Android vs Apple: the shoot-out

in apple on 2014-08-17 21:29 (#3Y4)

Two interesting articles showed up in my RSS feed today, that juxtaposed, make for an interesting discussion. First, Business Insider has provocatively written that Android is definitively the OS for poor people, and iOS for the rich. They've got some data that shows that people of higher income brackets overwhelmingly use iphones, while Android devices are used by the brackets with less disposable income. But at the same time, they've posted a good article showing a list of eight things the iphone can't - and probably will never - do. They include external storage, NFC support, USB connectors, and a couple of others [all one one page, not eight clicks: thank you!]

So is Android destined to be the poor man's iphone, or is it the ecosystem busy pushing the boundaries of technology and function? Because the days of claiming Android is simply catching up to Apple seem to be long behind us.

Is this grade school? (Score: 5, Insightful)

by skarjak@pipedot.org on 2014-08-18 01:28 (#3YD)

You may be able to show that more people with lower income buy Android phones, which is obvious considering that there is a wide range of Android phones and only a few (overpriced) iphones. I also think that, for some reason, owning an iphone is viewed as a sort of status symbol by certain people (despite equivalent phones existing for Android). So yes, there are reasons which explain that you may find more people with higher income throwing money at Apple.

Coming up with this statistic is one thing, but to then go and say that Android phones are "for poor people" is ludicrous. All kinds of people use all kinds of Android phones; it's an open platform after all. The article seems to acknowledge this a few paragraphs down, but they seemed fit to include this clickbait of a title. For shame.

I also think there's something vaguely insulting about describing certain items as being for poor people, honestly.