Consumer spending power is decreasing. This is just the start.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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Apple
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When iPhones were selling like crazy they were sub $500. Now they are a grand and don't do anything new. Gee I wonder why.
They only ever where sub $500 with a contract. And this is still true today (at least in my market). But people don’t like spending >$70 dollars a month on a contract
The rate of them getting faster and better was also much higher.
Now people complain that nothing is exciting anymore.
It’s good that people are upgrading less frequently. One could argue Apple is pricing things with this in mind. But maybe there is strong evidence that can’t be part of their planning.
The market is saturated. Everyone has a phone, and only so many will need one next year.
I still have a 12Pro (and had a 6s until is started acting up), and its fine. The camera is kinda trash, but otherwise it’s never had an issue running any app I’ve tried.
I tend to ride with a phone until it dies, and I bet most people are the same way.
I have a 14 pro max. I'm getting the battery replaced in it soon. Probably will be waiting until the 18 pro max or whatever they call it in 2026
Same with my 14 Pro. I‘ll get a new battery this autumn since mine‘s at 84% capacity right now and maybe when I’m at <80% and <2yr they replace it for free (hopes in Spanish)
They doubled rent, food and just about everything in the last two years. Coming off massive layoffs and a two year lockdown that saw most of the service industry without jobs.
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Base model 15 is $1130 here. Base model 14 (last gen) is $1000. Both before tax. At a time when millions are struggling to put food on their tables. And even assuming you could afford a new iPhone, it will be almost indistinguishable from older generations excluding a few software differences. Even the camera output is almost exactly the same among recent generations.
Yeah the (lack of) difference in price between generations is ridiculous. I just bought a 13 after using my 8 for six years.
The only difference between the 13 and 14 was once graphics core. So there was no way I was considering the 14.
But the 15 has USB C, which don’t get me wrong is great, but when you have a ton of lightning cables that will need to be replaced, it doesn’t seem like such a good idea (especially when family members are still using phones with lightning).
I think everyone has been forecast this for a while with inflation. The consumer has been more resilient than expected but I think leave finally reached the point where everyone who wants an iPhone has one, and we’ve ran out of disposable income to upgrade Willy Nilly. Really not much reason to upgrade if you have an 11 or newer
People keep saying the year to year changes are so incremental, I think it’s for that exact reason that people are keeping their phones for longer. It’s a waste to upgrade every year anyway. I’d love to see some data of like trade in age over time, I bet it’s up a lot lately. I’d still be using my xs today if I hadn’t dropped and busted it. Worked totally fine.
Maybe they can finally stop releasing new phones every year. We don’t have yearly game console releases.
I feel like that’s a bad example as consoles tend to be household items rather than individual ones. Regular releases mean that people can choose their upgrade schedule and always have a recently released product available. Good example is cars, manufacturers release a new version of each model every year, but the differences are fairly minor. Then every 5-10 years they do a major revision to the model that’s a significant change. This way most people don’t feel put off when they buy a 2-3 year old model and a revision come out the following year, but a person can buy a new model after 5-10 years and feel like they got a significant upgrade from the previous one.
I mentioned game consoles as an example of consumer electronics that function without having yearly updates. This is largely due to giving game devs a performance tagtet to hit, but it shows you don’t need marginal updates every year. Mobile app software could probably benefit from not having better hardware every year, forcing devs to write better software.
From a software standpoint, iPhones are locked down like gaming consoles, focused on consumption and not general computing devices. Apple controls what software runs on their devices just like Nintendo.
I think yearly car updates are also wasteful and the car industry has adopted a fashion style model where the changes are mostly atheistic and they try to make people’s cars feel outdated/obsolete and for them to buy a new model. Cars are viewed as a status symbol, so this works.
Apple has been applying the same play book as the auto industry, though they can actually obsolete hardware through their software.
On the other hand, console generations often provide a hard cut-off for compatibility. You can’t always use previous gen accessories with a new console, and those accessories are usually only comparable with that console. I can’t play my Wii games on my switch, nor use the controllers and other accessories. This is kind of inherent to consoles in that they’re meant to be a consistent platform that allows developers to maximize performance by knowing that each console is going to be pretty much the same. With iOS though the software evolved from the idea of desktop software that runs on a variety of devices. Developers develop with the idea that their software will be used on devices with differing hardware and performance. It’s a completely different paradigm. With computers, people expect that the one they buy this year will be better than the one available last year, but they also don’t feel the need to buy every revision(aside specific performance heavy use cases), they decide on their own replacement schedule. That’s the paradigm that the iPhone came from, regular iterations, occasional major revisions, and long term support/backwards compatibility with previous models and accessories.