>Among iPhone owners, a striking 91% of respondents indicate that they would prefer Apple to release the iPhone every other year rather than every year. Among respondents not owning the iPhone, this fraction is even larger, at 94%.
I wonder why the 94% care so much about a phone that they do not even intend to own.
I can't help but think that this study simply shows that more people should mind their own damn business.
Perhaps some of those 94% believe Apple shouldn't waste the physical resources to create an iPhone every year. If they used an extra year worth of time and resources on making the phone better, maybe it wouldn't be such an incremental upgrade, use less precious physical resources, and create less waste.
If I felt that an investment had a 2-3 year life before being semi-formally deprecated, I would feel more like buying it. The thing is, that I can't think of consumer objects I routinely buy where the pressure to show I have the "newest" one is so strong. Nobody cares if my kindle is old.
Amongst my colleagues, like me it's a badge of honour to run an old phone. The last nokia standout only ditched it when they turned off 2G. He went with a minimalist phone which could do google maps acknowledging GPS was useful. He does nothing else. On the whole, chosing to run a phone with high MaH battery life and at least some commitment to update is a good choice. Apple actually can conform to this, because the older models are 7 years in, with software support.
Good point. Perhaps I should have qualified to tech. That said, I bet amongst the gamers there is significant pressure over GPU, and which generation of Playstation you're on.
> The thing is, that I can't think of consumer objects I routinely buy where the pressure to show I have the "newest" one is so strong. Nobody cares if my kindle is old.
Honest question: who cares if your iPhone is old? Maybe I'm in a wrong demographic but flashing top new smartphone in front of acquaintances stopped mattering around the time when everyone graduated and got a job (so everyone could buy one and it stopped being "cool").
I tend to agree with your conclusion, but this this was a survey, and people were being asked their opinion. Was there even an "I dont care care" option. How much do they care, and have they ever thought about it before being asked?
Real opinion surveys are hard and you cant infer much from the results.
I mostly just dont see why it’s relevant. What decision is this supposed to inform? Whether or not Apple releases a new phone? Clearly Apple will do what they see fit, which is releasing more often, and if they are wrong Apple will pay the price. And they clearly have not been wrong.
Would that really help? There's a virtually unlimited supply of "stuff" one could desire & buy. There might not be a new iPhone this year, but would you look at that shiny new watch/console/TV/etc.
Either you care about owning status symbols or you don't, I don't think taking one of them off the market would make a difference.
The peer pressures to have an iPhone within a lot of groups are very real and strong. Having a "Blue bubble" is shunned in many circles [1]. It's a sad reality.
A part of it is likely iPhones managed to create a class of their own whereas nobody cares what brand of 65" TV someone has or who designed their 300 m^2 house.
I'm not sure if this is directly relevant since parent was discussing the pressure of owning the latest iPhone, not just an iPhone.
That said, I've read about the "blue bubble" phenomenon and it's truly a bizarre manifestation of consumerism. I'm European and the Android market share is really high over here, so I haven't witnessed it first hand.
The blue bubble thing isn’t about iMessage as much as it is about android messages sucking so hard it affects iOS users. SMS/RCS don’t support large files, (There’s no practical limit with iMessage) and video / images look like garbage. It intentionally corrupts the shit out of gps coordinates. It can’t even make decent audio or video calls. It’s tied to a phone number, and there’s no way to know if the recipient number even supports sms without sending one.
Also, green bubble messages are not e2e encrypted, and their contents are sold en masse to (or simply slurped up by) surveillance organizations.
iMessage has none of those issues. Signal only has a few of those problems. Its bubbles are blue (not by Apple’s doing, but still, blue bubbles, cross platform, and it is not intentionally a royal pain in the ass like android messaging).
Since you are in Europe, you probably don’t use SMS, and are therefore shunning the green bubbles just as much as any iOS user.
My impression was that you could send SMS through iMessage but when it's between iphones it doesn't use old school phone tech at all and just goes through the internet like other web based messaging apps. But only between apple devices of course.
Yes. It auto upgrades to a decent protocol when you are sending to an apple device. You can associate any combination of phone numbers and email addresses with it, so you don’t need a phone number to send iMessage messages.
I thought it was green bubbles which are shunned. In any case, it seems like a good way to get vain and vapid people to self-select their way out of your life. Would you really want to be friends with the sort of people who exclude others for consumer choices like that? Dreadful.
The unhappy feeling caused by "keeping up with the Joneses" in a society rife with "conspicuous consumption" is not the fault of an individual, but rather the result of a complex interaction between personal, social, and environmental factors. For example, in unequal societies, where there is a large gap between the rich and the poor, people tend to have less trust in each other and in the institutions that govern them. Living in a less trusting society is obviously detrimental in ways that are hard to ameliorate for oneself as an individual.
Even counteractive techniques such as mindfulness, or gratitude journaling must first be acquired—and not "for free," either!
You insist, vehemently, that the fault lies with the insecure so, from whom are you trying to deflect blame?
> I wonder why the 94% care so much about a phone that they do not even intend to own.
People around you see if you have the shiniest, most expensive toy or not. It's stupid to care about it — but we're stupid and that's nothing we can really do about it. Comparing yourself with others and caring about social status is something that's built-in very deep in our psyche by evolution. It's irrational to try to ignore or completely conquer something so foundational to our being; the best we can hope for is to channel it to something better.
