Slashdot Mirror
Low-Income Users Latch On To iPhone
narramissic writes "The iPhone crowd is still dominated by affluent males between the ages of 18 and 35, but in a series of surveys ending in August, ComScore found that iPhone purchases grew fastest among people with annual household incomes between $25,000 and $50,000. The growth rate in this group was 48 percent, compared with just 16 percent among people with incomes above $100,000. And the down economy isn't going to turn this trend around, says ComScore Mobile analyst Jen Wu. 'I don't see there's going to be much of a slowdown, just because wireless devices are so much more of a necessity than they used to be,' Wu said."
In other iPhone news, an anonymous reader points out a NYTimes story about the rise in car-related applications and uses for the iPhone, which points out that programmers are just beginning to "appreciate just what can be done with an iPhone and other advanced cellphones that know where they are and just how quickly they are going someplace else." Another iPhone story mentions that "Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won't let the company release it because it competes with Apple's own Safari browser."
Whilst I think it's a silly clause the Apple SDK license agreement for the iPhone has always prohibited developing a web browser for the iPhone so if the Opera team went ahead and wasted their time porting to the iPhone then it's their own stupid fault.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
When is 25K to 50K poor? I know! When you're on Slashdot dealing with overprivileged spoiled brat libertarians whose daddies got them shell accounts on their workplaces Unix boxes when they were 8. I have a job, I work as a PA to the disabled. I made less than $16000 last year. Do you know why it pays so low? Because the majority of people who do it in the cities are african american women. And thusly the work is devalued. (Downstate where I'm at, there's more caucasians and men, but it's still a woman heavy job.) Privileged white folks do what they have always done, hand off their babies, elderly and disabled to black women to take care of, cause they sure don't want to wipe their grannies ass, it's below them. Have you ever wondered why there's so many women (and even lesbian women) in social services? Because the work is so devalued by those with economic power (affluent white males) that it pays so low that men won't do it. And because it pays so low the agencies can't be picky about hires, thusly leading to lesbian friendly workplaces. And because the social services are known as being lesbian friendly, college aged lesbians know they can go into social services and get jobs and not have to worry about hiding who they are.
Yep they have cell phones, because a pay as you go cell phone is much cheaper than a landline or a regular cell plan. I'm averaging about 8 bucks a month for my pay as you go phone. Technically it's a personal use phone but the job essentially requires it.
Oh fuck you, you whiny, patronising waste of space.
That's pure BS. I have had Sprint for years and I can install any app I want on my phone.
It really surprises me that most people are so willing to pay for having the benefit to use something that is designed to keep them unaware of its inner workings. It also surprises me that most people do not feel any urge to understand the technology in their hands or hack it (I use the word "hacking" to mean something not very different than "computer programming", "amateur tinkering", or "creative customisation" always within the legal and social customs boundaries. I don't use this word to mean "illegal activities" which is the meaning of the word "cracking").
People say "I bought this", "I own this", or "this is mine". Some people seem to believe that they can own something just by buying it or being given it as a gift. That's wrong: to claim true ownership of something you need to do more than be its owner from a legal or social viewpoint.
For technological widgets like computers and mobile phones, owning a device means having full control over it and having full knowledge of its inner workings. To have full control over a device means that it must necessarily run either only free open-source software or only software written by you, and additionally all of its electronic design must be either free/open hardware designed by others or hardware designed only by you. Having full knowledge of the inner workings of a device means being possessing the full knowledge of how and why it works and all the necessary skills that are required to modify or even re-build the device. Unless all these conditions are met, when you say "I own this" you mean it in a legal or social sense and not in the hacker's sense.
I think all intelligent people should strive to attain a "hacking singularity", ie the condition that they are fully in control of and having full knowledge of the most inner workings of all the technology they use. This practically is about being able to program any device you want to be rightfully considered its owner in its machine language, and not use software instructions or electronic designs that you cannot see (open source) or modify and share (free software).
This is one of the reasons intelligent people should be in support of GPL and similar licences: right now it is impossible to attain a hacking singularity because most devices have electronic designs and software which was not meant to be modifiable by the user so it is not possible to understand, for example, how your BIOS works because it is covered by restrictive copyrights and patents, but if GPL and similar licences become the mainstream then you will be able to fully control and understand every technological widget you use. The hacker's (amateur tinkerer's) dream is a world where you can go in a shop and buy a laptop or a mobile phone and then unpack it at home and find copies of the device's electronic design blueprints and software, all licensed under the GPL or similar licence.