My own boss is a bit miffed his iPhone 4S doesn't work with the Bluetooth in his Mercedes like his 3GS did, but... bricking a BMW? "Bricking" usually means it's totally unusable, can't be recovered from, you must replace the entire unit. Are you sure you're using the right term?
If yes, then wow. That manufacturer-approved (one assumes), dealership-installed firmware updates can brick a BMW says much more about BMW cars than it does Apple's inability/unwillingness to work with older technologies.
I'm interested in your take on a comment above yours. You both seem to be in agreement on a number of things, but the point of contention seems to be here:
"If the instructions said to install the bolt one way, the assembly workers should have been thoroughly trained to do it *exactly* that way"
versus
"There is a hard rule in aircraft assembly that the bolt be placed head up nut down [...]This is not an optional rule, and assembly workers have it drilled into them at their new hire instruction, and every annual refresher, and whenever someone sees a mistake in QA, and just because someone thought now would be a good time to bring it up again. It is "how it's done". - full stop [...] She should have called her supervisor over and complained that the design conflicts with her training. Then put the bolt in upside down when her supervisor tells her to "
Please read his entire comment first as my selective quoting obviously hasn't captured everything.
She knows clearance issues are why you install a shorter bolt Again, engineering design failed, miserably, so a way to blame the peon.
If you insist on putting the brake pedal on the right foot and accelerator on the left, it doesn't matter how loudly you blame the driver, its still a design failure.
Example of proper design: the space shuttle main engine system was designed so the engines physically could not gimbal into each other, so even if there was a software bug it couldn't damage the engines in that fashion.
(No need to re-hash out all the reasons the shuttle system itself had numerous design failures, just pointing out a specific system that was designed properly)
It seems very common on/. to find people who associate both "Fascism" and "Communism" with the political left - leaving I suppose the political right as the only "good" form of government in their eyes. I cannot understand this level of ignorance and I assume its either willful, or the result of constant repetition by other political conservatives who want to distance themselves from any fascist associations.
Nailed it on the head. Much of it is willful ignorance and revisionist history, trying to distance their preferred political leanings from the evils the prime example of fascism, the Nazis ("National Socialism"), by claiming that just because it has the word "socialist" in its acronym it somehow espouses its ideologies. By such simplistic thinking, North Korea is actually democratic ("Democratic People's Republic of Korea").
And yet, not long after the Nazi gained power they turned on the communists and socialists in Germany, and many others that helped get them into power.
But then we'll always have race. Racism is alive in this country, yet it's hobbled, forced to take bizarre forms like birtherism because nearly *everybody* agrees racism is wrong. If you don't think that's remarkable, go back and look at papers, magazines and books of the 1930s. Racism was actually seen as respectable, * scientific* even. If that seems inconceivable to us, that represents real progress We still have racism, but it has to pretend to be something else. Politicians who want to exploit have to dance around it. Racism today is a puny, petty thing, still able to damage, but deprived of most of its terrifying weapons.
There were allegations of racism a couple months ago when a banana was thrown onto the ice as a Black hockey player, Wayne Simmonds, was trying for an overtime shootout goal in an exhibition NHL game in Canada. Many comments in online news stories agreed that throwing anything onto the ice was poor conduct on the part of an overzealous fan of the opposite team, but wondered what made throwing a banana (instead of say an apple or orange) a racist statement?
The reply was that bananas are tossed at monkeys and apes, so throwing a banana implies they're lower than human, and how did anyone over 20 not know this? It happens all the time in soccer, apparently. Well, I'm over 30 and had no idea (don't watch soccer), and clearly many others didn't either. The fan who threw the banana came forward on his own after the story broke, said he also had no idea of its racist undertones and claimed he was horrified at the implication and deeply ashamed, and apologized to Simmonds.
He claims he bought the banana at a concession stand. Since they close by the start of the final period, it's unlikely he bought it just in case the game went into overtime and then shootout, and just in case the Simmonds' was the deciding shootout goal.
