Apple

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra 256GB - $1299

Apple 16 Pro Max 256GB - $1199

Google Pixel 9 Pro 256GB - $1199

The only person being represented by this meme is OP.

My current galaxy cost like $200
People paying a grand for a cell phone are suckers for real
Apple devices mostly aren‘t significantly more expensive than their counterparts by other manufacturers.
However, most of those offer cheaper alternatives that Apple doesn’t. While the most expensive Samsung S25 is more expensive than the equivalent iPhone, Samsung also sells models under 100€. That does skew the perception towards Samsung being more affordable.
Which it is, of course, if you don’t care about the extra amenities of more expensive phones.
- Apple's discounting strategy is generally to sell last year's model, sometimes the model before that, with roughly $200 discounts for each year since its release. They sometimes release a lower spec model (the 16e is the current example, prior SE models or even the mini models from previous generations were part of this strategy as well) and that sometimes means the 2-year-old model isn't kept available as long.
  That's where their 5-7 year support window really shines, in that they can just sell older models as discounted models, knowing that the new owner will still get 3-5 years of support.
  The other thing is that the used market for iPhones is pretty robust. I can go buy used phones that are 3 or 4 years old and still get a good 1-4 years of additional support. At least in the U.S., if you told me my budget for a phone was gonna be $300 for the next 2 years, I think I'd probably buy a used iPhone.
  As it currently stands, I'm still on Pixels on a 2 year cycle, but I also know that my "sell used to offset the price of my new phone" strategy also would be much cheaper if I did it with iPhones instead of Pixels.
- You can buy a brand new iPhone 16e starting at $599.
- Apple devices mostly aren‘t significantly more expensive than their counterparts by other manufacturers.
  However, most of those offer cheaper alternatives that Apple doesn’t.
  So, there are no Apple counterparts for what "other manufacturers" make.
- So we’re upset with Apple because they don’t make low budget options?
  Please send a link to a new Samsung under 100€/$.
Galaxies and pixels are half off msrp like 6 months later.
Their 1TB version is $1600 because they get away with charging $400 for $40 worth of storage.
- Is it really 40$ in that form factor?

This logic is outdated. The top of the line iPhones are no more (and sometimes a bit less) than comparable Android flagships.

Their base models come in around high-midrange Android, true. But some of the specs (CPU/camera) still beat out Android phones at their price range. Heck on CPU they often beat more expensive Android phones.

I'm not saying that because I'm a fan of Apple it's just like, it's not just them. I've had something like 9 Android phones and 6 iPhones. Really in the end they aren't that different day-to-day.

Sweet Jesus, why do you buy so many phones?
I bought the first iPhone the week it came out, and I'm at 2 iPhone's, 4 android phones.
You must be the target audience for these companies.
- I'm a techie guy. I like tech. I run my own servers at home. I run a Lemmy instance.
  Trust me I am very aware I absolutely do not NEED a new phone. But if I can get a good deal on a new one and recoup a significant amount by trading/selling the old - I do (after a year or so, usually)
  It's something that interests me. Some people collect knick-knacks and probably spend more than I do on consumer electronics.
My older mid tier iphone was more expensive than my wife's pixel 9 pro bought around the same time. Her phone is better in almost every way, for sure every way that matters. I am counting the days until I can switch back to a device that doesn't suck.
I dont think the iPhone camera is better. In blind tests done by MKBHD, Google pixels consistently win.

Honestly, the only thing I care about when it comes to what other people do regarding phone purchases, is that that they at the very fucking least use their old phone until it breaks and don't just go out and buy a new phone every two years because they want something new and shiny. People who do that low key disgust me.

Wouldn't that effectively end the used phone market, forcing everyone to pay for new?
- If phones were built to last and something you would only buy once every 10ish years, I think we would all be better for it. I also think buying a phone from new would mean something different than it does in today's consumer culture. It would be way cheaper longterm for everybody as well.
  The used phone market only exists because of the current buy and throw away culture we live in.
My upgrade schedule is about 7–8 years. iPhones do “just work” for that long.
- i am withing this from my 2018 Huawei : Hello !
- I tried using and old iPhone. You can't install anything on it. If you go to the app store, it won't tell you which apps are compatible. It'll just download the app, and then show you error.
  Android is better at this, apps generally support old versions for longer, and the play store is better at showing compatible apps.
- It might simply be my my use patterns but in my experience they tend to require a battery replacement in that time. Apple charged so much for the replacements it's often not really worth it unless you get some guy in a strip mall to do it
Seems relevant…. https://imgur.com/ZDDnQDB
That's every iPhone user....
- Yep!
  - post made from my five year old iPhone 11 Pro
- Not really. I know a few iPhone users who have kept their phones for a long time. The most impressive case was a guy who had had the same phone for 11 years and only had to buy a new one because an update fried the old one.

leaves out the part where their old iphone "just stopped working" after a required update.

