[DrewADesign]

I’m not saying that you should cajole them into doing something they don’t want to do, but in case it’s useful to anyone else reading this, I had a good experience having family make that switch for that reason. Having used Google, Samsung, and Apple phones extensively, I knew that switching to iOS is way less frustrating than going in the other direction, or even from vanilla Android to Samsung, IMO. The iPhone 16e is more than sufficient for a non-demanding users and is $599 totally unsubsidized, without trade-in, and they really do keep ticking for years for basic needs. (I got them iPhone SEs years ago and they just upgraded recently.) Quite usefully, my family lives near a few Apple Stores, so they can go in and get user support (including backup/phone reset type stuff) for free nearly on-demand, which saved me a lot of time mitigating someone just downloading some bullshit that had a name like “Weather Zone Plus Free Pro Traffic Weather News Games Center Deluxe Free (no ads)” that totally horked their setup.

[margalabargala]

$599 for a phone is frankly exorbitant for what is required here.

The phone they have have that was being asked about is probably either free or close to it with carrier incentives.

Here on HN we are in a bit of a bubble. Most users of this site can just make a $500 purchase if they want to and not think about it. The median American's liquid savings are well under $10k, and buying the least expensive iPhone is a burden. "Buy an iPhone" is not a suggestion that should be made to a person who would have to put it on a credit card and would be unable to 0at.it off that month.

[filmgirlcw]

And you can get iPhone 14s for $99 on occasion as long as you commit to prepaid service from Total Wireless/Trac Fone for 3 months (so about $180 - so your total price for the phone and 3 months of service is about $300) or you can use carrier trade-in deals to get hundreds of dollars off an iPhone 17, as long as you stay on a postpaid plan and take the credit over 3 years.

Yes, there are way more options to get sub $500 Android phones, but pretending like an iPhone is too expensive for most Americans when carrier deals are often as good or better for iPhone options (to say nothing of the older phones being sold by Total Wireless and the like) and when more people in the United States use iPhone vs Android is a little bit silly.

We just got $1130 from Verizon for my husband's old iPhone 14 Plus towards his new iPhone 17 Pro (I get a new phone every year so I’m just on the Apple Upgrade plan or I buy it outright each year, whereas he gets a new phone every 3 years or so), making it essentially free (we had to change the plan he was on but it cost the same as the old plan) and if he’d wanted a regular iPhone 17, he could’ve dropped down to a cheaper phone plan too. A 16e would’ve been even less than that.

[DrewADesign]

I guarantee that a) they can get a hell of a lot more phone than that with carrier incentives, and b) if you compare Android phones released when that phone was released, you’re not going to see anything more than a hundred or two cheaper. And as much as I miss my salary, which was comparatively meager by standards here, I haven’t worked in the software business in years. I’m in my early career in a blue collar manufacturing trade, and not even in a major metropolitan area. I’ve been accepted into means-tested low-income programs within the past 6 months. I’ve got a pretty grounded understanding of what people outside of the Silicon Valley cultural sphere consider reasonable to spend on a phone, and what features they’d expect for it.