The dichotomy of premium products and the shitworld makes a fun read, but between Shitphone, Premium Shitphone and iPhone, the author skips right over the most worthwile category: price-performance, value, or whatever you want to call it.
Extremes, of course, always make for more interesting writing. Still, let's not forget about the perfectly viable middle ground: Where an $80 Shitphone is a hassle to use and an $800 iPhone seems wasteful, a $300 OnePlus One or Nexus 5 will deliver about the same utility at a bit than half the price. As far as I can tell, this will hold true for almost anything: $10 headphones typically won't fit well or sound good, but at $60, a pair of Shure SE215s sounds just as good as $200 beats. A $10k Kia will teach you to hate your commute, while either a $25k Jetta or a $75k Model S will get you to work comfortably -- one of them will just cost three times as much.
It's an interesting testament to an excess of purchasing power that premium brands like Apple, beats (or large parts of the fashion industry) managed to grow to their current sizes. And it'll be interesting to watch how this whole "good enough computing" plays out.
I have a somewhat different approach. I generally either prefer to get a "shit" version of something or a super-premium version. If the thing is simple and timeless and easy to transport, I opt for the timeless route. If I think I might not keep it for more than a year or two, I usually get the cheap one.
Midrange "luxury" items seem to be barely better quality than the best-cheap-options available, while most of their cost seems to go to marketing (or styling, in the case of clothes/fashion products). They also quickly depreciate.
Super premium items, however, usually retain their value and are significantly more satisfying to hold/use. The place where this has been the _least_ true, in my experience, is with electronics. All electronics depreciate quickly. There is no timeless smart phone.
Incidentally, Kia has been doing a great job lately. I rent a car almost every week, and after comparing the Kia Forte with the Jetta and the Optima with the Passat, I prefer the Kia in both cases. The VW automatic transmissions don't seem to shift very smoothly, and I actually found the trim levels to be comparable and the Kias more fun to drive.
As someone who found a bit of an interest in fountain pens some years ago, I understand and shared your penchant to go for super-premium when it comes to timeless items. I have bought the occasional $500 pen (Graf von Faber Castell and Caran d'Ache have a couple of very beautiful items), but after one of the more expensive pens suffered some scuffs from light use and a friend of mine broke another one's clip, I came to the conclusion that I have a tendency to, as they say, break shit. I enjoy using them. To me, the little marks in the pens' platinum-covered cap don't take away from their sentimental value, but if I were to ever try and sell them, I wouldn't hope to ever get my purchase price back. The same, I believe, holds true for watches. When I noticed I had lost my $30 Cadence in a Metro, I barely scoffed. Since I had liked the design, I had an identical backup at home. Losing a timeless super-premium $10k Omega, on the other hand would've been a more severe problem. The pens, the Rolex watch and many things like them will retain their value just fine -- if you never touch, use, or in any way enjoy them.
My initial comment went in exactly the same direction as yours on midrange "luxury" items, with the possible difference that I would consider an iPhone, the beats earphones or (to a lesser degree) the Tesla as the midrange pseudo-luxury choice. In my opinion, a large part of the retail price of each of those lies in the brand value and in the marketing done by those brands. As I view it, their prices are determined not by their cost or performance, but mostly on what the customers will pay. In my perception, the midrange choice (Shure Earphones, Nexus or -- as others mentioned -- Moto E/G, Jetta) more closely reflects the cost to manufacture the item. Their profit margins are slimmer and, more importantly, more consistent.
As a final point, my apologies to Kia. Being European I tend to stick to public transport, rarely drive, and if so, tend to get cars with a manual gearbox. I was going to go with Dacia (Renault's Low-End Brand, I believe) first, but couldn't tell how well-known they were in the States. I also was under the impression that VW's interior was considered to be of rather high quality while I have read some negative comments on Tesla's.
I've slowly come to the belief that if a product can't survive light use without damage, it's not a quality product, no matter how expensive it is.
This is why I prefer tough soft-touch-plastic ThinkPads to dentable aluminum MacBooks, super-reliable Hondas to repair-prone BMWs, and unbreakable Corelle dinner ware to delicate fine china.