I'd say we've come a long way when the younger generation isn't aware of the racist epithets and symbols of the previous one. It's too bad some Black rappers keep using the "n" word in their lyrics as if "owning" it empowers them, it doesn't, it just passes the word down another generation.
Yes I will tell you with a straight face that Apple devices are not engineered to fail in time for the next Apple device.
For that matter it's not just Apple, MOST brand-name electronics do not fail that quickly, as a percentage of their production run.
Consumer electronics advance fast, there may be artificial limitations restricting new features to the newest devices, but it is very obvious that Apple gear IS NOT engineered to fail in time for the next device. Stewbacca gave plenty of examples to put the lie to that claim, I could add my own, including that my own original iPod still works, though after 10 years of course the original battery holds almost no charge, but that's basic chemistry/physics. The one iMac that did fail did so after 4 years, due to the leaky capacitor issues that affected many 2004-06 systems.
Anecdotes yes, but they are backed up by prices of year-old used iDevices when the newer ones come out, and independent surveys of consumer satisfaction that cannot be explained away by mere marketing or post-purchase rationalization. One can rationalize away user experience issues, but if a large percentage of product line flat-out dies or needs expensive repair work (by design, as you claim) right after the warranty expires, there's zero rationalizing and zero customer loyalty. Ignoring this fact is your own attempt to rationalize your dislike of Apple. There are legitimate reasons, "Planned failure just after warranty period (ever since the original pod)" is not one of them.
Apple's marketing isn't THAT good. I doubt Google and Iris are making a big deal out of copying (or trying to go beyond) something completely useless. Siri isn't perfect, but it obviously works well enough that people are using it regularly. Voice vs. GUI is just like the old GUI vs CLI debates: each do some things better than the other.
Example: "Add event at 7 on the 31st called movie date" ("Add movie date on the 31st at 7" and other variations also work). Takes about 5 seconds total to say this, process on Apple's server, and get a screen so you can confirm Siri got the event details right.
To add using the GUI? Fire up Calendar app, select Jan 31, click the Add button, type the title "Movie date", select 7pm. Takes about 10 seconds minimum. Add time if you need to unlock, go to the screen with the Calendar app, etc.
Obviously Siri isn't practical in a noisy place, or if you don't want anyone to overhear. And network issues, or errors in voice recognition needing re-speaking or manual text correction, can add to Siri's time. But this is one example where Siri can clearly be a useful time saver.
Indeed, iPhone users are far more likely to actually *use* most of the features on the phone in the first place, so contribute far more to bandwidth usage (per-user) than any other phone. AT&T obviously never expected this back in 2007, which is why their capacity got maxed out even with upgrades, and they're now introducing monthly data caps on smartphone plans.
In Canada, with the big carriers it's easy to separate smartphones from feature phones: if it's got unlimited data, it's a feature phone (i.e. browser UI sucks so you rarely use it, and no real apps to use data anyway). Smartphones have always had data caps here, at least since the iPhone arrived here a year after the US got it.
The majority in Canada are also automatic, but I and literally half my friends (mid 20s to early 40s) drive manual. The differentiator: those with family or at least married tend to have automatics.
It's certainly not the future, it's just a silly gimmick.
Better tell Google to stop wasting their time on Majel, then. The Iris developers too, and all their users.
Gimmicks are features that attract users to something but are of little relevance or use, like racing stripes or fake intakes on a car. Siri is definitely very useful (though totally dependent on a network). And what better indicator of relevance, than several competitors trying to copy your feature even as they claim it's useless?
Government-run healthcare is not awesome, but it is arguably necessary.
However, that's a moot point because that's not what the US is going to get. The US had a right-wing party yelling "socialists! Death panels!" at a less-right-wing party which put up self-imposed roadblocks to appease them, even though the latter controlled Congress, Senate and White House (until late 2010), until you got mandatory health insurance.