Of course, HN is full of people on autistic spectrum or adjacent (me included) who may not feel the same emotions or psychological reactions as a neurotypical. But, once again, it's irrational to judge an average human being by yourself in this case.
It's irrational to expect humans to not have any irrational thoughts or inclinations.
That is precisely the point. All is cheap and nice because there isn't a young population to buy it. Otherwise it would turn expensive because of simple supply and demand.
it's still possible to realize those gains by moving there though, there's plenty of for example Indians who move to Japan straight out of uni (Japanese companies go recruit Indian grads with 3 or 5 year contracts). Don't even need to be an established professional to move there.
>how many would it be if we were not providing them with assistance? Do you think they're just going to roll over and capitulate if the US turns off the tap?
Seems like it? What else would they do?
Just look at what's happening, they are going to end up losing anyway despite the amount of money that the West has been giving them.
War sucks. Yes, soldiers are tired. How does that article imply that they are "losing" relative to Russia? Do you think the Russians assaulting Avdiivka right now are having a great time? I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
I have had the (not so novel, I admit) realisation that most intelligent people I know have had zero children, whilst most dumb people I know have had (at least) one. This was funny when it was the plot of a movie, now it's starting to worry me.
The occasional war corrects this imbalance. We're overdue.
The longer I live, the more I recognize that everybody has a role despite any apparent flaws. Take gays-- in a hunter-gatherer society, a clique not burdened by children to protect are free to become scouts or trailblazers; they have mobility. This childless-by-choice stuff is a modern invention and not an option for sexually-active adults otherwise.
We don't all have the same purpose. We're more like ants than we want to admit.
The various map providers are now all about the same level of quality and I chose Google Maps because I preferred the color scheme. With this change, Google Maps lost that advantage.
If only EPP parties were really right-wing. I say this as an actual conservative. EPP parties generally are "our position is whatever the left espoused ten years ago". Which is, basically, a very progressive position.
Traditional European parties have been converging towards the center. That's largely thanks to the EU, which is a centrist project founded on ideas such as social liberalism and pro-market policies. Social democratic parties have also become pretty right-wing by their traditional standards, largely due to Third Way politics that have been dominant since the late 90s.
I have to try three times because it says something went wrong. Then it generates an image that looks nothing like the one I uploaded. And then the next time I try it says I made too many requests. So, it would be cool if it worked I guess.
In 2019, the official Telegram client didn't have chat folders so I was using a Telegram client made by an Iranian dude (Telegram was extremely popular in Iran and Iranian clients were the most feature-rich).
Signal doesn't have a proper backup/migration mechanism yet when adding new devices.... Whatsapp is more complete. Idk, maybe Element too but haven't used it recently
>Not to mention the app is a buggy mess. At least on iphone.
If you think it's buggy on iPhone you have no idea what's going on on Android. The iOS venison is actaully the "polished " one as Signal devs daily drive iPhones.
Have someone call you on Signal. Missed calls galore. Also texts. It just dozez all the time (despite having been configured in Android to not let it sleep) and texts come late and calls get missed.
It doesn't "doze all the time" here, seems like you're blaming Signal when it's your phone's power management software not working as described.
The only people I know that have this kind of issue with Signal are all on Huawei phones, we've configured them and it's worked for a while but Huawei only seem to care about letting Facebook/Whatsapp/Teitter/etc.. run properly.
A bit of it. But it is besides the point: A messenger, that is working reliable and intentionally designed for the masses - does not come with the need, to fiddle with configs, to get basic functionality working.
I do not like Meta, but I never experienced with whatsapp, that someone send a message and this message just vanishes, so the sender thinks he is getting ignored. But exactly this happened way too often with signal.
But it's not fiddling with Signal configs, it's un-breaking the broken power management software phone manufacturers add on top of AOSP. This issue is not specific to Signal and if it were in their power to code around it, they would. Other apps get affected in the same way.
Whatsapp, being so popular, gets whitelisted. It has to work or people would be telling each other "don't buy Samsung!" (not unlike the situation with Huawai since the Play store got removed from their phones).
Messages getting lost entirely is a whole separate matter - so you got the two ticks telling you it'd been delivered, but nothing at the recipient's end? Was this a long time ago? I would stop using it too if I had that problem, I agree.
"Messages getting lost entirely is a whole separate matter - so you got the two ticks telling you it'd been delivered, but nothing at the recipient's end? Was this a long time ago? I would stop using it too if I had that problem, I agree."
This is the matter I am mostly talking about. Everything else is annyance.
As far as I remember, it was mostly only 1 tick, but likely also an instance with 2 ticks (grey) - but no trace ever on the recipent.
It happened often during the peak of new users coming to signal, with the latest whatsapp drama ( I use signal since the beginning), but since then not that I am aware off. But it did erode trust for me and others, so I cannot safely recommend it anymore.
Like the other poster mentionied, you might have missed, that you missed things. It is sadly unreliable for me, too, which is just unacceptable with a messenger.
I wonder why the 94% care so much about a phone that they do not even intend to own.
I can't help but think that this study simply shows that more people should mind their own damn business.