The problem is that nowadays even companies that have/had a reputation for high quality are cutting corners to increase their margins.

I'm not sure if quality is objective or subjective, especially when referring to art.

I read this anecdote somewhere:

A visitor to the Louvre in Paris viewed the renowned Mona Lisa and stated loudly: "That painting is nothing special. I am unimpressed." A curator who was standing nearby said: "Sir, the painting is not on trial. You are."

Could have said the same thing about "Starry Night".

Which washing machine did you get? I researched them a bit last year when I needed to buy one (for the first time in my life) and my takeaway was basically that all the "premium" models are crap now too, except perhaps for a few quasi-commercial models (Speed Queen comes up a lot) that are probably more reliable and repairable but also loud and rough on clothing.

I am not sure what point you are trying to make.

I made an example to explain what would happen if consumers had a way to know, for sure, the quality of a product.

I didn't mean for you to take my example, try to find smartphone models that may match and then come back to me saying "your example is wrong because I can't find those models in real life". The whole point of my example was to share an idea, not to sell a smartphone.

> A Motorola Moto G Play is $110 no contract. The cheapest iPhone is $429. It's is not 20% more, it's 4x more.

But this is the market failure.

If you ask a normal person why they should care about having a phone with drivers in the mainline kernel tree, they don't even know what you're asking. But the answer is, because then it can keep running the latest version of stock Android indefinitely, instead of being forced to buy a new phone over and over.

At which point a 20% difference in the hardware price will be relevant, because if you want to keep the phone a long time you'll want the one with 16GB of RAM instead of 4GB -- which is fine because RAM is under $1/GB.

But since the average phone customer doesn't know this, the phone they want isn't even available and their choices are the cheap phone which will be out of support in less than a year or the one that costs four times as much up front and will still be out of support before they otherwise actually need a new phone.

The phones market is completely distorted by several kinds of anti-competitive and purposeful social-engineering forces.

For a start, it's not a given that the Moto G Play has a lower quality than the iPhone. If the market was competitive, there would be comparable alternatives on every dimension, but it isn't, and those can't be compared.

That is not the proposition. For $15/month savings her child will be ostracized at school because of the blue message box. Is it worth it?

Phones have outsized influence on our lives. A phone costs 1/10 as much as a car per month, but we spend more time with them, and most younger people today would rather give up their car than their phone.

Better screen quality will more than pay itself in optics prescriptions later in life. Batter quality photos you take today will stay with you for the remainder of our life, and past it. Longer battery life would mean avoiding a lot of unpleasant situations.

To answer this question properly she would have to use both and then make a judgement, no?

I think this is less common than you would assume. Yes, there is a 'poor tax' on low quality items that are more expensive in the long run, but also people have gotten burned enough times paying more for an item that still turned out to be crap, so it's hard to justify taking the risk on such an investment.

On average, the people I know to have expensive phones and very big TVs are a lot poorer than the people with cheaper phones. The former eat domino's pizzas. There's a lot more psychological effect at play than just price and amount of food in the table.

> Most of the population is limited by cash flow so that extra 20% they get to spend on food today is worth more than the quality of the phone a year from now.

Most of the population in the US has an iPhone. If you were right, they would most definitely have a cheaper phone.

A significant number of people have enough money that they can decide between options that cost less or more. Otherwise we wouldn't have $2000 phones or TVs that range from $500-100.000. If the number of people with sufficient budget to choose between options was so small that we can ignore it in this discussion, no manufacturer would bother with market segmentation.

However, they do bother, so it's wrong to just assume baseline that most people just care about the cheapest option because that's all they can afford and that we shouldn't bother.

Many of us strive to get the best possible deal within a budget which satisfies our preferences and delivers a certain amount of quality. The fact that most of us don't have an unlimited budget makes it all the more important to us and this discussion that manufacturers can skimp on quality in a way that's unrecognisable to 99% of the market until a certain amount of time has passed. This has other consequences than just "it's cheaper but it's shitter and we don't know how much shittier". It allows utter bullshit like "I bought this $200 Xbox controller and the bumper broke after 3 months and I got it replaced twice and now the replacement is broken again after another 2 months". And all we can do is shrug because that's just what modern manufacturing is like. Skimping on everything while setting a price point as high as they can get away with using marketing.

Lots of the population isn't paying up-front for their phone, and the monthly fee on a longer lasting phone would be lower in a competitive market.