I don't need my belongings to punish me for being a clumsy monkey. A product which silently conforms to the realities of human use is a beautiful, and sometimes rare, thing.
Interesting, I have the same sentiment but the opposite conclusion. The plastic case on my most recent Thinkpad spontaneously cracked around the fan vent. Never dropped, babied it everywhere, no idea how it could have happened. The laptop still works, it just can't be moved anymore.
So I switched to an aluminum laptop. Life's too short to put up with crappy Lenovo plastics.
You can have a nice, semi-premium watch for cheap. Rolex Air Kings are fantastic watches and have a healthy and inexpensive used market. I hate current watch stylings (large, ~40mm+ faces) so my grandfather's Air King from '67 suits me fine for daily wear.
You can do fantastically well for yourself if you have/develop a taste for Soviet watches. A large number of them look great and have as-good or nearly-as-good movements and can be had for $50-150($400 on the extreme outside...). The better ones among these will have service records with them. If you like great watches that get attention while being nearly-throwaway, this is the way to go.
Point being? You either like watches or you don't. There are situations where having (and checking) a watch is appropriate where checking a phone is not. Also maybe I might be somewhere that taking out my $900 phone might get me robbed - a $50 watch is a lot cheaper than that.
The whole point of the discussion was watches as fashion accessory (while still being able to appreciate their engineering).
VW's interior on its SUVs and Passats are fine. On the non GTI Golfs and the Jettas (perhaps excluding the Sportwagen, YMMV), they are remarkable cheap. Just feel about the panels on the interior of the door and the handles.
Yup, pixl97 is correct. I travel for business to cities that are not pedestrian friendly. It's kind of ridiculous when you consider the amount it costs, but it's an expected, reimbursable business expense.
Both are examples where normal pricing and demand doesn't match (normal meaning demand goes down as price increases). It also explains why people don't just buy the cheapest product that meets most of their needs.
This is a really excellent (and funny) article, founded on an excellent premise: The highest-end branded version of a product offers a chance to taste the luxurious future of technology; the shitworld version lets you preview a more practical future — the future most of the global electronics-buying public will actually enjoy.
I bought a 'shitphone' last year after I damaged my main one in a fall, but it was mostly still working and I thought that I would be able to repair it (I wasn't). Some things the new phone does significantly better; the camera is slow but turns in surprisingly good images (in sunlight; there's no flash), the battery life is excellent and it recharges super-fast, it feels a bit more rugged and so forth. As the article says, the big downside is delay - I use Android and the hardware in this thing is really not up to multi-tasking, so now I mainly use the phone for texting, calling, and email, occasionally maps or web searches but only when necessary, sometimes as a music player.
At this point I'm thinking about buying a good phone again, because the downsides are an annoyance if I'm busy and need to depend on it for work stuff; on the other hand, I rather like the fact that I spend a bit less time fiddling with my phone than I used to do, and am more engaged with the world and whoever I'm with. This includes the dog; I'm increasingly struck by how many people go to a dog park and then spend the whole time sitting on a bench hunched over their smartphones. I'm seeing more overweight dogs whose owners take them out as a matter of necessity but don't really exercise them, and then give them extra treats out of a sense of guilt. I love that I can put a computer in my pocket and use it anywhere, but I don't want to go back to being buried in it.
For just a tiny bit more, he could move up to the Moto E/Moto G, which are a lot nicer than the BLU phones I've seen and experienced. The sub-$200 phone market is an amazing quality-for-money price point right now.
My wife and I both have Moto G's and they are amazing value. I couldn't imagine spending the kind of money some people do on smartphones when great options like the Moto G are around.
I recently dropped and broke my smartphone, which, by Iphone standards was probably shit, but it cost 300.00 bucks, which is nice for me. I bought a $40.00 ZTE piece of stinker at Target, and I am a VERY satisfied customer.