Mine is 5 years old. Doing just fine.
- Not in a literal sense but apple do tend to cripple old iPhone with their newest software update. I should know i owned an iPhone 12 mini on ios 17. That little bugger stutter everytime i pull down the control centre, scrolling through safari, scrolling through app, delay when pressing keyboard and yes, the battery is above 90% iirc.
  My wife's iphone xr is even worse, granted it has been 7 years but god damn, that thing make my blood boil. Its still on ios 17, i cant imagine how slow it's gonna be on ios 18. Battery is at 82% though but i dont think replacing battery is worth it at the moment. Just waiting for the right moment to upgrade.

They can’t keep getting away with this!!!

Narrator: They kept getting away with it.

So tired of the audience participation in these endless phone wars. Oh you have a smart phone? Dope! They’re cool and useful. Anyway

I like Apple’s os, App Store and processors better than android’s. I like Android’s everything else better than apple’s.
Ultimately you are getting fucked anyway but you get to pick the guy who fucks you.
- Well everyone says, and has said for years, that the best phone would run iOS but with the hardware innovations of Android phones.
  Hell we're on the 7th generation of foldables and Apple still hasn't got one. I get they're not for everyone, and that's fine, but they should have the option.
  If Apple offered an iPad that I could fold up and put in my pocket I might actually consider switching over. I'm not particularly bothered by iOS on a phone but iPad OS on a foldable phone I'm pretty sure that would sound like hotcakes even if it was 3K.
If people were simply pointing out the pros and cons of the various devices, it would be very helpful and useful. I don’t care if you hate Apple, I just want information about the hardware and software and if it’s a good value proposition.

When android isn’t spyware, I’ll consider switching.

While this is a fair criticism of Android you don't exactly have access to check and see if Apple is doing the same thing like you do with Android. You're really just taking Apple at their word and they wont even let you cloud save to anything but their servers and can dig through your photos to find illegal content.
Let me tell you about our lord and saviour GrapheneOS
- Not sure if you’re being sarcastic. If so, hilarious! But, it’s the expected response from an android Lemmy user to reference graphene os.
  I actually bought a pixel and installed graphene on it just to give it a try. It’s not bad, and I can do probably 90% of the things I need on there. There are even some nice apps and features you can’t get on iOS (storage scopes is cool). But, at the end of the day, switching is hard. My biggest gripe is backups suck and fail 100% of the time, also no support for touchless payments. Also, android doesn’t manage battery life that well. Some days it’s fine, but other days it randomly drains to almost zero. At the end of the day, I don’t think the solution is to hack together an OS to work on a company’s hardware that doesn’t really support the mission. I wish the Graphene team would partner with Fairphone or something. Anyway, I’ll probably keep using the Pixel here and there, but I don’t know if I could daily drive it. I did try.
- It only works on pixel devices though right.
Fanboi: “Apple does everything Android does! They just lie about it!”
Apple is no saint, but they have a different business model with different pressures. There’s little incentive for them to commit the same sins Android does.
- What do you think iCloud is for? Do you they are just be nice offering a cloud storage solution, or do you think maybe they get something out of it?
Apple absolutely does spy on their customers. They've just taken this clever approach where they say they don't, and for some bizarre reason everyone just accepts it.
They probably don't spy as much as Google does, but let's face it they're definitely collecting info.

"it just works" is also what my partner says, but we can't videocall through Signal for longer than 1h because her iPhone will overheat and go into temp error mode and shuts down. And even when charging the battery with the official charger it will drain faster than it can charge during a videocall. Apple is far superior for sure xD

I mean, sure. We could all just list anecdotes on why one or the other is superior.
- I agree with your spoiler. But when you look at how Apple works, with there monopoly with their app store and how old phones get mediocre updates while newer phones lack significant improvements, while they do their best to make it exclusive (for example, even though usb C is forced on to them, they have their own version. But also removing the aux plus which sadly is copied by other brands). Samsung does the same, as they joined the fight against right to repair so they are just as evil as Apple imo. Many brands are either from mega corps and push apps onto you and love to exploit their users, or are Chinese brands stealing away customers with too cheap prices while their next line is just as bad as the competition while they hoard your data. It's hard to find a decent brand these days. It's just an ocean of shit companies.

