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Comment by Certhas | Hacker News Reader

You are (wilfully?) missing the point that the paragraph about cases is making. Many people (most in my bubble) use cases. As consumers the device that we want isn't being built, and we resort to a subpar substitute. Why is something that soany people so obviously want not being built? Why is there no "slightly more clunky and no glass on the back" 'caseless' option? My thesis is because markets don't optimize for what we want, but for what is easy to sell us.

As for other decisions you don't get to make: One obvious example is the safety requirements for all your electronic devices. You can not decide to sell/buy unsafe devices.

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> Why is something that soany people so obviously want not being built? Why is there no "slightly more clunky and no glass on the back" 'caseless' option?

Let’s try this another way.

Pretend your a phone company, and pretend that 70% of people use cases. And pretend 50% of those are zealots about cases and are offended at even the suggestion that they might ever go caseless. I think it’s less than that, but whatever.

So you’ve got three choices!

1. Build totally different phones for case and caseless. Everything from development to tooling to distribution is totally separate.

2. Focus on one market or the other, but not both

3. Ship a phone that works great caseless, and cases that can be attached for people who want bulkier phones.

Now, even if you personally hate the idea of a caseless phone, I hope you can work through why it is more economically and environmentally efficient to make cases an add-on.

I’m sorry the market isn’t serving your needs. I’m less sympathetic with anyone who insists their particular niche is actually the silent majority that would obviously be the correct group for companies to center every product decision on.

I don't get what you are suggesting here. Companies build separate phones for separate market segments all the time if it attracts customers. Moreover, there are many companies building phones.

Yet there are ~ 0 caseless phones out there. Your argument does not explain this _at all_. How you can look at this situation and pretend it's not an obvious market failure is beyond me. The only question is what the origin of the market failure is, and whether regulation could help. I don't think for cases regulation is an appropriate tool, for USB and replaceable batteries I think it is, for SD Cards I am not convinced either way.

But to have a meaningful discussion on this, it's first necessary to acknowledge how irrational the phone market actually is, which seems to be something that some people are (ideologically?) opposed to in this thread.

> Yet there are ~ 0 caseless phones out there.

Maybe in your social circles, but I can only think of a few friends that use cases. Screen protectors are more common I think, but you can’t see that at a glance.

I meant 0 phones to buy designed for caseless use.

PS: In 2017 80% used. Case in the US:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/368627/us-protective-cas...

As already pointed out no, not everyone wants a case. But even those that do can and do choose different cases. On my work phones I often use battery cases because I use them so heavily. Having that option is useful flexibility.

Cases are also fashion statements for some people. Mandating bigger bulkier phones again forces trade offs on customers, making decisions for us you have no business making.

As for not knowing what I’ll need in future, I’ve been using smartphones for 14 years, I think I’ve got a pretty good idea by now what features I value.

As for SD card slots and replaceable batteries, phones with those features were common fur years and years, but the fact is the market simply didn’t care. If they were genuinely valued product differentiators those models would have been rewarded and the features would have survived. They didn’t because the fact is they offer marginal utility to most people.

Largely the products I want to use are being made, thank you very much. Please leave them alone.

Nobody was suggesting mandating bulkier phones. The argument was only that in this case what a majority of (or at least many) people want is not actually being made. That is not surprising, it's just capitalism and market failure.

How do non capitalist systems fix this?

> If they were genuinely valued product differentiators those models would have been rewarded

Can't vote with your wallet for a product that nobody is offering.

But you're half right. When my mom buys a phone, she doesn't think about those things, but when she calls me and says "my phone is full what do I do?" I would previously have advised her to pop in an SD card, but that option no longer exists.

In the economic literature this is sometimes modelled as time inconsistent preferences. A well known source of market failures.

This thread is full of what one might call the efficient market fallacy "this is what manufacturers provide, thus it must be what people really want".

It’s full of people like me who know what they want, and it’s not the bulky, feature encrusted structurally compromised things others here want to make the only legal option. I’m sorry that they don’t have the products on the market they want to buy, but is it really reasonable to ‘fix’ that by making the ones I and many others like and do buy illegal?

It optimizes for what makes companies more money, once all of their costs are factored in. That's all. We - customers - are merely consumers to them, and our only role is to buy what they sell; to give them as much money as we can bear to give for whatever they're selling.

Externalities are equally ignored, and government fines are simply another cost (which is, ironically, why significant fines drive changes).

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