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Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

> The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB.

The smallest iPhone sold now is 128 GB. The iPhone 5C, sold in 2015, had 8 GB internal storage with no expansion options. 439 MiB is a full 5% of the total storage capacity of the iPhone 5C, completely ignoring the amount reserved for the OS that's completely unusable to the user.

The logic used here hurts lower-income people and contributes to climate change by encouraging poor use of device resources -> shorter device lifetimes -> more e-waste and wasted energy.

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And even 2 of those 8 GiB were taken up by the OS. So that leaves just 6 GiB. Now we’re already at 7%. That’s valuable storage that you cannot use to fill with holiday pictures.

I had the 8GB iPhone 5C. The OS (iOS 10) actually took up nearly 4GB of that 8GB.

People with 7-year-old phones are not really a target group a company selling luxury stuff is going to bother optimizing for.

United Airlines is not a luxury product.

Flying anywhere, period, is a luxury

Flying in NA, with covid, is a luxury. Europe is a different story.

Edit: why the downvotes? You can get flights for 50 bucks to go to different countries in Europe.

Maybe people don't believe it.

The cheapest flight I can see on SouthWest.com is $60, for a 1 hour journey from Atlanta to South Carolina.

The cheapest flight with Ryanair from Copenhagen is $9, though it doesn't include checked luggage. It's also an hour.

An even cheaper one is Kraków to Eindhoven, 2 hours, $6. There are fewer dates for this price though.

Southwest is not really the equivalent of Ryan. Spirit airlines has plenty of $22.22 flights (for two's-day, I guess), glancing at their page today. This includes e.g. Chicago to Tampa, Texas to NJ, and other flights longer than most European flights.

Thanks, I hadn't heard of Spirit.

They look very much in the style of Ryanair with the garish website. $22 for three hours (Boston-Miami) is priced between the two Ryanair flights, so I expect the "service" is similar.

I'm sure the average distance of a flight within Europe is lower than in the USA, since the USA is a bit empty in the middle and Europe has more water in the way, but routes like Scandinavia to the Mediterranean (Stockholm to Zagreb is 3½ hours and $14), or Britain to eastern Europe (London - Cluj, 3 hours $13) aren't far off, and the budget airlines also have flights to tourist destinations in Egypt, Israel, Jordan etc, which are as long as a US coast-to-coast flight.

I’ve been on a flight between Berlin and London that cost less than an Amtrak return ticket from Davis to Sacramento, and I’ve also been on a multi-day road trip from Davis to Salt Lake City that, while fun, was only a good financial choice due to four people squeezing into a Prius.

While I enjoyed camping and seeing bits of the US that foreigners like me don’t normally see, it’s not entirely clear that the difference between that and flying makes flying the luxury.

In general flying is more expensive in NA because of less competition and bigger distances. That's what I noticed when I moved from Europe to here. Now you have to take expensive tests to fly international both ways. That's why I consider it a luxury.

Downvotes because you seem to think there is something special about flying in Europe? lol. It is a similar size to the US within a reasonable estimation, let alone the whole of NA, which is probably what 3x as big?

I don't know if you're trying to make a point about global living standards (irrelevant) or the non-necessity of air travel (true, but also irrelevant), but the fact is that budget airlines have existed for decades, and are often comparable in price to a bus trip.

Flying is far cheaper than Amtrak.

For a lot of trips, Amtrak is about the same as flying. Looking at a round trip from NYC to Chicago, on the arbitrary dates of March 26 to April 9, Amtrak costs $180 while Kayak shows the cheapest flights at $159. Of course, Amtrak takes much longer (20 hours) but is less hassle, and at that price the flight only lets you take one carry-on while Amtrak lets you bring two checked bags and two carry-ons. Adding checked bags will add $60 for the first and $80 for the second. Amtrak is also better for the environment if that matters to you, and the price difference is about the same as the cost of the carbon offset for the flight.

Overall, choosing Amtrak or flying is perfectly reasonable in different situations. Amtrak could definitely be improved a lot though!

NYC to Chicago probably has a decent customer base to support that price point. For amusement, try Miami/Seattle via Amtrak. It's possible, since I looked up the route [1]. One week transit time one way, at $2,000 (I don't recall if the price was round trip or just one way). And trying to work on the train was fun (too "swishy" to use the computer: http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05.2). Totally not worth it for me. Sadly [2].

[1] For reference, I live near Miami (technically, I live in Boca Raton, but Miami is "close enough" at this scale). The company I work for is based in Seattle. I refuse to fly anymore for a variety of reasons.

[2] Riding in a private rail car really spoiled travel for me: http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05.4 But way out of my pay grade.

I don't think I kept it, but a couple of years ago I made a video of a £1 coin (as thick as two US pennies) balanced in a shallow groove in the table on a long distance train in Denmark. It was about 30km before it fell over.

(But maintaining the track to this quality would be even more expensive if there was as much freight on it as tracks in the USA carry.)

That's somewhat a different definition than the comment I was replying to. There are plenty of people who may want to fly somewhere who aren't going to upgrade their phone to the latest and greatest every two years (which is what the comment above was implying: that since flying is supposedly a 'luxury' item it can be assumed that the customers have the latest and greatest phones).

Flying often enough to justify even installing the app/getting any benefits from it surely does count as luxury flying though?

Ideally an app is sufficient low friction that even a really minor quality of life improvement justifies it.

Not being an American I have no reason to even be a UA customer let alone install the app, and therefore I don’t know if they’ve achieved this or not.

Flying that much in anything less than first class is no where near luxury.

Perhaps not but everyone saying this is what kills accessibility for those who need it. This is the same argument made by companies to not support deaf/blind people.

Requirements are often above average in some dimensions and below average in others.

If we optimize for people who are wealthy, always in high bandwidth areas with new phones, etc etc soon we will have left most people behind.

> a company selling luxury stuff

Leaving people behind is the entire concept of selling luxury stuff though, so I still don't think that the companies will care much.

Why would you ever want to discourage someone from buying what you are selling?

When the cost of selling to such a niche group outweighs the revenue, that’s the premise of this thread.

The assumption here is that a luxury-oriented audience would always want the latest phone. I disagree with that. If I'm rich, I might just not care about upgrading because I have better things to do. Or I like this particular 7 year old phone, so I keep it.

The iPhone is not a luxury product; not in America, anyway.

More than half of American smartphones in 2021 were iPhones. The iPhone is price-comparable to its Android contemporaries. The Android downmarket in the U.S. is a minority by a wide margin.

I don't know why this downvoted. Apple dropped latest iOS support for 5c in 2017.

But 5c is most unloved device so not a good sample. It was released at the same time as 5s that introduced ARMv8 by A7. It was the worst time to release it with old chip.

I'd pick iPhone SE 16GB in 2017 that's still in support.

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