The Iphone is a luxury commodity and like all luxury commodities it marketed for people with little sense and lots of money who are easily separated from the ladder with shiny trinkets. Before the Iphone there was the Rolex and the super-secret clothing designer brands only 1%er yuppies think they know about. Before that people ground up egyptian mummies for medicine/taste and bought expensive jar of nutmeg spice from halfway across the world imported via boat. These kind of people were always going to spend 2000$ on trinkets whether its a 2000$ pocket computer or a 800$ wrist watch is a difference in taste. The real question is why humanity can't shed this consumerist prone archetype what is it about people constantly wanting new shiny things that they don't need and for which the money can go to a better place? Why do modern consumerist not have the ability to tell corporations to fuck off? Why is it that after a quarter century of time to get used to the concept of a computer and an email people tantrum and shriek when their tappy button gets moved 2 inches to the left without knowing how to fix it? Why do we consider this an acceptable baseline for human intelligence and emotional volatility?

And the $2k Galaxy Folds are for discerning consumers?
- No, the 100-200$ Galaxy S mid range android phone with half decent RAM, screen size, actual specs and features that enable practical work, social communication, or entertainment consumption with a reasonable price to lifespan cycle ratio is.
  You know, something you can actually buy outright, calculate approximately how much value you got by how many years it lasted before breaking, and not get stuck into a never-ending cycle of slowly frog-boiling raising contract rates.
  So wheres the brand new retail sold 200$ Iphone budget entry for the plebs to access the IOS ecosystem on the cheap?
  Yeah, I thought so. its called market segregation and Apple knows the exact crowd they made a billion dollar industry pleasing.
  Any phone thats >500$ and doubley so for >1000$ are for the people who spend hundreds of dollars a month on contracts renewing them continuously every two years convinced its somehow a deal and don't think twice about it. Different flavor of luxury good gotta get that tribalism social posturing in after all.
  If you were a true professional in an industry making complete use for videography, audio recording and editing, music production, I could maybe see it.
  But lets be real, thats the statistical outlier for apple users you know exactly what 99% of people do with their phones. Check emails, shit posting on the internet, watch youtube, MAYBE record a quick video or picture without knowing how to manually balance anything or even knowing what an ISO is.
I would argue it is premium, not luxury.
Premium like a flagship Samsung, offering extra features and quality for the buyer, usually for a disproportionately higher price. Luxury is where there is no extra value offered beyond brand recognition, signaling to yourself and the world that your can afford it (like the obscure clothing brands you mention).
Not many luxury phone brands exist, maybe Vertu with gold and diamond set phones. Cars are an easier comparison, premium is e.g. MB, Audi or BMW, while luxury is Bentley, RR or Ferrari.
Rolex is also more of a premium product within the watch market, it is machine made and mass produced to a very high quality level, offering additional value (like better accuracy, less steel corrosion, longer service intervals) compared to other automatic Swiss watches. On the other hand, luxury hand made watches like Patek Philippe or FP Journe are not competing with others by offering better technical parameters, but dominate due to their brand recognition, making rich people beg salespeople to get a chance to buy them.
This of course doesn’t really make a difference beyond marketing, as most people cannot afford a 10k Rolex or a 200k FP Journe either - but they do hold a very different position in their market.
To answer your question, I think most humans are very social, and always seek to stand out with status and personal brand within their group. Capitalism offers the easy way to do this - buy this thing, and show the world what you are worth. It unfortunately works, as it targets our strong primal instincts.

I honestly don't know why smartphones got so powerful and expensive, and why everyone just rolled with it. No one iPhone user needs the hardware that the latest iPhone provides, and I'm sure as hell Apple doesn't even let you push that hardware to its limits. The average Joe just uses an instant messenger app and maybe a few social media apps, and that's it. Who in the world actually needs hardware so powerful and compact on a phone that it is on the verge of experiencing quantum tunneling?

Well, more power efficiency is always better and chips are the opposite of cars. The faster the chip can finish doing its calculations and go back to sleep, the less power it will end up using.

2020 iPhone SE is my favorite phone. It’s the perfect size and power. Apple’s going to have to pry it from my cold dead hands.

I bought that one refurbed for one of my kids. I was definitely impressed. Small, fast, actual iOS version. Where is this magic phone from? Its not like the others.

