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Comment by sz4kerto | Hacker News Reader

This looks bullshit to me. He says the normal distribution is vanishing, and to prove himself, he brings up some charts which do not look like a normal distribution. Like the first smartphone-related chart:

"You’re looking to buy a new smartphone. What does your demand distribution look like? Is it normally distributed? Absolutely not. It looks like this:" [ non-Gaussian 'curve' ]

Okay, what is a 'demand distribution'? I am pretty sure the market demand for smartphones does not look like the graph he's showing. Etc. etc.

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> This looks bullshit to me

It's obviously bullshit since the guy analyses ZERO data and says the normality is dead. Obligatory facepalm.

And obviously Android smartphones pricing look NOTHING like what he has drawn, there are cheap as well as high end Android devices out there at about every price point.

whole article comes only with 'hunches' and not a single data point researched.

it conveniently ignores many facts and makes up some, like Androids being the cheaper, low quality choice, ignoring there are devices sold for as much as iPhones. one could argue that those are sold in lower volumes, but then that'd be a gaussian distribution

also, of course economics stats are not a good fit for a gaussian. they tend to stabilize around exponential. that's why the price pyramid is a pyramid.

I have to concede that by looking at some data, it seems there is a exponential distribution going on for all price ranges except at the highest end, but that's more a hint of the product price/features space being discontinuous than we being in a post scarcity society where gaussian/exponential distributions suddenly vanish.

but anyway, the fact remains that the data is out there, even for the other field, this on smartphone is but one of the many he didn't research preferring to follow intuition. and human brain is very bad at applying intuition to statistics.

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/tomiahonen-engagewithmobile-w...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uY7kRAl6XfA/URibddfrTqI/AAAAAAAAPL...

>it conveniently ignores many facts and makes up some, like Androids being the cheaper, low quality choice, ignoring there are devices sold for as much as iPhones.

He absolutely does not ignore that fact, in fact he specifically says that the better end of the market is either iOS or high-end Android phones.

Obviously (and all market data point to that), the Android phones that sell more are not the high end units, but the cheapo units that dominate the "free with subscription", "prepaid" etc market.

Pretty sure author is just making stuff up. There's no content to this at all. One has no ground to make such empirical claims without showing any data backing it up.

>I am pretty sure the market demand for smartphones does not look like the graph he's showing. Etc. etc.

And I'm pretty sure it does look like that, judging from all the people I know (most either have a crappy whatever smartphone or a high end iOS/Android model, with the middle ground, which is the main bulk of a normal distribution under-represented).

It also matches all information I've seen about the mobile market, user behavior (e.g. how iOS dominates profits and mobile views while still having a much smaller userbase, etc).

This is what's commonly -- and pejoratively -- referred to in the sciences as "logic without evidence".

> "logic without evidence"

When I was in school we called these people "philosophy majors." ;-)

I know you're saying this in jest, but a good philosopher will account for empirical knowledge in his arguments, when it exists.

I know it's cool to rip on philosophers, but they're incredibly useful to the sciences: they're usually the first ones to point out circular (or otherwise fallacious) reasoning.

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