And? My android phones last on average 3 years, do everything I need and cost less than €200. The exception is the current Fairphone 3 I am using, which I paid 350€ and I am expecting to use for at least 5 years, possibly 7. How can one justify paying 3x the cost if not just to continue keeping myself tied into Apple?
The hardware on those 300 euro phones are awful. iPhones last longer in both software support and actual usability.
> How can one justify paying 3x the cost if not just to continue keeping myself tied into Apple?
It's not rocket science. The experience you get using an iPhone vs a cheap Android for 5 years is not even close to comparable, and while you do pay a ridiculous premium for an iPhone, there are obvious reasons why someone would want to.
The hardware is just fine. My old Nokia 6 from 2018 can still play Mario Kart just fine.
I hate to see that I am starting to sound like an activist, but I also hate to see how even the supposedly smarter-than-average people in tech lose all sense of perspective when they see shiny overpriced trinkets.
Why should we care if "the experience is not even close to comparable", if it is brought by a trillion dollar corporation who denies people even the most basic rights and fights as dirty as it can to keep its unfair advantages?
(And please notice that the above paragraph also applies to Google and Samsung, so please don't make it sound that I am arguing for team Android here)
My iphone is currently 6 years old, and still getting security updates from Apple. It works as well as it ever did (I spent €60-ish for a battery replacement a year or two ago), and I hope to get at least another year out of it yet.
It cost me about €600, and I also enjoy knowing that I've generated that much less e-waste compared to my prior Android life, where I had to discard phones every 2 or 3 years.
First, let me point to Fairphone which is also providing 7 years minimum of updates, but most importantly, it does not lock me into their OS and I can install anything I want (in the case, MurenaOS).
Second, I'd love to be proven wrong, but I can bet good money that if we look at a distribution of activated iphones per model, we will see that most users probably stay a lot less than 6-7 years.
Third, it's not about iPhone vs Android. It's the fact that we are discussing things like "getting security updates" when in fact we should be asking ourselves "why aren't we free to install whatever system we want on our own device?" I don't really care so much about the fact your phone cost 600 or 6000€, what bugs me to no end is that we are effectively paying trillion-dollar corporations to let them remove our freedoms.
Is that what the majority of people are buying, or are you just pushing down some numbers while forgetting that it does not reflect the reality of the consumer market?
My last two iPhones have been the SE model and I know a number of friends who have one. The previous smaller iPhone SE (2016) was a lovely phone and still getting updates.
What I was responding to was that it makes little sense to talk about "Androids aging out faster" as some kind of valid justification to pay the premium price of iPhones.
If you manage to make do with the cheaper version of iPhones, ok. But your case (and mine) are outliers, and even in that case Apple's products are not better from an ethical/environmental/fair trade point of view.
Are we stuck in a loop here? I'm not arguing about the price of any particular model. I'm arguing that (a) most people buying iPhones are not doing with "longevity" in mind, they are just buying the "most phone they can afford" and trade every 2-3 years and (b) even the ones that are buying iPhones based on "longevity" (i.e, TCO) are ignoring the fact that there are other alternatives with similar characteristics while being better from an ethical standpoint.
Not if you compare with the Fairphone. The Fairphone uses materials that are a lot easier to be recyclable and is supported for as long as Apple devices.