It feels like we are not talking about the same thing. I totally agree with you regarding "luxury". Buying a luxury Swiss watch can be somewhere between status signaling or art; you don't need a luxury Swiss watch to get sufficient time precision.

But I was talking about quality: how does one compare two laptops costing respectively 400$ and 800$? It regularly happens to me that friends ask help choosing a laptop. Sometimes they blindly trust me when I say "in your situation, I would buy that". Often though, they're more like "okay but you like computers so of course you would want a 'rolls-royce', but for me I think the cheaper one will be enough". Where actually my opinion was that both are not good enough for me, but the cheaper one is a piece of crap for everybody and the less cheap one is good enough for this particular friend.

The thing is, I can't blame them for not knowing how to compare two laptops. And the one thing they understand is price: they see two laptops that look similar, and one of them is half the price. The assume similar quality and therefore go for the cheaper.

Again, it's not that they don't care about quality, it's that they fail to estimate it.

I'm not sure how you are disagreeing with the comment you are replying to.

> With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands.

So you agree that when people can actually perceive quality, they car about it, right

Didn't you just prove their point / agree with your post? The German car pricing example fits right in the "people can't judge quality adequately and marketing does the rest" narrative:

People buy overpriced cars that are not actually high quality.

or

You/marketing are telling me about how these chinese cars are higher quality and I should by them. While most people have no Idea whether "green engines" are good or bad. I could take your word for it and believe that they are inefficient. But that sounds bogus given that efficiency is a cornerstone of "green".

I understand that you generally agree with me: people care about quality.

> I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use.

In your example, though, what you have done is try multiple models over multiple years, while the use-case hasn't changed one bit. So you have found an example where you could actually test multiple products yourself, and then decide which one you like better.

Many times it's not like that. If you buy a smartphone today, you can't test 4 different models for 2 months and then choose. So you will have to pick one. And in a couple years, when this one is not good enough, you will have to buy a new one. But everything will have evolved: websites will be even bulkier and slower to load, mobile apps will be more Javascript wrappers on top of cross-platform frameworks etc etc that made them faster to write, etc. So the new phone you will buy will not compare to the old one, because it won't live in the same world.

Therefore you end up in the same situation: you need to buy a smartphone, you can test 4 different models for 2 months, and you don't know if the ones that are more expensive are better.

For long time I used to think about crappy ladles and why steel ones in decent shapes not available in US stores. The kind that I had in India would last lifetime. Finally I found these kind of things in webstaurant store. Seems this kind of stuff is readily available in catering/ restaurant supply stores. Things mainstream stores sell is all inspired from Tv, media celebrity cooking etc. This stuff is more fragile but supposedly fancy looking. I now have stuff more practical, reliable and all steel (or at least part that touch food) from catering stores.

Sure, but that's not quite what I meant.

I meant "if you could provably show them". Of course, if I tell you "this one is 20% more expensive but it will last twice as long", you have no reason to trust me. But that's a problem of trust, not a problem of how much you care about quality.

If quality provably means it's cheaper (because it will last twice as long), then it's completely irrational to buy the lower-quality, more expensive one. The whole idea is that people don't have a way to know about the quality for sure in advance, so they can't take the decision based on that.

You would be right if it was possible to estimate the quality of the items.

But it generally is mostly impossible. Of course you can read about the products, you can read reviews, and then you can build some kind of belief around that. "From what I read, and assuming that the company doesn't bankrupt suddenly, and assuming that they won't deploy an update that erases all my data, I believe that this one is better". But that's a belief: you don't know anything about the hardware that is inside (other than a list of a few high-level components you think you understand, maybe) or about the software that is running inside.

Yes, but that's because the cost of evaluating the quality is very high, often infeasibly so.

(Seriously, it's pretty difficult. Read reviews? They can give some idea, but it's rare that they do any rigourous testing, and they can be corrupted. Have a brand or specific model that you like and has a good reputation? How do you know they haven't started to cash in on that by cutting quality but still charging the same prices?)

IMO that is economists trying to argue that the market is working when the market is actually failing.

If people would like to be informed of the tradeoffs but do not have the information the end result is not optimal.

Is it just me or is 5G not an appealing feature? When I had good 4G signal I never felt limited in terms of speed. Now that I have 5G everything’s the same. What more am I going to do on my phone besides watch one 1080p video stream?

> But that assumes if you pay more quality increases as well.

It's just a thought experiment. In this situation, people would probably go for the higher quality, because they would know it's higher quality.

In reality, it's very hard to assess the quality of a product, that's correct. And that's my point: people do care about quality, it's just often very hard to have a good idea about it.

