Comment by lawrenceyan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lawrenceyan | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, the cheapest phone you can buy right now from Apple is an iPhone 7 which comes in at a hefty $450. For a large majority of the world's population, this is pretty much completely unaffordable.

People in developing countries have maybe $100 - $200 maximum they can afford to spend on a device, and that's often through a very long time spent saving. Such a purchase is more akin to buying a car for these people. You could see then how having the price be doubled in order to be able to get access to a new Apple device would scream "luxury" in many ways.

That Apple dismisses these criticisms so lightly shows to me, a lack of perspective, that is frankly quite concerning. The world is a lot bigger than just Cupertino or the Bay Area, and it seems like Google has managed to understand this point. I wonder when Apple will too. Perhaps a new CEO is needed? Someone like Sundar who has actually lived through the experience of growing up in a developing country, and truly understands the pain points and thus opportunities that come with it.

Luxury of course is a relative term and in many parts of the world a $450 device would be considered a luxury. I don't think Apple is lightly dismissing the point, however. Apple does not leverage user data in the same way and their profits are driven by sales of goods and services. Federighi implicitly states that there is an amount of private user data utilized by Google in order to subsidize the cost of the phones.

Apple is often compared with Google, but it'd be more appropriate to compare them against Samsung, Huawei, LG, or another phone manufacturer. They produce a limited amount of products that largely serve a higher end market. They produce all their own processors and they don't design low end versions of the chips like Qualcomm do.

Could they afford to design lower end chips and offer low end offerings that could serve a broader base? Perhaps, but I doubt they'd like to dilute their brand image in order to do so.

Google can say privacy shouldn't be a luxury item but until real action is taken on their part to eliminate their own exploitation of user's private data, it holds no value to me.

> exploitation of user's private data

You don't understand privacy. If Apple collects the same information as Google, that is just as bad for your privacy as Google collecting that data and doing something useful with it (e.g., allowing you to search your images by content or providing reasonable spam filtering). Of course, Apple collects more information, so it is actually worse (e.g., banking details for developing apps for your own device and location data for AGPS that cannot be disabled).

There is absolutely no requirement, moral or economic, for Apple to cover every single segment of the market. It is perfectly reasonable for different companies to specialize in different price segments.

Plus firing the CEO because he’s not selling enough products to developing nations is a patently absurd idea.

Hyperbole much? A new CEO because they make devices only for rich people?

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