I can look up restaurant addresses, read HN, shop for crap on Amazon and REI, play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup while waiting for a haircut, and send all the texts and make all the phone calls I want. If I run it over or fall overboard with it in my pocket I don't care. With the money I saved I bought the shittiest Garmin GPS available for about $100.00, which I can even use without a cell network. Sometimes my friends complain about the sound on my shitty phone, but I don't care.
Plus, I stare at a computer all fucking day, I know all I need to know about programming for at least the next five years of stateworker career, and I would FAR rather read a print book, go for a sailboat ride, have a dinner party, or dig some vegetables than spend another f-ing second computing even with a really nice screen.
Oh -- I write this on a 12 year old macbook running FreeBSD, which I used for my dissertation, from ~2000 lines of Octave matrix code to typing it up in Lyx/ Latex. Works far better than any new Windows piece of crap for actual computing, isn't occupying space in a landfill, and I have money left over to buy rain gear and boots for getting outside.
For what it's worth, I pre-ordered a Samsung Galaxy S2 in 2011, at a time when I decided to join the ranks of the "edgiest" among us (after going through an HTC diamond and a Nokia N900).
Five years later, almost to the day, I'm still sporting my S2; I just haven't had any compelling reason to change it. It does its job now as well as it did back then, and in some cases actually performs better thanks to software updates. The battery outlasts most of my friends' phones even though it was never changed. The phone itself seems to be indestructible: I never protected it (cases, screen protectors, etc.) in 5 years, it has been through just about everything you can imagine and more, yet the only damage is a vague scratch on the screen I can only see in a very awkward angle and a some slightly chipped paint by the ear piece.
I don't know what makes this phone so particular, but for the same reason I wonder more and more what genuinely makes a lot of the new expensive hardware that particular either. In any case, it will be a sad day when I have to part with this phone.
YES, I'm typing this from my uncased, unscreened S2, which has been dropped hard, many times. The thing is indestructible, which is all the more incredible when you consider that it doesn't really look it
I am also a lover of shitpliances. A long-time shitphone user (before Android shitphones it was years-old Sony Ericssons and Nokias), I also buy shitty used laptops, tablets, TVs, sound bars, and... that's it actually, I don't own any other technology. But I always buy the lowest possible priced hardware that will do something I want. I like to think that i'm cheating an industry founded on selling the hapless techno-dweeb on electronic appliances that will lose 80% of their value in two years.
I can remember exactly the moment I realized the ridiculousness of the overvalued tech gadget. Finally armed with enough money to buy my own computer, I remembered how my parents paid $2,000 for a an IBM with a 200MHZ Pentium Pro [w/MMX], 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. I decided I would never value a tech gadget that highly, and would only pay the bare-bones price. (That idea is probably why there literally became a market called the "barebones PC", computers with random commodity parts pieced together by the purchaser, like a made-to-order self-assembled Model T Ford).
My current shitphone is a $75 AT&T Go-phone with 1GB RAM and a dual-core 1.4ghz processor. I refuse to update any apps for fear they might use more RAM or CPU for some improved feature and make the apps less stable than they already are. I enjoy dropping it onto concrete in front of people and watching their gasps and cringes, only to show them how the seemingly plastic screen remains unblemished. I might be a shitphone sadist.
> I remembered how my parents paid $2,000 for a an IBM with a 200MHZ Pentium Pro [w/MMX], 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. I decided I would never value a tech gadget that highly
You are overlooking the fact that that machine was right at a breakpoint where we switched over to heavy commoditization. 64MB of RAM was big and very expensive at that point, 4GB hard drives were only surpassed by 9GB SCSI drives (which were full 5.25" and almost 1.5-2" thick--they would jump out of your hand if you flipped one over due to gyroscopic moment), and the Pentium Pro 200 was a LOT faster than anything short of a high end RISC microprocessor IF you were running Windows NT.
Then everything went haywire. Memory prices crashed, disk drive densities shot through the roof, and processor development underwent massive acceleration. All of these absolutely crashed the price of computers.
