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Comment by NineStarPoint | Hacker News Reader

So obviously 99% is impossibly high, but iPhones (and well made flagship phones in general) being some of the most popular things ever made wouldn’t be very surprising to me. People’s lives revolve around their phones. They’re probably people’s most used item after their bed. And for the most part they work really well. That 20% of people don’t like Thanksgiving and the Shawshank redemption isn’t surprising to me, and I don’t think that means the iPhone couldn’t have higher than 90% approval rating.

(Especially since a lot of people who don’t like iPhones would have gone to Androids at this point anyway, so current iPhone customers is a somewhat self selecting demographic)

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My thinking is maybe iPhone 14 customers are satisfied by it, but I'm satisfied by my phone, not because it's a great phone but because any modern phone has the bare minimum I need to get satisfied by it.

Those people aren't using other phones so they wouldn't know if they'd be satisfied by them.

> I don’t think that means the iPhone couldn’t have higher than 90% approval rating.

I would be surprised if iPhone didn't have 90%+ customer satisfaction narrowly scoped to usage of the phone.

The product as hardware combined with software and supporting services are the best money can buy. Apple regularly pushes the smartphone category forward on fronts neglected by other companies.

That said, consumers seem to think more broadly about their experience than just the phone. For example an unexpected failure of an official or 3rd party case might influence overall satisfaction. The article mentions a 3% difference based on 5G availability, as another.

So without an explanation of the carve out, 99% does seem a bit too good to be true.

Apple should publish how these numbers are arrived at. If its a decent measurement it could help set an evolving standard for the category.

Yeah, I agree with that. The article asks:

> If Apple’s claims of 99% satisfaction were true, it would mean the iPhone 14 was not only the most popular mass market consumer product of all time, but it would also probably make it the most popular anything of all time.

Is it not the most popular mass market consumer product of all time? People spend their lives on their phone these days, and I've never heard anyone say anything about their iPhone. I have one and it's fine. I'm satisfied. I have end-to-end encrypted backups, the battery lasts long enough, the screen is nice to look at, etc. If I like some sort of tech product, it's probably hard to find people that don't.

I'm quoted in the post. I agree, it is plausible that iPhones have a 90%+ satisfaction rate. Apple's claim isn't 90%, or 92% or even 95%, but 99%. I agree that 99% is impossibly high.

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