Hacker News Reader

Comment by zactato | Hacker News Reader

Thats got to be a super tiny population of the world

I wouldn't be so sure of that. There are many studies showing that age is strongly correlated with reduced smartphone use, additionally, youth only makes up a small portion of the whole population.

Youth are fewer, youth have an outsized affect on consumption however. Meanwhile, older people tend to slow down consumption a lot, and therefore you can't really make as much money catering to them.

I think you have the reasoning backwards. Older people have considerably more purchasing power, after all they've had all their life to make money. There are many industries that do extremely well catering exactly to that fact.

You mean like Harley Davidson?

Ya, they have more buying power, but they are choosey about what they buy and aren't so interested in new gadgets. Younger people have less buying power but they are full of wants. They also get more money and will buy more over time, whereas baby boomers are going to retire quickly and their buying will fall off.

You're still reasoning backwards. Apple produces new gadgets that appeal to young people, so they don't have as strong consumption from older people. That's a decision they made, but there's nothing baked into the laws of the universe that prevented them from designing around older consumers.

> They also get more money and will buy more over time, whereas baby boomers are going to retire quickly and their buying will fall off.

You're assuming this is a generational thing and not an age thing. If older people (and to be clear, I'm talking >40 vs <40) naturally gravitate away from smartphones for some more fundamental reason than generational differences, then that high-buying-power market will remain underserved even once today's young people age into that bracket.

Consumption != purchasing power. To say young people have outside portion consumption compared to their numbers isn't very controversial at all in retail. It is why advertising is geared toward young people, why NBC couldn't make money on Matlock and Golden Girls (they were very popular, but the ad dollars were not there), why you go broke aiming at a 60 yro demographic rather than a 20 yro one.

You are just claiming that the market is being inefficient, but they have been burned so many times before assuming that somehow the 40+ crowd is going to drive the market for new things.

Visit any restaurant that has Michelin stars and look at the clientele, the more stars the restaurant has, the higher the age of the average customer. The same holds for any luxury goods and services, whether it's cars, housing, jewelry, etc. You can easily spend a new phone's worth of money per person per evening at one of those restaurants, and these people go out to eat way more often than a young person can afford to buy a new phone.

I suspect OP is also including Android users in the group too.

FWIW, I don't use Apple anymore. But I think this would be a nice product and it'd also stimulate the market.

Right now, most expensive fitness trackers rely on smartphones.

I think only Garmin and Polar can be set up without a smartphone, but Polar still relies on smartphones for GPS updates.

I figure if I'm in that group, it can't be that small of a group. I'm a turbo normie and no thought I have is remotely unique or original. There are at least dozens of us out there using our watches as phones.

But seriously, probably millions of people would prefer to not carry a phone everywhere yet still have the essentials (texting and calling) handy if need be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com