I find it incredible how many times I have to re-explain this. Between those literally trying to find which model of smartphone costs 20% and lasts twice as long and those telling me "there is no point to wonder, because we can't know in advance if it will last twice as long".

Let me restart: the article says that "most people don't care about quality". I disagree, and offer a thought experiment. It is not real, it is just a way to share an idea. "Imagine a world where a person is offered a choice between two smartphones, where one is 20% more expensive but will last twice as long. Imagine that this person confidently knows this (it is impossible in real life, but let's imagine it for the sake of this argument). And obviously, imagine that the person does not have an irrational reason that will completely ruin the experiment, like someone putting a gun on their head and telling them which one to buy. Do you think that this person will say "I will take the one that is obviously worse, because I am completely irrational", or do you think that this person will say "well, the more expensive one is apparently a better deal due to the quality guarantees I know to be true"?

The point that I am trying to make being: quality matters to people. It's not the only thing that matters, and they don't always have a way to know about the actual quality of whatever they buy. But if they could know about the quality, then it would probably be part of the decision process. Therefore it feels wrong to say "most people don't care about quality".

In real life, people don't buy the better quality products, that's a fact. But it does not mean that people don't care about quality.

> I think it is commonly considered that for most metrics iPhone is better

I would debate that.

One thing is that iPhone is one, whereas Android is thousands. It's easier to trust an iPhone than a random Android phone. But there are certainly really good Android phones that are cheaper than iPhones. It's just hard to estimate the quality, again.

I know you are not probably part of this group - but can we stop just comparing Android to iPhones? There are Android Devices which are in a lot of metrics way better than an iPhone and vice versa a lot of iPhones better than a big set of Android devices. But still, depending on different factory like price, ecosystem, habit etc., people go for one or another. It's not 2010, where iOS has been the only (relatively) mature OS.

Really not an Android Fanboy, and had devices from both worlds but this one thing is bugging me out as it is just a blatant product of Apple's "our devices are better because our name is on it" marketing - and it's bugging me out.

>Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end. Because, if this were true, then YouTube creators would not pour an insane amount of effort into the THUMBNAILS of their videos. Marketing talent would not study human psychology and do A/B tests to figure out why certain ads sell products and others don't. ...

>There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .

I think that is the point he was trying to make. Marketers have done all that study to completely destroy the ability of "the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously." Having destroyed the ability to tell shit from shinola, they are now free to sell shit at shinola prices.

> > You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.

> Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end.

It's a bit of a tautology: people don't notice things that are targeted to guide them subconsciously. I don't know if that's the point the author was making; either way, it was kind of weak.

You're confusing marketing of a product (and the quality of the design of the marketing) for design of the product itself. The articles is claiming that most people will not notice, even subconsciously, if, say, a laptop is well designed (say, whether it has a robust body, whether the keyboards clack, whether the function buttons and inputs are placed in usable places).

This is completely orthogonal to whether the marketing campaign for said laptop is well made and hits certain conscious or unconscious buttons to make you want the laptop.

Now, I don't agree with the author, but the reasons are completely different. I would say that differences in design that end users don't notice are not relevant. Any design school that holds that one design is better and another is worse where the end users of those products wouldn't notice the difference is, by definition, a form of snobbery and a bad school of design.

ABBA is one of the most iconic and beloved pop groups in history, whose songs are still enjoyed by a good chunk of the planet, 40+ years since they were first released. I'm not sure why it's baffling that you too could find something to enjoy about them, when so many people clearly have and still do.

Is it ABBA in particular, or do you not like the style in general?

Because there is a difference between quality and preference. You can totally dislike the Mona Lisa, but in its style, it would be very hard to say that it is not high quality painting.

And that brings me to another point that I think goes against the philosophy of the featured article: music is acquired taste, if I can say. We generally don't like music we don't understand. Some styles are easier to get (maybe because the music is just easier, or because it's broadcasted everywhere you go), some are harder. I like a lot of different styles of music (from classical to metal through rap, pop and jazz, etc). But in each of those styles, I did not immediately like everything. Of course there is good and bad quality, that's one thing. But the other axis is what I could understand of the style.

In rap, I started with very melodic songs, and then I started to get the rhythm and flow, and then downright the culture and the meaning of what they would say. I still don't like everything, but vastly more than I used to.