Realistically, however, the primary driver of computer performance was NETWORKING performance. Every time your "internet connection" jumped an order of magnitude, we needed better computers. You can see the break points--300 bps, 1200bps, 9.6kbps-14.4kbps, 28kbps-56kbps, 128kbps-512kbps, and 1Mbps-3Mbps. New apps also popped out at each of those points: bbs, email, graphical internet, the web, audio/MP3, and finally video.
At the 1Mbps mark, the telecom companies started dragging their feet about network speeds and computer sales slowed down.
Or, you know, do what Google did with the Moto G: unspectacular but very usable hardware, no crufty software layer above the OS, at a good price point.
The other solution is to buy used phone. Premium phones are outdated so quickly, you can easily find a good deal on swappa or similar websites. I'm on my third smartphone since I left my flip-phone in 2009 and I never paid more than $200.
This is a good idea if you can find a reputable service that will guarantee your money back.
I bought a used Note 3 off of ebay. I got it, popped my SIM card in and worked perfectly. Then one day I couldn't make calls, use data or register at all on the network. Turned out it was on a carrier payment plan and the original owner stopped making payments. So T-Mobile blocked/blacklisted the IMEI number. T-Mobile refused to talk to me about it or even let me pay it off. I sold it on ebay for about $350 - afterwards I realized that for $50 I could have had it "fixed".
And I'm sure I'm not the only one that has been scammed like this. The sad part is that it only scares people away from wanting to do business with honest people like me because of all the idiots out there.
Swappa has a 100% refund if you get burned by a bad ESN. I too bought a premium used phone through Swappa without any issue.
>" If you were to buy a device on Swappa that could not be activated due to a blacklisted ESN then you would be entitled to a refund no matter the seller's stated return policy."
I don't think would have helped me. When I got it - the phone worked perfectly. It wasn't until months later when the guy stopped paying the monthly fee and T-Mobile blacklisted the IMEI number.
Amazon is best place to buy used electronics IMO. I used to sell smartphones on Amazon and eBay. Amazon typically has better condition products and guarantees everything themselves at least 30 days, regardless of who you buy it from.
They don't allow selling blocked or less than good condition phones at all. You can usually get your money back from ebay from a deal like that if you fuck with ebay support for long enought though.
If the phone arrived with a blocked IMEI number - I would agree with you and gotten my money back. However, several months had passed before the IMEI number was blacklisted.
Here's another alternative for the frugal technologist: Get a secondhand phone.
In 2012, I bought a used Nexus One for $30, wiped it clean, and put Cyanogenmod on it. The phone was already two years old when I bought it, and it had scratches all over the place (except, thankfully, the screen itself), but it served me well for another two years.
Recently, the Nexus One finally broke, so I replaced it with a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini. The previous owner had only had it for 6 months, and it was in an impeccable condition (not a single scratch), so I had to pay a hefty $100 for it. Again, I wiped it clean and put Cyanogenmod on it. It feels twice as fast without all the Samsung bloatware and carrier garbage. I fully expect to keep using the Mini for the next two or three years, at which point I'll probably buy another used phone.
Sure, it takes a fair amount of research and luck to find a phone that has been well cared for. And I obviously won't take any chances with the stock ROM, who knows what it might be infected with? But as long as you're careful, and if you buy locally from ordinary people (not professional dealers), you can get last year's mid-range phone for the price of this year's shitphone. Why get a $80 shitphone if you can buy a non-shit phone for $60? People in wealthy countries switch phones a lot more often than what even the cheapest phones are designed to last, especially if said phones are kept encased in lots of fancy fabric, rubber, and plastic.
In addition, since you're no longer a slave of your contract, you can also save a lot on the monthly phone bill. I only pay $8/mo on average, while everyone else in my country seems to be stuck with $40+/mo two-year plans.
Cyanogenmod -- which includes Privacy Guard -- does wonders for old hardware. When apps can't wake the device every minute to ask for location or hammer on background data, suddenly the lowest hardware becomes snappy. The updated graphics drivers help too. It literally added another year of life to both my Galaxy S1 and S3s.
Just picked up the octacore Galaxy Alpha for $350 off-contract. Just like new cars, the premium for brand new on-contract phones rarely pays itself back in productivity.
