A new unlocked iPhone 13 Mini device is $850 in Canada. I can buy an unlocked Android smartphone for under $80 that'll do what I need. Though I splurged and spent just under $200 on my last phone. Something that costs 4x as much as a decent mid-range model that will meet most people's needs is luxury.

Most people do not purchase phones and service plans the way I do (separately - I buy an unlocked device up-front then use it with my preferred carrier). So they probably don't think about it like that. It's just an extra $30 a month on their bill for the lease. That really starts to add up, though.

The 128GB Samsung S20FE is $475 CAD today

Well you’re paying for the Samsung brand I guess. There are plenty of cheap and usable Android phones.

I own a Moto G Stylus 5G (256 GB) from 2021 that I paid $240 USD ($330 CAD) for on Amazon earlier this year.

> A new

After having owned a what was already considered 'old' used iPhone for three years, I finally bought a new iPhone, which I expect to use for the next five years.

FWIW - my 5-year-old "original" SE, which was Apple's cheapest phone when I bought it, finally stopped supporting the new iOS version early this month.

> Is the iPhone se really luxury?

If you combine the SE with the local used market, it can get extremely inexpensive. I'm currently rocking an SEv2 that I got for $150.

I'm not saying that $150 is cheap objectively, but in relation to Android phones - even used ones - it stands up pretty well.

This is especially true since Apple supports phones for so long. If you're cost constrained, you can spread the cost of a phone over more years than a typical Android phone.

But with Android you get much more features for the money. All Android phones are bezelless for instance, even the cheapest budget phone. The SE still rocks the iPhone 8 design from 2017 with all its drawbacks.

Personally I don't use Apple because I have far too many things I can't do on it (mostly due to their restrictions in the app store, like using open PGP keys over NFC). But if I did I'd never consider the SE.

Why is bezelless a “feature” or improvement?

> Why is bezelless a “feature” or improvement?

I mean, it makes the phone smaller for the same screen size. That's an improvement for me.

Not enough for me to drop $$$ on an iPhone-mini, but I'd be happy if Apple put future SEs into an "iPhone 13 mini" body (presumably with a single lens camera).

Because it's optimising the usable surface of the phone of course. The bezels don't serve any purpose other than they were technically necessary during the first years of smartphones.

On a tablet you can use them to hold the device but a smartphone is small enough to grip by the edges only.

And OLED really is a total must-have for me these days.

its the only iphone model with a physical front button. it will be my replacement come december!

> its the only iphone model with a physical front button.

It's definitely a great feature if you wear a mask often. I find I only have trouble with it if my finger is wet.

I wish Apple would bring back the fingerprint scan. Once my iPhone 8 plus bricks they won't sell me a new 8. Face scanning is too dystopian and violating for me, but any iPhone after 8 requires it. I tried buying the SE to resist this practice, but it's designed to be intentionally tiny and inconvenient to force us neo-Luddites into the current corpo-dystopian era

You can also, you know… just use a passcode and not set up FaceID…?

But what’s the problem with FaceID?

If the discussion is around phone for kids, I think a second hand SE is still a great choice. Kids don’t really care about the features that you or I would care about.

The screen size/battery size would probably be larger on a price competitive Android phone then the SE, however I doubt you'd get as fast a processor/as many years of software updates either so it really depends what you prefer. I may be biased though having the SE, think I'll only bother to upgrade it when Apple finally switches to USB-C

The SE is so dang small, and I love the 8 Plus's still having a home button and fingerprint sensor. I feel stuck because I don't want having my face scanned (even if Apple says it's not sent to a centralized auth server, it creeps me out).

Anything that has 87% of the market is by definition mass-market.

Edit: Back in the '90s, PC Magazine had a saying, "the PC you want costs $3,000". This figure was fairly stable despite the improvement in PCs' performance over the decade.

By this standard, and considering that as well as a PC it's a phone, a camera, an atlas and an encyclopedia, a TV and a music player, the iPhone doesn't seem too much like a luxury.

87% of the children*

I wouldn't call Finding Nemo or it's current equivalent mass market even though I have no doubt 87% of children have seen <<insert cultural movie I probably am missing by a generation or two>>.

Why not? A "mass-market" paperback book means unit sales on the order of 100k/year

What level of market penetration would you expect? I would argue that most popular products still have a target vertical.

You don't think finding nemo is mass market?

I would call 'people under 10' to be a targeted market. And it seems Wikipedia agrees:

"The mass market differs from the niche market in that the former focuses on consumers with a wide variety of backgrounds with no identifiable preferences"

"Machrone's Law" as I recall had a $5K price point. And, yes, it held until probably sometime in the 2000s. Yes, PCs were pretty expensive if you consider the PC you "wanted" was probably close to $10K in today's dollars.

It's pretty luxury nowadays. Decent smartphones go for less than half that cost, and good ones can be even cheaper. The accessibility and affordability of high quality mobile computing devices has risen across the board.

But Apple is very much on the upper mid range to high end side of things.

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

Locally? Or is there a reputable place online?

I've bought an used SE 2 from refurbed, but it's not available in the USA. There are competitors which do deliver to the USA, e.g. refurb.me: https://www.refurb.me/refurbished/iphone/iphone-se-2

It's its own entire market. Generally I would suggest looking for bigger companies and ones which have policies to replace batteries if they are below a certain health level.

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

You can walk into a prepaid wireless store and grab a new Android phone for $20.

You ever tried that? It's a horrible experience. I love Android but you definitely need to spend much more to get something out of it. My advice is to get a second hand Samsung flagship - I have S9+, that's a great phone you can get for $200 - but don't go for anything less, you'll be very sorry if you do.

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+ years old and doesn't look good anymore.

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.