It might just be the old, but I’m having trouble thinking of the last time there was any meaningful advance in mobile phones at all. Face ID comes to mind.

Not a day goes by where I don’t feel angry that there are no viable, mainstream FLOSS Linux phones. No Android, nothing downstream of Google at all… just Linux and a nice, touch-friendly UI. Until then, I pinch my nose and pick Apple as the lesser of the available evils.

Dude I’m still bitter about Apple killing 3D Touch. It’s like companies research what I like and when they find it that’s the tipping point for killing a feature/flavor/model/etc.
Canonical had a really interesting idea for a Linux phone back in the day but it never launched. There are some Linux phones trying to make that happen but it’s just not likely to see the widespread adoption needed to fund development.
We can’t have nice things.

Last time I went to my cellphone carrier offices to upgrade my hardware, they were already pushing the iPhone 15 or 16, but I went in there and asked for the iPhone 10, managed to get the very last one they had in stock. It cost a fraction of what the latest ones did, does everything I need it to do, and a couple of years later it's still purring like a kitten.

it’s still purring like a kitten.
…should a phone be doing that?
- I mean hey as long as it's not breathing and whistling!

Oh wow! Another super inspired meme hating on a subset of users’ personal preferences! So original, thank you! Haha, apple user and phones bad!

Big “I use arch btw” energy.

I actually think using something because "it just works" is a braindead take. Most things just work, that's literally the bare minimum. Plus most things that "just work" in my experience don't in fact just work.
We are making fun of the choice to buy an overpriced and super restricted phone, like literally I couldn't install ytliteplus on an European iphone in Europe, why because apple needs to give an id to apps for it to install without a PC or Mac server which needs to be connected every 7 days, I think.
- You might be making fun of that, OP is just vomiting up weak, tired memes. As another user already put it, neither iPhone nor Android is that great anymore.

What’s there to innovate, really? That ship has sailed back in the ‘90’s.

Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericksson and a bunch of other companies put out a ton of really neat phones. Tech moved so fast, every six months you’d see new leaps: introducing a color screen, Bluetooth, new ringtone formats, WAP, installable apps, etc.

These days we’ve pretty much settled on boring rectangular slabs. Innovation means yet another camera, a .01 mm thinner phone, a faster screen… none of it really exciting.

We all need phones. And yes, iPhones just work. There’s nothing wrong with buying a thing that just works. I don’t need my toaster to ‘innovate’ either - just to make toast predictably, you know?

The most innovative thing the iPhone has added in years is the LiDAR and like <1% of the users actually use that beyond Face ID.

I use iPhones for myself and the family because they just work. I don’t shell out for the latest models, this as-new iPhone 12 I’m on now works just fine. I use Linux for everything else but my requirements for a phone are totally different to what I need from a PC. I don’t need freedom or the ability to tinker or hack it. I need my phone to operate as a reliable appliance and a mobile wallet, so I appreciate features like Apple wallet and Face ID. Other people’s requirements might differ but I think it is just a case of horses for courses. But don’t get me started on all the advanced features of the iPhone that are hidden so well behind the pretty ui most people will never ever realise they exist..

Lol Apple fans have strong feelings about their tech choices. Defending Apple in social media gets you 5% off your next purchase of nearly the same hardware stretched across different formfactors as "choice"! Never change consumers.

Meme should be targeting apple, not it's users. I get why people like there stuff, but spec wise, they overcharge for the cheapest upgrades and at the same time, pat themselves on the back like they do gods work or something.

As an IT worker, Apple products are fine. Not my bag, but fine. Just different issues than PCs and Android. Apple fanboys, however, are just the worst. One of my bosses once wanted me to tear out and rebuild the entire physical network because he had a problem with Safari on one of his Macs.
And they do so because there are stupid people buying their shit. Pretty simple.
- Being tech support for so many people, an app changing the location of a button to the other side is enough for people to call you. Not everyone is tech savy, and not everyone likes change, apple used to be the leader in the smartphone space, you get used to one thing and you can't get out without spending a lot of time, time people just tend to not always have.
  If all android manufacturers pulled the same stunts as apple, I doubt many would switch to a Linux mobile OS (it's just not there yet), normally you would suck it up and deal with it.
  Don't blame the user, blame the manufacturer
If Apple is shit for setting those prices, then so are their customers for paying them those prices.
- Well yeah, that's pretty obviously the point of this post