It is a giant clusterfuck that Republicans are secretly overjoyed to get, because when it collapses they will tout it as an example of why public health systems don't work, even though it's nothing like the public health or mixed public/private systems in other countries that DO work (though again, not awesomely).
They (and much of the American public) also ignore the fact that even before Obamacare, even during the Bush Jr. era, the US was already spending more tax dollars on healthcare per capita than all the other industrialized nations. If they'd only spend those *existing* health care tax dollars properly, the standard of care that the poor and lower-middle class would be AT LEAST as good as Canada's (which has plenty of flaws, don't get me wrong, but it's very unlikely to force people into bankruptcy or taking out a second mortgage), and the wealthier could still pay for better health services.
Bad example--the originals are owned by the studios, who authorized the remakes. That's why the remake of Karate Kid is called that, despite the fact it's more kung-fu than Karate, and they moved it to China--they had to keep the name in order to keep the right to re-use 99% of the plot.
These articles on C-11 are just fear mongering, without any real facts to back up the fear building its attempting to do. No thanks in part to people who don't know the Canadian political system, our laws, and people who are trying to find any excuse to blame the current Conservative government, when in reality, all of our international agreements for copyright laws and piracy were signed by the Liberal Party of Canada.
The Kyoto Protocol was also signed and ratified by the Liberals, yet the Conservatives had no problem dropping that as soon as they had a majority. WIPO hasn't even been ratified by Canada.
If the Conservatives thought it was a bad agreement, it's within their power to withdraw from it. That they haven't, and in fact tried pushing legislation through twice (and the Liberals' once), means they deserve all the scorn and blame being heaped on them over this.
The only reason we held out was because the parties in power at the time (Liberal and Conservative both) were minority governments. Twice, copyright reform bills died when the government fell and an election was called. Last time, the Conservatives knew an election was coming and "listened" to the public outcry and shelved the bill, to give people one less bullet point against them.
Then they got a majority. There'll be no stopping them this time.
Levy on CD-Rs, yes. On DVD-Rs, no. There was a levy on storage media including mp3 players, but that was revoked several years ago and AFAIK hasn't been reintroduced.
The recording industry in Canada long ago realized they messed up when they argued for, and won, the CD levy in the 90s. They totally missed the internet train, and DVDs. But instead of being at least somewhat reasonable about this new law, they want do double-dip by locking down media, locking up "pirates", and *still* continue collecting levies on storage media.
"We" voted the fundamentalist Conservative party into majority last year. Probably the ONLY reason bad laws weren't passed the last five years is they'd been kept in check with a minority. Infallible? Canada? Hah!
There's no stopping this crap bill or ACTA this time. The next federal election is 3 years away, people will have forgotten this by then (assuming they haven't been locked up in the new mega-prisons thanks to an massive crime and punishment bill that even Texas Republicans said was unworkable, having tried the same thing themselves and failed miserably).
Apple's not really an American company. Almost all of their staff are located in China building the phones, computers, tablets,...
That is nonsense. Those are staff and workers of Foxconn, a contractor for not just Apple, but also HP, Dell, and many others. Apple doesn't pay them directly, they are therefore not Apple workers.
And you're right Apple didn't get subsidies, but I can't find any indication that Exxon received subsidies either? Can you provide citations?
Wait, you say there's no need to try creating some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy... right after you claim history is repeating itself?
Apple has defined or severely disrupted several markets--the iPad, iPhone, iPod are just the most recent, and just hardware. In these three cases there was an existing niche market that consumers just weren't connecting to.
If they rest on their laurels, yeah Apple's going to falter and fall. But they've demonstrated a willingness to cannibalize their own product lines when introducing their next big thing, something most companies are unwilling to do. Just look at why Kodak failed, why RIM is in dire straits, and even Microsoft is sustained mostly by the inertia of old product lines like Windows and Office.
The iPhone at launch was entirely like any other phone on the market..