In jazz, I liked big bands and "soft" stuff like this until I started studying jazz. I forced myself to listen to jazz styles I really did not enjoy, up to free jazz. I regularly listened to good quality songs (I had to trust my music professor about the quality, of course) in those styles for a few months. And after a while (and I can't say precisely when it happened), I started enjoying some of those, until I could enjoy songs in all of them. Again, I don't like everything, but by learning and getting used to new styles, I got to enjoy them as well.

Of course, in doing all that effort, I improved my musical expertise. So I am now more critical about quality, which I feel like I compensate by being more open to very different styles. By voluntarily staying ignorant, I doubt the author enjoys all styles of music. So maybe they don't ruin the low-quality music of the style they are used to, but on the other hand they miss the high quality music in all the styles they are not used to :-).

Those women's voices are incredible.

> My life isn't better for experiencing better quality, it's worse for the other 99% of the time.

IMO it is possible (and I believe I have done it with effort) to achieve a high level of appreciation for popular, common, basic, what have you things, while also having a high level of appreciation for high quality things.

I completely agree that being unable to enjoy things is a negative, and if lots of people can enjoy a thing you might be better off working out how to also enjoy it. But you can do both.

Does knowledge of good things necessarily make bad things painful? I have cheap earbuds for listening to podcasts or walking around and listening to music, and then some ok HIFIMAN headphones on some midrange dac/amp. Maybe I’ve been too mobile lately, but I find that I get enough time on the earbuds to provide a frame of reference that lets me really enjoy the headphones. It is a nice little experience once in a while; to put the headphones on and really notice the difference.

It is possible I haven’t gotten far enough into the audiophile “hobby” to achieve miserableness. But, I wonder if it is enough to save yourself by staying grounded in a more reasonable frame of reference.

I remember an article posted here that showed that wine aficionados enjoyed drinking wine less than the average person does.

I have a feeling that the best strategy is to avoid the bottom 10% of any market because that is guaranteed to be garbage. Beyond that it doesn't really matter.

I think it's both. I never switched on 120hz refresh rate on my phone because 60hz never bothered me. I also know, if I switch to 120hz I won't be able to view 60hz phones anymore without it bothering me!

But there's some things where buying higher quality definitely offers a much better experience. Everything from soap dispensers to vacuum machines - higher quality ones will save time, look better, last longer, be easier to maintain, etc. Cheap ones will break, be a hassle to use, etc. As I'm writing this though, maybe this is actually in agreement with your post. Those quality issues are frustrating "for me". And one might assume needing to replace 5 out of 6 soap dispensers after 3mo-2yrs would be universally frustrating for all people. But perhaps that's not the case and people simply aren't bothered by these things.

> now I'm focused on all the schlock-y writing of the latest Marvel movie I'm at with my friends instead of enjoying it

Not enjoying crappy Marvel movies any more is a feature not a bug, it means you're growing as a human being.

The problem being that if you truly enjoy something, you will end up becoming better at noticing quality.

Learning to understand music so that you can show off in society is (IMHO) stupid because you ruin your ability to enjoy "average" music. But if you really enjoy music, you're doomed to improve your understanding of it and start becoming more critical regarding "poor" music, however popular it is.

What is the motivation of emulating an ascetic lifestyle by consuming low quality goods? It sounds like you're doing it to save money rather than reduce total consumption, but for what greater purpose?

No one is hiding their loss of physique with a suit. You can see it in most people’s faces, and the 1990s era suits where one could have hid abdominal fat have long been out of style.

Most people don’t write Amazon reviews. Only picky, whiny, complainey people take the time to write Amazon reviews. Or leave Hackernews comments.

Regardless of whether or not your point is right -- I don't think Amazon reviews are a good yardstick for this. Product reviews are a tiny but noisy minority, who may or may not even act in line with their grievances. (i.e. some people just like to complain) A better metric would be return rates and/or sales figures.

That’s not people having a high bar for quality. That’s Amazon being absolutely flooded with low quality products to the point you can’t find anything of even decent quality.

If by outrageously high you mean standard expectations from a generation ago I'd be more inclined to agree. I expect to get a minimum of 15 years of service out of a major appliance and really they should last indefinitely with repair and maintenance being a viable option. I expect tools to be made well from the correct materials, properly heat treated where applicable, and for them to withstand at least a decade of borderline abuse, generations under nominal household workloads. I expect any item of furniture I purchase to permanently resolve whatever issue that item of furniture resolves. I shouldn't have to replace a bookshelf in my lifetime.

The thing is all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory. Dude says nobody cares about quality, I'd counter with there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it often enough in life to come to expect it.