Well, you might not want to void the warranty on your new expensive gadget.
Which is actually ridiculous, if you think about it. Wiping the stock OS (usually Windows) and installing some other OS on a typical laptop does not void the warranty, and even if it does, nobody will care if you restore the stock OS before taking your laptop in for service. Why should it be any different for phones and tablets?
> Last month my fourth iPhone in six years was, in medical terms, crashing. The screen, which had pulled away from its glue, was behaving strangely. The charging port, no matter how thoroughly I cleaned it, only occasionally took power.
Maybe a solution is to treat your next expensive phone with a modicum of care? My partner and I have each had four iPhones over the same period with one cracked screen, and that's it (and I consider us heavy users). I can't even picture how to make the screen come unglued if I wanted it to...
If I have to go out of my way to wrap my phone in a protective case and treat it with extra care just for it to not fall apart under what I consider normal day to day use, then it is not fit for purpose as far as I'm concerned.
I'm surprised this article didn't mention the sweet spot of affordable-but-still-good phones out there. The Moto G could reasonably be called the flagship for this category: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/26/moto-g-review/
I have a Moto G, it's excellent. Ok the camera isn't fantastic, but it's fine for snaps.
I found myself finally out of an 18 month contract back in 2009 (Palm Treo 750v) and hung onto it for another year eventually biting the bullet and bought outright an unlocked vanilla HTC Desire for around GBP360 in early 2010.
Sadly wear and tear got the better of it in September 2014 and it wasn't behaving very well, but still not bad for a four year plus device that saw quite a bit of action.
After reading favourable reviews of the "G" I picked up a PAYG for GBP99. It's bloody brilliant for the money, it's also at a price point that if I do accidentally lose it, or drop it in the loo, a replacement isn't going to be an eye-watering expense. The only sad thing was that I managed to drop it in a carpark after owning it for only three days and cracked the upper LHS of the screen. My HTC would have just bounced, as it often did. However the "G" still works just fine.
I feel like this is going to get bigger and bigger if the "premium" manufacturers don't get their act together. Premium hardware is nice, but if it is slowed down by bloatware and doesn't get software updates or patches either it has a hard time to justify the price. Replacing a 80$ "shitphone" (I don't like the term) every 2 years is easier to stomach than a 400$+ "premium device".
Not a phone story but...I was in the market for a new portable DAB radio for the kitchen, I also needed one that I could plug my Android into and play podcasts. I'd previously been stung by paying £160 for a "quality" brand (Roberts) only to become less satisfied with it over the years (I'm a wee bit of an audiophile) plus it didn't even have an AUX input. I'd also auditioned Pure and Revo models but couldn't really audibly detect that they were worth the extra money - getting something with an AUX input seems to mean hitting the premium model price ranges.
To cut a long story short I ended up with a "Sandstrom" SDABXRW13 which is PC World (UK)/Dixon's own brand. Ok, it's not a total Shit-Brand but you all know the sort of thing, built-to-a-retail-price but passing itself off as some fancy Scandinavian make, often ending in disappointment after getting it home.
The reality is that it's a well built, fairly decent sounding portable DAB radio and has exactly the same features I needed as an equivalent Pure, Roberts or Sony, which was going to cost me at the time £80-100 more. It doesn't have tone/eq controls but neither did many of the more expensive brands and to be honest it I mostly only listen to spoken word radio and podcasts, that said BBC Radio 6 sounds just fine.
I've had this unit for three months now and would happily recommend over a prestige brand leader.
If one takes a bit of time to choose well, it's possible to buy good quality stuff at almost steal prices. Think Moto E, Acer C720, Nexus 7, Casio F-91, Duralex glassware, etc. None of those qualify as shit-x, yet their prices do.
I bought an Amazon Fire Phone when they were on sale for $199 (and it included a year of Amazon Prime, which I already have paid for for nearly as long as the service has existed). It is basically a shitphone, though a quite high quality one (from a hardware perspective, the software is soundly in the "shitware" category). It has a weird/broken/old version of Android, has the Amazon store instead of Google Play (though Play can be side-loaded), and has some weird and ridiculous features that nobody wants and everybody laughs at when I explain it to them (the 3D stuff and the four cameras on the face to provide the 3D stuff).
