Especially teens and college students
Source: i’m a college student
Once something becomes statusy, is seems pretty rare that it ever stops. You can’t outcompete Apple at being Apple, and to stay exclusive they can just keep prices up.
It genuinely was revolutionary when it came out. I guess they managed to leverage that into being a luxury brand, when no further world-breaking innovations were forthcoming. The only thing those really have to worry about is staying relevant, as opposed to going the way of fine china and monocles.
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This is the real reason. The iphone was the original tablet-like smart phone and it was marketed as a premium offering and as a result has always enjoyed that status.
Android was second to market and a competitor to the iphone. Because every manufacturer wanted to make a tablet-like phone, they copied the iphone’s style and made hundreds of shitty knockoffs over the years that effectively bolstered the iphone’s premium status. Yes there are flagship android phones made by Samsung and LG that cost more than the most expensive iphone - but they are loaded with bloatware and bootlocked so you dont get updates and is held back by garbage so it works like shit in only a few years. So even the premium options are shit. The google pixels are good hardware but they’re made by a company that makes every one of their trillions of pennies by spying on you.
android phones made by Samsung and LG
I don’t. I just use the phone because it works well with my laptop. My previous one was all banged up and scratched, so I wouldn’t really call it a status symbol.
I don’t really care about status though. My friends are a bunch of misfits. If it bothers you that people are using something as a status symbol, perhaps you’re more concerned about status than you realize. I’d love to just advise you to stop caring about that but it’s not that easy. Status seeking is a pretty common, normal behaviour.
Because they’re teens
They bought it specifically for that purpose.
Can’t be any other purpose in my personal opinion. Android is better, to me.
Not a youngster, but I would say because it’s a simple choice. Don’t have to think which brand sporting Android is better and definitely don’t have to worry about what custom ROM to install. Troubleshooting between different models can be a pain. People just want something that works out of the box without having to be an expert.
1 choice (mainly) vs (too) many choices.
I used Android since they first came out and not once did I ever needed to worry about a custom ROM.
Let’s be real and just say that Apple is doing anticompetitive things and not getting in trouble in the US yet.
I can’t think of a single mainstream android phone manufactuer that requires any expertise setting up their phone out of the box (for doing anything an iPhone can do).
You then have the option to install 3rd party software or a custom ROM but that is not required, just a bonus that isn’t available to Apple users.
I mean, don’t you just log into an account these days and it’s all there?
Certainly no more complicated than setting up an iPhone.
they haven’t outgrown being incredibly stupid and some never will.
Because they paid a lot of money for them and they need to convince themselves that it was worth the cost.
I remember a friend of mine whining about how my text bubble was a different color and it “made it weird” to text because of that.
By then I was already super over the whole tribalistic iphone/android bs from people I know when it wasn’t being meme’d on, so I just told her “you can either get over it, or we can stop talking and being friends”
Wouldn’t you know it, the color of a text bubble isn’t enough to end a friendship over.
It’s expensive
If there was another decent mobile phone, the same size as the SE, I would seriously consider it.
ASUS Zenfone 10
Can’t unlock bootloader :(
Otherwise I’d be typing this comment on one right now. It’s the only otherwise-perfect device that I could find earlier this year. Why did they go out of their way to modify AOSP and lock everyone out of their own device…
Oh wow. That’s unfortunate. It’s an enthusiast phone. It’s a requirement.
I have never ever ever encountered a single person who treated their iPhone as a status symbol.
That’s nuts, you’ve never heard anyone tease about green chat bubbles? Never heard the joke “I don’t talk to poor people”? Didn’t see all that stuff blow up extra when the air pods came out?
you definitely have, they probably just didn’t mention it to you specifically
It’s not the phone, it’s your age bracket. You can say the same thing for other stuff like shoes/clothes, cars, etc. It’s peer/societal pressure, FOMO, and other factors that teenagers and young adults feel are important. People care less when they get older. My iphone is a utility device to me, and I’ll keep using it until it dies or security updates stop, instead of upgrading every year.
My daughter wanted an iPhone when she was in high school because her friends played the arcade games together on it. That was the only reason she wanted it.
I see my deGoogled Android device as a higher status symbol than any overpriced stock Apple device.