Your misspelling is accurate. the iPhone didn't do anything new that existing smartphones did. In fact, almost all of the iPhones "new" features were already available on other devices.
But it is pretty.
And yet very few used those "existing features" before the iPhone came along.
Either those existing features were too cumbersome to use, or the makers of those phones had the crappiest marketing of all time.
"Pretty" was used to dismiss the Mac GUI (or any GUI) in the pre-Windows 95 days, and yet every major consumer desktop OS today still uses a close variation of all its original key concepts, almost 30 years later. "Pretty" is just the term ignorant people use to dismiss design and polish.
As others explained already, oil is a commodity. Regular gas costs the same whether you're well off and bought a decent new car for $25,000, or if you're a broke student forced to buy a used $500 clunker.
No one forces you to buy a luxury item, and people don't complain much about phone prices because there's plenty of choice, at different price points. They'll rant about the ridiculous monthly fees, of course.
You just reminded me of a scene from Airplane II, as background people pass through security.
The first guy is obviously armed with something, but doesn't trip any alarms and no action is taken. Then an old granny passes through, and sets off the alarm for some reason. The guards throw her against the wall and start patting her down, as two more heavily armed guys with ammo belts walk through unmolested.
It's been 20 years since I last saw that movie. It was funny at the time, it's sad to see how close it resembles real life today.
Sure. So buy from Dell, Lenovo, HP, Sony, Samsung, LG, etc for your consumer electronics...
Wait, they're not solving America's problems either, and they're definitely not obligating themselves to make the best products possible--not when they have products spanning the spectrum from great to what's literally considered disposable.
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My own boss is a bit miffed his iPhone 4S doesn't work with the Bluetooth in his Mercedes like his 3GS did, but... bricking a BMW? "Bricking" usually means it's totally unusable, can't be recovered from, you must replace the entire unit. Are you sure you're using the right term?
If yes, then wow. That manufacturer-approved (one assumes), dealership-installed firmware updates can brick a BMW says much more about BMW cars than it does Apple's inability/unwillingness to work with older technologies.
I'm interested in your take on a comment above yours. You both seem to be in agreement on a number of things, but the point of contention seems to be here:
"If the instructions said to install the bolt one way, the assembly workers should have been thoroughly trained to do it *exactly* that way"
versus
"There is a hard rule in aircraft assembly that the bolt be placed head up nut down [...]This is not an optional rule, and assembly workers have it drilled into them at their new hire instruction, and every annual refresher, and whenever someone sees a mistake in QA, and just because someone thought now would be a good time to bring it up again.
It is "how it's done". - full stop [...] She should have called her supervisor over and complained that the design conflicts with her training. Then put the bolt in upside down when her supervisor tells her to "
Please read his entire comment first as my selective quoting obviously hasn't captured everything.
She knows clearance issues are why you install a shorter bolt Again, engineering design failed, miserably, so a way to blame the peon.
If you insist on putting the brake pedal on the right foot and accelerator on the left, it doesn't matter how loudly you blame the driver, its still a design failure.
Example of proper design: the space shuttle main engine system was designed so the engines physically could not gimbal into each other, so even if there was a software bug it couldn't damage the engines in that fashion.
(No need to re-hash out all the reasons the shuttle system itself had numerous design failures, just pointing out a specific system that was designed properly)
It seems very common on /. to find people who associate both "Fascism" and "Communism" with the political left - leaving I suppose the political right as the only "good" form of government in their eyes. I cannot understand this level of ignorance and I assume its either willful, or the result of constant repetition by other political conservatives who want to distance themselves from any fascist associations.
Nailed it on the head. Much of it is willful ignorance and revisionist history, trying to distance their preferred political leanings from the evils the prime example of fascism, the Nazis ("National Socialism"), by claiming that just because it has the word "socialist" in its acronym it somehow espouses its ideologies. By such simplistic thinking, North Korea is actually democratic ("Democratic People's Republic of Korea").