But, for effectively $100 I got a quite high end phone. And, it was fun to tinker with it, getting it whipped into proper shape. I may eventually root it and pop Cyanogen or some other ROM onto it, for now, it's a pretty solid phone.
If I hadn't gotten the Fire, I probably would have gotten one of the cheap Chinese imports like the author of this post. I refuse to do a subsidized phone, and $650 for a high end phone seems absurd.
Over the years, I've learned not to buy shitronics.
Not because they have shitty reliability.
I avoid buying shitronics because I run my electronics to the ground.
I'm currently typing this on 9 year old Core 2 Duo Dell that runs plenty fast.
Down in the basement is another Dell about 11 years old that's been running 24/7 for the past 10 years. Unlike my high-end Core 2 Duo Dell, the basement one is a Celeron POS that was a $299 special.
It was slow on day 1 and it is still slow on day 4015, but it keeps chugging along. And every time I use it, I curse myself for not spending a little bit extra for faster machine.
Oh yeah, shitphones. My first smartphone was a shitphone, and after three years of living with a device that was constantly unresponsive, hung itself every other time someone called me (no kidding) and that I had to reset by taking out the battery every time I turned on Wi-Fi because syncing would overwhelm the hardware - after those three years of extreme frustration, I decided to never again be cheap on tools. There are things one shouldn't save money on - a mattress, a work chair and - for me - a smartphone. The constant stress and frustration just isn't worth it.
> Whether you choose the luxury option, the commodity option, or something in between, you are buying future garbage.
I think this is one of the biggest differences between today and when our parents grew up.
When something was made back then and when someone bought it, it was bought with the expectation that this should last. And it did. It probably still works and could probably be used by you if you wanted to use it. Basically decades (or in some case centuries) of durability.
Contrast that with today. If you buy something this year, servicing it next year will be unprofitable compared to throwing it away and buying a new one.
Take a wild guess at which is the eco-sustainable one.
I wonder if or when the pendulum will swing back and we will try to strive for durability, and just how bad things needs to get before we understand that we need to go there.
I don't understand smartphones. I just carry a tablet in backpack, and still use my 10 years old dumbphone for calls and smses. I had company iphone 4 and it was worse phone and worse tablet, and was probably more expansive.
Just tripped over this. $80 a month for a phone contract seems hugely expensive to me (and my Blackberry 9000). UK sim only contracts around £10 to £20 depending on term and usage levels. Not LTE/G4 of course.
The idea that if something isn't Apple, it's shit, is wearing a little thin.
Apple simply doesn't give me what I want in terms of features and freedom. I think their products look boring and ugly. So to me, Apple products are shit.
I also think calling unwanted email "spam" is totally stupid and it shits me to tears. Spam is a product made with meat.
I also think the way Americans (and now sadly, the rest of the world is starting to pick it up) say "I reached out to <x>" is the dumbest thing ever. No, you didn't reach out, you tried to contact. Unless you were close and you reached out to touch them?
Those are 2 things that wear a little thin with me. How in touch with the generally accepted way of the world do I sound?
Extremes, of course, always make for more interesting writing. Still, let's not forget about the perfectly viable middle ground: Where an $80 Shitphone is a hassle to use and an $800 iPhone seems wasteful, a $300 OnePlus One or Nexus 5 will deliver about the same utility at a bit than half the price. As far as I can tell, this will hold true for almost anything: $10 headphones typically won't fit well or sound good, but at $60, a pair of Shure SE215s sounds just as good as $200 beats. A $10k Kia will teach you to hate your commute, while either a $25k Jetta or a $75k Model S will get you to work comfortably -- one of them will just cost three times as much.
It's an interesting testament to an excess of purchasing power that premium brands like Apple, beats (or large parts of the fashion industry) managed to grow to their current sizes. And it'll be interesting to watch how this whole "good enough computing" plays out.