't we just call them PocketPC's?) and tablets for a big chunk of the population. I'd imagine HD video viewing and gaming to be a big use of the computational power of the smartphone.

Better camera is a big incentive for many people.

I'd have thought for most people it's an incentive like better car engine, they don't really need it, but they can say "I've got the latest 20Mpx" (when really it's probably the quality of the glass, flash, processing that's most important rather than raw megapixels).

I've been looking at cameras again, I want more control over focus, better ISO, but don't want to pay so much for a better phone because the glass and sensor size is limiting.

Not really - I take most photos of my kids with my smartphone - the quality has been increasing dramatically in the last 5 year and these photos are memories that will last for 50 years. So it’s definitely worth it for me.

i buy refurbished iphones. Admittedly iphones have better build than almost all and are better-lasting overall, i wish i could find a decent alternative. At the price points of current iphones, it is impossible to justify it as an upgrade. At least my region, it is either first-time phone buyers, or people wanting to show off/signal.