And yet, not long after the Nazi gained power they turned on the communists and socialists in Germany, and many others that helped get them into power.
But then we'll always have race. Racism is alive in this country, yet it's hobbled, forced to take bizarre forms like birtherism because nearly *everybody* agrees racism is wrong. If you don't think that's remarkable, go back and look at papers, magazines and books of the 1930s. Racism was actually seen as respectable, * scientific* even. If that seems inconceivable to us, that represents real progress We still have racism, but it has to pretend to be something else. Politicians who want to exploit have to dance around it. Racism today is a puny, petty thing, still able to damage, but deprived of most of its terrifying weapons.
There were allegations of racism a couple months ago when a banana was thrown onto the ice as a Black hockey player, Wayne Simmonds, was trying for an overtime shootout goal in an exhibition NHL game in Canada. Many comments in online news stories agreed that throwing anything onto the ice was poor conduct on the part of an overzealous fan of the opposite team, but wondered what made throwing a banana (instead of say an apple or orange) a racist statement?
The reply was that bananas are tossed at monkeys and apes, so throwing a banana implies they're lower than human, and how did anyone over 20 not know this? It happens all the time in soccer, apparently. Well, I'm over 30 and had no idea (don't watch soccer), and clearly many others didn't either. The fan who threw the banana came forward on his own after the story broke, said he also had no idea of its racist undertones and claimed he was horrified at the implication and deeply ashamed, and apologized to Simmonds.
He claims he bought the banana at a concession stand. Since they close by the start of the final period, it's unlikely he bought it just in case the game went into overtime and then shootout, and just in case the Simmonds' was the deciding shootout goal.
I'd say we've come a long way when the younger generation isn't aware of the racist epithets and symbols of the previous one. It's too bad some Black rappers keep using the "n" word in their lyrics as if "owning" it empowers them, it doesn't, it just passes the word down another generation.
Yes I will tell you with a straight face that Apple devices are not engineered to fail in time for the next Apple device.
For that matter it's not just Apple, MOST brand-name electronics do not fail that quickly, as a percentage of their production run.
Consumer electronics advance fast, there may be artificial limitations restricting new features to the newest devices, but it is very obvious that Apple gear IS NOT engineered to fail in time for the next device. Stewbacca gave plenty of examples to put the lie to that claim, I could add my own, including that my own original iPod still works, though after 10 years of course the original battery holds almost no charge, but that's basic chemistry/physics. The one iMac that did fail did so after 4 years, due to the leaky capacitor issues that affected many 2004-06 systems.
Anecdotes yes, but they are backed up by prices of year-old used iDevices when the newer ones come out, and independent surveys of consumer satisfaction that cannot be explained away by mere marketing or post-purchase rationalization. One can rationalize away user experience issues, but if a large percentage of product line flat-out dies or needs expensive repair work (by design, as you claim) right after the warranty expires, there's zero rationalizing and zero customer loyalty. Ignoring this fact is your own attempt to rationalize your dislike of Apple. There are legitimate reasons, "Planned failure just after warranty period (ever since the original pod)" is not one of them.
Apple's marketing isn't THAT good. I doubt Google and Iris are making a big deal out of copying (or trying to go beyond) something completely useless. Siri isn't perfect, but it obviously works well enough that people are using it regularly. Voice vs. GUI is just like the old GUI vs CLI debates: each do some things better than the other.
Example: "Add event at 7 on the 31st called movie date" ("Add movie date on the 31st at 7" and other variations also work). Takes about 5 seconds total to say this, process on Apple's server, and get a screen so you can confirm Siri got the event details right.
To add using the GUI? Fire up Calendar app, select Jan 31, click the Add button, type the title "Movie date", select 7pm. Takes about 10 seconds minimum. Add time if you need to unlock, go to the screen with the Calendar app, etc.
