If the item has stayed the same and not exceeded inflation, you're doing fine. If it's stayed the same and is now lower than inflation, you're doing well. If it's a far superior item and is now lower than inflation, that is exceptional.
Prices should come down. They have not. I will not pay these prices. I will go without a cellphone before I pay that sort of money to make calls, send sms and read hn. I can’t understand why people buy these phones unless they’re rich, in which case the prices could actually be significantly higher. These are sucker prices to get poor people money. “Inflation adjusted your 1000$ telephone is actually saving you money!”
Pt Barnum quote.
Isn't this confusing what you choose to do (I also won't pay that much, but that's irrelevant) with economic reality? If Ferrari halved their prices, that would be incredible, but I still wouldn't buy one.
One cause of inflation is when there's a load of money borrowed and spent by government, e.g. on pandemic response, or an overseas war (which also raises prices through, say the price of fuel) and so the basic levers of the economy are pulled by said government to make interest rates higher, which inflates currency. So the exact same good produced in the same way will be more expensive (in amount of money paid).
In that case is it not childish to say that prices just "should come down", if we can't say why they should? Isn't it a good thing when companies give you a massively better product and also beat the inflation from government?
I believe the "danger " of deflation is a conveniently devised fable to keep the printing press running as a backdoor means of taxation without legislation. Inflation is a kind of hidden tax.
I've read all the arguments about the economy collapsing if things get cheaper over time and a vicious savings death spiral that can only be stopped with a steady 2% (and occasional 10%) annual inflation. But none of them address the fact that many of the hottest fastest growing industries are extremely deflationary.
This iPhone version will drop prob 10% a year in price and people will still line up to get it. And the deflationary pressure is so high that it's got the same dollar price as an inferior model from a few years ago. According to Keynsians, no one would buy it if they knew a better version for the same price was coming out next year!
So until someone can explain to me why deflation is awful and we need to continue to trust the central bank to create money out of thin air to keep the economy from collapsing, I'm going to think it's all a big scam.
Monetary Policy falls under Macroeconomics (eg. Currency Liquidity, Interest Rates, etc) and the price of an individual good (eg. iPhone) is Microeconomics, as you are dealing with a single localized variable and it's interaction with the dynamic system, not the entire dynamic system itself.
Also, old school Keynesianism hasn't really been played around with since the 50s.
Modern Macroeconomics has changed significantly since the early 20th century. A full explaination would take forever, but I'd recommend reading a basic Econ textbook like Mankiw's Principles of Economics to get started.
Econ is similar to ML - a lot of very complex ideas are being distilled into meme soundbite explanations that fail to provide an accurate explaination of very complex systems.
Specific examples of the negative effects of deflation include:
- The Great Depression, which began in 1929, was a period of severe deflation. The prices of goods and services fell by more than 25% between 1929 and 1933. This led to a decrease in aggregate demand, which caused businesses to cut production and lay off workers. The unemployment rate rose to over 25%, and the economy did not recover until the early 1940s.
- In the early 1990s, Japan experienced a period of deflation. The prices of goods and services fell by an average of 1% per year between 1992 and 1999. This led to a decrease in aggregate demand, which caused businesses to cut production and lay off workers. The unemployment rate rose to over 5%, and the economy stagnated for several years.
The reason these economic theories are widely believe is because of the close alignment with empirical observations.
That is basically correlation implying causation. Deflation has been happening with China mass producing cheaper goods than western world able to. My dollar able to purchase way more Nokia knock-off phones and yet my pay decrease during the same time. Yeah USA is experiencing decrease in aggregates demand. Economics are just number statistics fitting whatever school of economists decide to be. So many contradictions of theories in economics so bad that some have to actively attack the other schools (Misses? Chicago? Keynes?).
It's not a single localized variable. It's entire product lines.
For instance, cars. You can buy last year's model at a discount. Or software. Or TVs. All electronics.
Saying it's "micro" vs "macro" and a bunch of hand waving around dynamic localized variables is not an explanation.
The core argument of the danger of deflation is "no one will buy anything if they know the price is going to come down". I can point to several counter examples and I can't get a straight answer why this is not true in these examples, or why deflation is so dangerous not relying on that argument
I've read plenty of econ textbooks. I can easily explain why inflation is bad and it doesn't take me forever. Its a backdoor method of taxation. It robs people of their savings, especially the less fortunate who don't have their savings in financial assets. It also hurts mostly poor people that disproportionately spend their income on non-discretionary items like food and shelter. It provides uncertainty and inefficiencies and makes operating a business harder (in extreme cases). Every extreme inflationary cycle (and there are many examples) were disastrous in terms of any available metric (deaths, despair, poverty, crime, etc).
> The core argument of the danger of deflation is "no one will buy anything if they know the price is going to come down". I can point to several counter examples and I can't get a straight answer why this is not true in these examples, or why deflation is so dangerous not relying on that argument
I don't think this is the core argument of anything, assuming you are talking about consumer spending. a large chunk of consumer spending is on daily necessities like food. even with luxury items, deflation has to be quite strong to outweigh the desire to "have it now". inflation/deflation are most impactful to entities that are sitting on large amounts of cash. this does not describe the majority of consumers.
my understanding is that the major issue with deflation is on the investment/credit side. if you can get a solid risk-free return on your pile of cash, it lowers the incentive to do risky things like start a business or lend money to others to start a business. eventually the lack of credit and new investment decreases production to the point of reverting to an inflationary environment. this could either be a slow oscillation between the two or periodic shocks.
