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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

When something like a Samsung Galaxy A15 can be had for $175[1] (and that's with no carrier commitments), any iPhone is a luxury good. Yes, even that $429 iPhone SE which is well over double the price of that Samsung.

Smartphones as a general good are a life necessity at this point, but esoteric offerings among them like iPhones or Sony Xperias or the higher end Samsung Galaxys or Google Pixels are luxury goods because nobody needs the features brought by the much bigger price tag.

It's like how a bottom trim Toyota Corolla or Honda Accord is a necessity because you probably need a car, but anything beyond it is a luxury because whether you want that car is different. Another example would be choosing name brand foodstuffs at the grocery store instead of the store brand, that's also choosing luxury goods assuming the store brand is cheaper.

[1]: https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-a15/buy/galaxy...

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> because nobody needs the features brought by the much bigger price tag

That sounds like a very bold claim, yet it reflects nothing from the real world. You may not need something, but that doesn’t mean others don’t or must not.

Technically, nobody needs anything beyond food, water, shelter and companionship (even the last one is arguable). Allow everybody to only buy the cheapest of foods and the most basic shelters. Then declare that anything else is a want. That just doesn’t make sense.

Nobody needs social media or HN or to be commenting on HN either, but here we are.

>Allow everybody to only buy the cheapest of foods and the most basic shelters. Then declare that anything else is a want.

But most of the things we obtain are wants rather than needs, aren't they?

iPhones are a luxury good; they are significantly more expensive than budget smartphones that can nonetheless practically serve the needs of most people if not their wants. Is that Samsung Galaxy A15 a great phone? Hell no it isn't, but you can do your mobile banking and make calls and texts and do instant messaging and emails just fine.

Not having a smartphone like even that Galaxy A15 will make life exceedingly prohibitive today, but not having an iPhone won't adversely affect your requisite daily affairs. iPhones are a luxury good.

Keep in mind, I'm not denigrating luxury goods thereof or the act of enjoying luxuries. There's inherently nothing wrong with buying an iPhone or a six-pack of beer or a sports car or a big house or a family vacation to a faraway country if that's what you want. We only get one life, so we might as well enjoy it.

I think you’ve articulated it pretty clearly here, but I still have minor quibbles. Back to the original point… I might be misconstruing it, but reads a bit like this to me: something should be free of consumer protections if consumers have cheaper alternatives; they chose the more expensive option, and therefore they should suffer the consequences of that good or bad; and furthermore, we shouldn’t care if the company selling the product (allegedly) actively works to make it harder for them to transition to the cheaper alternatives in the future should they so desire.

Does that seem like a misconstruction of the part of the argument that we originally started this string of comments on? I think there are other slightly better arguments against it but this one seems pretty flawed to me.

It seems reasonable to me that when a product hits some critical, hard-to-define adoption threshold, even if it is a “luxury” choice by your definition, there is still a good argument for placing consumer protections in place. It’s also reasonable to believe those actions would be nanny-state failings, stifle innovation, drive business away etc etc, but I do think the first point of view is reasonable.

I'm not passing judgment one way or another regarding consumer protections here, though I personally find EU more draconian than my preferences and whether they're effective is up for debate (GDPR is a hilarious failure, USB-C mandate is a resounding success).

Though, I think that when someone deliberately chooses to buy a luxury good (much less one that costs a 4 figure sum) they lose some of their standing to complain. Kind of like how I don't complain about my beer because someone will yell at me that I just shouldn't buy the beer if I don't like it and he would be absolutely right.

> I'm not passing judgment one way or another regarding consumer protections here, though I personally find EU more draconian than my preferences and whether they're effective is up for debate (GDPR is a hilarious failure, USB-C mandate is a resounding success).

The hell are you talking about GPDR being a resounding failure? It's been pretty awesome. I love bills like that.

My experience is that GDPR added a lot of compliance activity at companies but did not materially improve actual privacy. Companies pretty much do what they did before GDPR, just with a layer of bureaucratic indirection in between now. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intent but that's where we are, and in that sense it was a failure.

It's not a "luxury good". That's just what Apple's marketing department would have you believe.

It's a handheld computer. That's what it is. That's what it should be. And we should own our computers. And those computers should run whatever software we choose. And they should be able to network with every other computer on the planet. No bullshit restrictions.

Libre Computing is an entirely different matter from whether iPhones are luxury goods.

I'm glad you agree. Because it's not about libre anything.

I don't believe I should "lose some of my standing to complain" after buying any product whatsoever. Cheap, expensive, "luxury", you name it. I believe I should gain standing after paying for something. I believe should fully own the thing after buying it. Especially $1000+ "luxury" smartphones. I believe I should never end up being a serf in the corporation's digital fiefdom.

It sounds like you've decided that "luxury good" means "anything that's more expensive than a competing product by an arbitrary dollar amount I've decided on".

That's not how the concept of luxury goods works.

Also consider that Android is not a 1:1 replacement for an iPhone in the same way that a Honda is a replacement for a Mercedes-Benz. Lock-in and ecosystem interop matters a lot more for a phone than for a car.

I would probably buy into the idea that a Pixel (for example) is a luxury Android device, but not that an iPhone is a luxury smartphone in general.

Luxury good is anything that is not strictly necessary for a given purpose, in this case daily life. You will likely need a smartphone of some kind in this day and age to live, but you do not strictly need an iPhone. Hence, iPhones are a luxury good.

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