Obviously Siri isn't practical in a noisy place, or if you don't want anyone to overhear. And network issues, or errors in voice recognition needing re-speaking or manual text correction, can add to Siri's time. But this is one example where Siri can clearly be a useful time saver.
Good question! Both are definitely inconsequential in the short term...
Indeed, iPhone users are far more likely to actually *use* most of the features on the phone in the first place, so contribute far more to bandwidth usage (per-user) than any other phone. AT&T obviously never expected this back in 2007, which is why their capacity got maxed out even with upgrades, and they're now introducing monthly data caps on smartphone plans.
In Canada, with the big carriers it's easy to separate smartphones from feature phones: if it's got unlimited data, it's a feature phone (i.e. browser UI sucks so you rarely use it, and no real apps to use data anyway). Smartphones have always had data caps here, at least since the iPhone arrived here a year after the US got it.
The majority in Canada are also automatic, but I and literally half my friends (mid 20s to early 40s) drive manual. The differentiator: those with family or at least married tend to have automatics.
It's certainly the future [......]
It's certainly not the future, it's just a silly gimmick.
Better tell Google to stop wasting their time on Majel, then. The Iris developers too, and all their users.
Gimmicks are features that attract users to something but are of little relevance or use, like racing stripes or fake intakes on a car. Siri is definitely very useful (though totally dependent on a network). And what better indicator of relevance, than several competitors trying to copy your feature even as they claim it's useless?
Government-run healthcare is not awesome, but it is arguably necessary.
However, that's a moot point because that's not what the US is going to get. The US had a right-wing party yelling "socialists! Death panels!" at a less-right-wing party which put up self-imposed roadblocks to appease them, even though the latter controlled Congress, Senate and White House (until late 2010), until you got mandatory health insurance.
It is a giant clusterfuck that Republicans are secretly overjoyed to get, because when it collapses they will tout it as an example of why public health systems don't work, even though it's nothing like the public health or mixed public/private systems in other countries that DO work (though again, not awesomely).
They (and much of the American public) also ignore the fact that even before Obamacare, even during the Bush Jr. era, the US was already spending more tax dollars on healthcare per capita than all the other industrialized nations. If they'd only spend those *existing* health care tax dollars properly, the standard of care that the poor and lower-middle class would be AT LEAST as good as Canada's (which has plenty of flaws, don't get me wrong, but it's very unlikely to force people into bankruptcy or taking out a second mortgage), and the wealthier could still pay for better health services.
Bad example--the originals are owned by the studios, who authorized the remakes. That's why the remake of Karate Kid is called that, despite the fact it's more kung-fu than Karate, and they moved it to China--they had to keep the name in order to keep the right to re-use 99% of the plot.
These articles on C-11 are just fear mongering, without any real facts to back up the fear building its attempting to do. No thanks in part to people who don't know the Canadian political system, our laws, and people who are trying to find any excuse to blame the current Conservative government, when in reality, all of our international agreements for copyright laws and piracy were signed by the Liberal Party of Canada.
The Kyoto Protocol was also signed and ratified by the Liberals, yet the Conservatives had no problem dropping that as soon as they had a majority. WIPO hasn't even been ratified by Canada.
If the Conservatives thought it was a bad agreement, it's within their power to withdraw from it. That they haven't, and in fact tried pushing legislation through twice (and the Liberals' once), means they deserve all the scorn and blame being heaped on them over this.
The only reason we held out was because the parties in power at the time (Liberal and Conservative both) were minority governments. Twice, copyright reform bills died when the government fell and an election was called. Last time, the Conservatives knew an election was coming and "listened" to the public outcry and shelved the bill, to give people one less bullet point against them.
Then they got a majority. There'll be no stopping them this time.
Levy on CD-Rs, yes. On DVD-Rs, no. There was a levy on storage media including mp3 players, but that was revoked several years ago and AFAIK hasn't been reintroduced.
