| > That's a bit of an unusual way of looking at iPhones. This is the kind of comment that becomes a downvote magnet. An unusual look is the point. I don't think it's true that there's some frontend-web-developer-graphic-design-nerd-sense-of-UX superiority to iPhones compared to Android phones. That's what this is about. There's a bunch of observations written here by non-elderly people trying to reason about why iPhones work better for the elderly than Android phones or whatever. Man, just get them a cable TV subscription and pay for it, because that's what they really want: free TV. That's what everyone wants. It's only in this country that iPhones have such high market share. The fact is, Android or iPhone, the end user is mostly using it to consume the same garbage - mindless freakshow television in TikTok and YouTube. Mostly couldn't be more true of a generalization either. The sum of the time spent on consuming linear video content on phones is probably like, 90-99% of the time spent on the devices. Even accounting for people playing long session video games in Asia, because children are overall a small part of the population, and adults are for the most part not playing games. All of these hard, true facts about how utterly narrow an average user's usage of phones attacks sacrosanct magical thoughts in HN readers' heads regarding the diversity of the experiences people are having on computers. They think it's this wondrous world of diverse meaning. There's some truth to that. It may be you and I are having wondrous diverse meaningful experiences. But the average person is scrolling TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. People who disagree and downvote: at the end of the day, how do you know? I mean, have you ever seen the engagement statistics for Apple Photos? For a banking app? Making phone calls? No! But there are countless surveys, all pointing to ridiculous numbers of hours spent in TikTok. 90m a day on average for Americans. That means 1 in 5 people may be spending 180m too! Who do you know spends 90m a day taking photos, banking, making calls? It's far more rare. You can look at the engagement for Google Maps and Spotify, which may be the only non-social media, non-TV apps with high engagement, but it would be intellectually dishonest to count Google Maps - you're using your car for navigation with an appliance, not your phone - and Spotify is an aberration, although still passive mindless consumption, a better more affordable UX compared to radio. If you could watch TV while driving a car, people would, and that would be it for radio and Spotify. So of course a phone can converge a bunch of other activities. But it doesn't mean that I'm wrong. I know they have a bunch of functionality. The question is, does it matter? No. The average person wants freakshow TV. I'm not the first or the last person to say this. It has never been so stark though. |