US salaries are much higher. What looks like a reasonable spending on quality and privacy (especially with an operator offering a loan) when you make $180k, may look senseless display of wealth when you make $90k.

Replace iPhone with something like Vertu.

I'm glad you know every European iPhone owners' financial situation. Good for you.

Also I happen to live part of the year in Europe. And found the price of Apple products to be within 10% of Apple US.

I'm glad you do

The thing is that I have a ton of friends all over EU, UK, and Switzerland, and have an idea of the salaries, mostly in the IT. I'm not speaking from some theoretical assumptions.

I don't need to know the financial situation of the iPhone owners. I need to know the financial situation of the 50% of population, to compare to the 50% penetration rate in the US.

As much as I understand, phone carriers / operators subsidize phones in Europe to a much smaller extent than in the US, too.

So your friends in IT are representative?

They are hold comparable positions in several countries, in Europe and in US.

And that makes them representative of the broader population of all users?

privacy? Don't you mean "money spent in advertising more privacy while at the same time not having it?"

Because it's generally true?

In europe apple stuff costs much more.

It's something that I often hear, but each time I check, the difference is minimal. So I did the comparison again between France and the US, for an iPhone 14 (unlocked, 128 GB) + AppleCare+.

I take the phone unlocked, with AppleCare+, to attempt a normalization across regulations. Default warranty in the US is much weaker than in the EU, but should be the same with AppleCare+. Buying a locked phone is also cheaper in the US, but AFAIK it's not possible to buy a locked phone in France anymore.

US: 978 USD (excluding sales taxes), France: 1198 EUR (TTC, including sales taxes) or 998 EUR (HT, excluding sales taxes), so about 992 USD at current rate. So the iPhone in France costs about 14 USD more, or 1.45% more. That's not "much more" in my book, although it is a little bit more.

I think the common mistake is to compare European prices with sales taxes (20% in France) against US prices without sales taxes... Hint: prices displayed on the Apple store in the US are always displayed without sales taxes, while in the EU prices always include sales taxes (I'm not sure it's true in all 27 member states, but it's definitely true in France).

The difference is in salary, not price. iPhone costs as much in USA as EU in absolute terms, but when that’s 50% of your monthly income, you go buy a cheap (or telecom sponsored) Android. It won’t be a flagship Android but at least there’s an option you can buy that on paper has all the same specs.

Indeed, I would have agreed 200% with the following: "In Europe Apple stuff costs much more, relative to income."

But I've read so many times (on French forums) people argue that Apple is overcharging EU citizens by forgetting to adjust for sales taxes that I defaulted to interpret "In Europe Apple stuff costs much more" that way.

In a way it makes sense, in France what you see is what you get, so the typical French consumer expects the sticker price on the US Apple Store to be the final price. In fact it's the law: in France you have to honor the sticker price, even if it's wrong (unless it's an obvious mistake, but the bar for obvious mistake is quite high).

Well there is a big difference in sales taxes. When I first started regularly going to USA some friend or another would always ask to bring back an iPhone. Because sales tax here is 7% and VAT is 22% back home.

Ah yes, a friend of mine figured it was cheaper to fly from EU to nyc, buy a couple of macbook pro and come back, than to just get them in a shop here.

People want to feel better about themselves despite having an objectively inferior product

It is most definitely not a bad take as I'm literally saying just what you imply: as per my comment, in many social circles that is what I've observed. Which does reveal about my social circles. Which are circles I've come across in several countries throughout Europe, and across a large spread of socio-economic contexts.

You can argue that your experience is different, I'm just providing mine which I've experienced consistently enough to find it worth pointing as a common divergence from what I see in the US.

If people in the EU don’t care about iMessage interoperability, then why is the government so keen on forcing Apple to make iMessage interoperate with other platforms?

https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/24/eu-legislation-to-make-imessa...

And the only stats I could find say that iMessage is used more than WeChat

https://www.androidauthority.com/imessage-big-deal-guide-308...

Could it be that maybe your anecdote is meaningless outside of your bubble?

> If people in the EU don’t care about iMessage interoperability, then why is the government so keen on forcing Apple to make iMessage interoperate with other platforms?

The legislation is aimed at opening up the APIs of all messaging apps/companies which meet their criteria for being a "gatekeeper". Apple simply happens to meet those criteria.

> And the only stats I could find say that iMessage is used more than WeChat

Your article called their data an estimate without giving any insight into how the data was estimated, other than the caveat that it may include users who only used imessage for sms.

> Your article called their data an estimate without giving any insight into how the data was estimated, other than the caveat that it may include users who only used imessage for sms

You mean anecdata without hard facts are meaningless??? You don’t say.

Given you were so keen to call out the ineffectiveness of anecdotes, it's rather ironic for you to be giving out estimates with no real data behind them as somehow superior.

Not to mention, where was the anecdote in your article? There's no anecdote there in a 1.3B estimate, for all I know it's just some random reporter's guess (backed up by who knows what), whereas an anecdote is at least a hard fact, just one with small sample size. If I don't know how the estimate is made then I probably actually prefer the anecdote.