The recording industry in Canada long ago realized they messed up when they argued for, and won, the CD levy in the 90s. They totally missed the internet train, and DVDs. But instead of being at least somewhat reasonable about this new law, they want do double-dip by locking down media, locking up "pirates", and *still* continue collecting levies on storage media.
"We" voted the fundamentalist Conservative party into majority last year. Probably the ONLY reason bad laws weren't passed the last five years is they'd been kept in check with a minority. Infallible? Canada? Hah!
There's no stopping this crap bill or ACTA this time. The next federal election is 3 years away, people will have forgotten this by then (assuming they haven't been locked up in the new mega-prisons thanks to an massive crime and punishment bill that even Texas Republicans said was unworkable, having tried the same thing themselves and failed miserably).
The GP wasn't clear that Apple was *perceived* to be going out of business, not that they actually had to close their doors anytime soon.
GP was also wrong about the $4B. They had $1.2B as of September 1997. Adjusted for inflation, that's more than what RIM currently has ($1.4B)
So, $199 for an iPhone is overcharging the user, but that same $199 for a Blackberry Bold, Samsung Focus S or HTC Titan is perfectly reasonable?
There are areas where Apple is definitely overcharging (RAM upgrades through their online store, for example), phones are not one of them.
Apple's not really an American company. Almost all of their staff are located in China building the phones, computers, tablets, ...
That is nonsense. Those are staff and workers of Foxconn, a contractor for not just Apple, but also HP, Dell, and many others. Apple doesn't pay them directly, they are therefore not Apple workers.
And you're right Apple didn't get subsidies, but I can't find any indication that Exxon received subsidies either? Can you provide citations?
How about Fox News (via AP article)?
$4 billion a year in tax subsidies.
Wait, you say there's no need to try creating some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy... right after you claim history is repeating itself?
Apple has defined or severely disrupted several markets--the iPad, iPhone, iPod are just the most recent, and just hardware. In these three cases there was an existing niche market that consumers just weren't connecting to.
If they rest on their laurels, yeah Apple's going to falter and fall. But they've demonstrated a willingness to cannibalize their own product lines when introducing their next big thing, something most companies are unwilling to do. Just look at why Kodak failed, why RIM is in dire straits, and even Microsoft is sustained mostly by the inertia of old product lines like Windows and Office.
The iPhone at launch was entirely like any other phone on the market..
Your misspelling is accurate. the iPhone didn't do anything new that existing smartphones did. In fact, almost all of the iPhones "new" features were already available on other devices.
But it is pretty.
And yet very few used those "existing features" before the iPhone came along.
Either those existing features were too cumbersome to use, or the makers of those phones had the crappiest marketing of all time.
"Pretty" was used to dismiss the Mac GUI (or any GUI) in the pre-Windows 95 days, and yet every major consumer desktop OS today still uses a close variation of all its original key concepts, almost 30 years later. "Pretty" is just the term ignorant people use to dismiss design and polish.
As others explained already, oil is a commodity. Regular gas costs the same whether you're well off and bought a decent new car for $25,000, or if you're a broke student forced to buy a used $500 clunker.
No one forces you to buy a luxury item, and people don't complain much about phone prices because there's plenty of choice, at different price points. They'll rant about the ridiculous monthly fees, of course.
You just reminded me of a scene from Airplane II, as background people pass through security.
The first guy is obviously armed with something, but doesn't trip any alarms and no action is taken. Then an old granny passes through, and sets off the alarm for some reason. The guards throw her against the wall and start patting her down, as two more heavily armed guys with ammo belts walk through unmolested.
It's been 20 years since I last saw that movie. It was funny at the time, it's sad to see how close it resembles real life today.
Sure. So buy from Dell, Lenovo, HP, Sony, Samsung, LG, etc for your consumer electronics...
Wait, they're not solving America's problems either, and they're definitely not obligating themselves to make the best products possible--not when they have products spanning the spectrum from great to what's literally considered disposable.