I would be interested in knowing if any of those people change their behaviour though. What people say is irrelevant. Do they actually buy differently?

If the article was wrong, those reviews wouldn't even exist because people would never assume that the HOODOOVOODOO-brand product that's 1/4th the price of something that's not named by a passphrase generator is any good due to a basic understanding of how the world works.

And Darn Tough would have a monopoly on socks.

People only care about cost. The #1 irrefutable indicator of this is airline ticket prices: if Airline A charges $117 for a ticket and Airline B charges $110 but will also kick you in the nuts and nickel-and-dime you for everything to the point that it actually costs more in the end than Airline A...

...people will choose Airline B every time.

The vast majority of people will search for a flight, sort by price, and buy the cheapest ticket no matter what.

Ooof. Also god I miss n-gate.

The effing Article (TFA)

"the fucking article"

I know I didn't go to the right places but all the pizza I had in NYC was either bad, or bad and expensive. So while there is good pizza there, there's also a ton of bad pizza where I would have rather had <chain pizza> because at least I know what I was gettting.

Now the bagels on the other hand...do bad bagels even exist there?

As someone who lives in the NYC area I feel the same about Dominos. It's different from what I really consider pizza, but sometimes it's exactly what I want and that's totally fine.

I've spent most of my software career in the Medical Devices industry. One point that stands out to me is when a previous employer released an instrument and Marketing focused on its high quality, only to find out that customers (large hospitals and medical labs) didn't care about quality.

Made no sense: it's a medical instrument. Who doesn't care about quality?

Well, digging deeper, they found that the customers simply assumed that by virtue of being FDA approved, pretty much everything had a similar quality level (pro-tip: no!) so us providing them with White Papers attesting to high quality didn't move the needle on their purchase decisions.

Yeah, there's a bar and often it's much lower than you think it is.

The problem is that all of the qualia that can only bee seen and articulated by a professional practitioner aren't necessarily stacked in a heap. It's more of a Jenga tower of mutually reinforcing practices. Maybe some of the blocks lost to cost cutting weren't load bearing, but as each one comes out the structure gets more fragile.

There's the lure towards disruption and cutting the right thing to win big. Everyone already knows that strategy though, and the market is full of different stratifications of disruption - streamers disrupt the networks, creator economy sites disrupt the streamers, short form socials disrupt the creators. Any new thing needs a real reason to exist in that ecosystem beyond just being worse.

> In other words: yes, there's a bar you need to pass, but it's low.

Except in some odd cases like datings apps where this bar is in orbit or has left the solar system entirely - see my other comment for details

I think your last para is spot on. There are dimensions of quality people care about, and dimensions they do not.

Websites are a good example. The article says a designer will notice jank. I usually do not care about the design: I want the content, and I care a but about usability (in a limited way - e.g. things that are hard to find annoy me).

Websites and UIs in general are often made worse by people whose measure of quality is aesthetics rather than usability - there have been multiple HN discussions about articles on this topic.

Different people may care about different ones (e.g. one person might want a high performance car, another a comfortable one).

I found the bit about actors accents amusing. American attempts at British accents are always annoying, and it even happens with British actors in American produced things having weird or wrong accents. It is sloppy but its rarely puts me off something I like otherwise. Dealing with other countries and cultures is often done sloppily. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a good example too to anyone who recognises the language people in one village are speaking which is spoken a very long way (certainly well over a thousand miles) from where it is set.

As for SPAs, I do not think preferring MPAs is an unpopular opinion on HN.

> from the evidence, you need to be a highly skilled photographer with expensive equipment and perfect photos to get responses on those apps

I don't know, I'm not in the market... But if you want to learn what it takes to "score a date", going to a website called "killyourinnerloser" where a guy describes how he has all the sex and threesomes and foursomes and knows how to please all women, posts a bunch of erotic/pornographic material, and literally asks for $1 to change your life is very much like going to an actual porn site to learn what it takes to satisfy a woman.

Not showing your dirty dishes or toilet in the background, and not taking pictures in the dark is common sense. No need for macho photographer to tell you how to sex the ladies.

But let me put your mind at ease further. I needed a chuckle and read the mistakes to avoid, together with his own fine example of nine winning pics. In no particular order:

- Don't wear the same clothes in multiple pics. Proceeds to wear the exact same sweatshirt and gold chain in no less than four pics in different settings, even restaurant and gym because it's his "everywhere" sweatshirt. Then wears the exact same overall outfit in another two pictures. Then the same cap in two pictures.