No, it's not. Never buy a new $20 phone - it's subsidized by all that tracking and pre-installed shitware and it won't be getting updates soon, if it ever got even one, and the hardware is going to be absolutely terrible too. Buy a second hand one if $20 is all you can spend.

Your Samsung has more tracking and spyware installed you won't be able to uninstall. Never buy a Samsung and expect privacy.

Samsung has unlockable bootloader and good LineageOS support. Unheard of with these $20 phones. And even without flashing, I'd still rather be tracked by Samsung than whatever they put into these $20 ones.

Only some Samsung's have unlockable bootloaders.

Yeah, the flagships do, that's why I'm recommending them.

You don't care about bloatware when your first worry is whether you can end up homeless or malnourishing your kids at the end of the month.

You do because your phone isn't usable because of it. Hard to do work on a phone that barely runs the SMS app.

“ Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. ”

I bought a few of these for testing purposes. Completely unusable.

The average worldwide cost of a smartphone is ~$300.

Android phones can be bought new in box for $50-$170. The iphone SE which is basically last years model starts at $429 and comes without the power bring which allows you to plug into an outlet which costs an additional $18. That is iphones start at a cost more than the majority spend on a phone admittedly worldwide but that isn't what I call all cost points.

The Apple website prices only reflect the top end of the iPhone market. The iPhone SE 2nd generation is still sold new directly from low price/prepaid carriers for under half that price (right now $189 on the Tracfone website for example, probably even cheaper elsewhere). Compare that to new Android phones in the same price range which often are loaded with adware/spyware apps that cannot be uninstalled, and blocked from all security/software updates, the longevity makes an older SE competitive with the cheapest 3rd world country android phones in the long term, and with performance that exceeds even the highest end Android phones because of a better cpu.

> The iphone SE which is basically last years model

The iphone SE is not last year's mode. It's an iPhone 8 body (including camera) with the current CPU. For example, the SEv3 came out this year and has the same CPU as the iPhone 13 which came out at the same time.

Yeah the SE is probably the fastest iphone model there is because the CPU is top notch while the screen resolution is smaller, so rendering is less complex computationally.

I don’t think that any iphone model has trouble with rendering, so it is likely not a bottleneck. Nonetheless, it is an insanely fast phone 2-3 generations ahead of current top android chips.

Is there any point in calculating with worldwide averages? There are people who live on less than a single dollar per day, should we really compare them to first-world citizens who easily spend an order of magnitude more on the way to work?

Is there a reason to allow a tech company to arbitrarily emphasize ostracization and bullying to increase their bottom line?

I know there are common accusations of fan-boyism in both directions but I would hope this community can unite in calling out Apple over their messenger bullshit. Real stakeholders at Apple need to realize how damaging this profit optimization is.

But Apple isn't doing any of that.

They invented a ton of new messaging features that SMS didn't support, and the phone has to make it clear which conversations support those and which don't. So they had blue bubbles replace existing green ones.

Ostracization and bullying is what teens do for a thousand different reasons over a thousand different things. Yes Apple is responsible for creating a walled garden of messaging, just like WhatsApp has over most of the rest of the world, and basically every other rich messaging app is trying to do. It's not like Google Allo was trying to be any less walled garden.

But to say Apple is responsible for ostracization and bullying is to take the notion of responsibility too far. Is Supreme responsible for kids who bully other kids because they aren't wearing Supreme...?

Or they could just open iMessage to android...

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.

If you want to fix teenage rebellion and cliquishness I applaud your efforts. I certainly personally suffered from bullying when I was a teenager over my clothes and haircut and pretty much every other facet of my person so if you can come up with a way for no one to ever endure it again I'd celebrate your achievement. Humanity hasn't managed to impart real empathy on teenagers in thousands of years of existence - we have accounts of rebellious teens from Rome so I assume it's not an easy fix.

So, maybe instead of focusing on bullying we can just focus on punishing companies that profit from bullying.

> So, maybe instead of focusing on bullying we can just focus on punishing companies that profit from bullying.

This is an extreme take. Yes bullying is is a consequence of society. Don’t be lazy and blame someone else for your societies ills. Especially when the solution is simple: encouraging the use of an alternative. No. RCS isn’t the alternative. WhatsApp, Line, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord etc, etc, etc are all mature, are used widely by the rest of the world (where SMS is practically free to use as well). The easier solution, and much cheaper for everyone is to change behaviour. It’s extremely naïve to think that changing the colour of a bubble will stop this sort of bullying.

I don't think adding RCS support is going to instantly solve all the world's ills but Apple is pretty explicit about their reasoning for not supporting RCS: to create a specific and exclusive messenging experience on their phone. This exclusive experience is causing just another thing kids can be assholes about - they are currently and will forever continue to be assholes about a lot of stuff but this particular one is one artificially created by Apple to benefit their profitability. I'm sure in their internal meetings they like to think that exclusivity will only really affect adults and that we're mature enough not to bully each other (which, we mostly are, since the behavior we most bully as adults is bullying itself) but this exclusivity also affects teens that are far less mature. Personally I'd also love it if everyone moved off SMS/RCS in general since it's billed as an extreme luxury by carriers but I don't know if we can make that happen when Messenger comes pre-installed on iOS devices.

I don't assume that fixing a bubble color will fix all bullying but I do stand by your interpretation that I find that changing the color of a bubble will stop all this sort of bullying.

What is more difficult to fix?

Humanity (specifically, teens) or

Apple ( the largest technology company by revenue (totaling US$365.8 billion in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company by market capitalization[0] )

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

Love that you angryly included the source, like the internet is a debate club. You and all the other pitchfork handlers are assuming Apple actually needs to be fixed for this entirely-made-up and self-imposed issue. They don't. It really is that clear.

You mean the behaviour that ancient civilizations already used to complain about? I'd argue changing one UI color would be an easier first step.