- Don't be too far away or bad angle. Posts a picture with his back to the camera in which he is ~1-2% of the whole frame.

- No staged or stiff pose and definitely no static posture. Posts three pics with the exact same blank and stiff facial expression and static posture. All but one picture look extremely staged poses.

It has always historically been that significant portion of males don't find a mate and there is a small percentage who get many, just because of the status, hierarchy, etc. So men have always needed to outcompete each other. With so little material in dating apps to compete with, these details will matter so much. Having professional photos also implies a lot of desirable qualities about you, like you had money and wisdom to do that in the first place.

How did Apple "win"? They have always been a fraction of the market share of desktop/laptop computers, and they are only popular on mobile in the US, worldwide Android is dominant with 72% of the market. If you mean money===success, then sure, they have money, but do you compare their money to all the companies making PCs and all the companies making Android phones in the world combined? Apple fans have 1 single company to choose from, but PC/Android fans have hundreds of options - I can get a PC or Android in hundreds of form factors, whatever I need but Apple only sells what Apple makes. Sounds to me like PC/Android fans are the real "winners".

>Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.

This hasn't been a thing for a very long time. I hear about as much about the spinning beach ball of death as I do BSOD. Apple is by no means perfect, or did you forget "you're holding it wrong".

Apple has never "won" in the sense that Windows has always had by far more installed desktops.

Android also by far runs more phones than iOS.

Apple "won" the wealthy Western market, which is all that has ever mattered to them.

It's also good to remember that Macs weren't exactly that stable until Mac OS X.

> Apple won only after windows...

Apple won after Sony dropped the ball on HDD Walkmans and Nokia, Motorola, Palm, and Blackberry failed to reject carrier bloatware.

Macs are a side hustle for Apple, and MS is still the dominant player for desktop computing.

During that 20 years experts dismissed Apple as dying and too risky windows was the smart investment just like VHS.

While I agree with your larger point, I just wanted to point out some inaccuracies

> Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android

FWIW this is only true if you’re not comparing within market segments.

If you stick to the same market segment, then they’re about on par with equivalent Android phones for price. They just don’t have anything in the real budget categories.

> The iPhone especially in America is a unique case

The iPhone market share is relative to the premium phone market share of most locations. Which in turn is relative to the spending power of the populations.

iPhones dominate the premium market share compared to Android. I’m actually curious what the Mac market share is when framed to just “premium devices, and non-gaming”.

I suspect, but cannot backup, that Macs do relatively well if constrained to that market. But most people who have premium computers do so for gaming, and the ones who want budget don’t have a Mac to cater to them.

> The iPhone especially in America is a unique case.

iPhones have a >50% market share in Japan, Canada, and in a few European countries (Danmark, Sweden). The common point I see between all those is that they are high-income countries.

> Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android.

The only honest way of comparing Android to iPhone pricing, in my opinion, is to compare flagships.

The S24 and the Pixel 9 are the exact same price as the iPhone 16. The S24+ is more expensive than the iPhone 16 Pro.

The phones also last a long time, being very durable and getting updates for a quite a while, so you can buy an older refurbished iPhone and save quite a bit of money.

I only just upgraded a year ago from an iPhone 7 I had owned for about 4 years and bought refurbished for under $300 (that still worked fine, I just wanted to start developing mobile apps again and needed something with the newest iOS) to a refurbished iPhone 12 for $250, and it feels plenty modern to me. It still has the latest iOS version on it as well.

It feels like a cheap shot to bring up the mechanical keyboard situation that is close to the hearts of most techies - but sometimes "value" can mean... quality.

Sometimes it's not just about longevity, it's about how the product feels. This is especially true when it comes to our online content and- as adults- we have less time as we have children. Meaning quality is more important than quantity.

I absolutely care about quality and I choose Android.

The fact that different people choose different qualities should surprise nobody.

(Some people are obviously price constrained out of the Apple price bracket, but there are also plenty of people who actively prefer Android)

I don't want to argue the basis of system 1/system 2 as described in [1], because the point I'm taking away is more about whether they interoperate at times of decision making. The point I'm making is system 2 is a far more costly (effortful in the article) mechanism of decision making.

The point I'm making is, as an organism we avoid utilizing higher-effort or higher-cost actions when unnecessary. An untrained lower-cost (IR1 in the article or System 1 in my definition) decision will result in not caring about quality. A trained lower-cost decision will utilize heuristics to bias for higher quality.