I think you're wrong about the "deflationary spiral" as not being the central argument as to why deflation is dangerous. You can see it featured predominantly in the Wikipedia for example.
As to no one investing, nominal interest rates are based in part on expectations and the risk free rate. Kind of like two years ago my savings account was paying nothing and now you can get close to 5% risk free just to park your money. So in a deflationary environment you can think of money appreciating in real terms ($1 would buy you more a year from now), so required investment rates would have to adjust.
But it's still true today with technology. If I raise money for an AI startup today I would be using the money to buy GPUs, but if I wait a year from now I'll be able to buy them more cheaply (or buy better ones). But people still raise money to buy quickly deprecating assets. Or if someone wants to start a Laundromat and buys quickly deprecating machines. Or any industry that requires capital investment in a deprecating asset
Of course you have to consider the deprecation of the assets you're buying but the world doesn't stop because prices go down and it's actually fairly healthy. And the benefit would be the opposite of the dangers I listed before about inflation. Imagine everyone getting a raise every year because of technologocal progress. Imagine spending less and less on groceries because we improve tech to deliver cheaper food. Instead that's all masked by money creation.
We don’t have to worry about deflation. As the older workforce starts dying off, and our labor force continues to shrink, everything is going to get more expensive due to lack of humans.
This is nice spin - not being a wise-ass - but wages, as we know, have not kept pace with inflation. This the type of lens those in leadership positions use to distract from more important underlying failures.
Apple will still make a boat-load of money. Nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, nearly everyone else's income has not kept pace with inflation. That is, using the 15's price as some sort of sociopolitical barometer is a false god.
That has to be true only for some countries in the world, but far from being the average. I don't think this applies to most of (western) Europe or Japan e.g.
Perhaps over the small window, but still lagging over the longer. So ultimately using the shorter window is data cherry-picking. Yes, the iPhone has a definitive start so the window makes sense, but keep in mind citizens / workers / taxpayers / consumers were plenty behind inflation at that point.
Anecdotally, I don't think I know anyone who believes they're ahead of inflation.
Housing is a component of the consumer price index used to measure inflation. The proportion matches the proportion of household spending that most USians spend on housing.
Of course, not every household is the average household. Some households spend more of their spending on things that have increased more than the average household. Some spend less of their spending on such things.
And, of course, even if the average wage has risen quicker than inflation, that doesn't mean any specific household's wages have.
I said "average" not "mean". The median is a form of average.
BLS looks at mostly median households in the survey dataset, but also considers means of some aggregates, when choosing weightings of goods in the basket.
I suspect in the specific case you're talking about -- housing -- using the mean would overweight housing in the basket.
I had the same thought. It is nice Apple is not raising the price this year. But when people's food, energy, housing costs go sky high relative to wage increases, discretionary income goes down, so that shiny new Iphone (even at this same price) become less affordable.
i currently own a moto G30 that i bought like 2years ago. i got it for like 10K inr or around US $110. it works for taking calls, photos, mindless scrolling on lemmy.
I DO NOT FEEL FOMO when i'm the one on the hook for 10x more money when the marginal benefit over the current device is not enough for me.
I've never gone big for a phone. As you said, as long as it does what it needs to do, I'm good. For privacy reasons, I was strongly considering the 15. But with USB2 or USB3 for top dollar? I'm doing some rethinking. Maybe my carrier will offer a deal?
The current "iPhone" is a low-cost parts bin model that was first introduced as the iPhone 5C. The current iPhone should be compared to phones in that family (5C, XR, SE, 8, and 11-15), not to the actual iPhone family (Original, 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 6, 6S, 7, X, XS, and 11-15 Pro).
Still, the $999 price started with the iPhone X (2017), they have been keeping it for 6 years. I know because I'm finally upgrading my old iPhone X for the iPhone 15 Pro, and it surprised me that it would be "cheaper" this time (inflation-adjusted).
Gsmarena just wrote a "do not buy" recommendation. The pro they like. The plain 15 they feel is underpowered and overpriced and has usb2 speeds behind the usb-c where the pro goes 10gigabits.
I actually think that’s a terrible take. Maybe they are just salty about the USB speeds, a feature that is irrelevant for the vast majority of people. The A17 in the Pro is an extremely marginal improvement over the A16 of about 10%.
The iPhone 15 vs 14 has the better main camera with 4x the resolution, usb-c charging, dynamic island, upgraded processor, and twice the peak brightness. Seems like a totally solid upgrade for MSRP 100 bucks!
It can have USB0 speeds and it would make no difference. Since iCloud and Airdrop over a decade ago, I haven't synched a photo or file from or to my iPhone since.
But many people care more about spec comparisons than real life impact.
There are probably plenty of reasons to skip the 15, but this is about as niche as it comes. Survey nearly any user and ask about the transfer speed between lightning, usb2 and usb3 and the most common answer will be "no idea and who cares?" I'm a techy and I haven't plugged in my phone for data transfer in years. Complain that Apple pinched pennies here, but it matters to almost no end users. And those few who do care, would likely get the Pro anyway.
I haven't plugged my 13 into anything, ever. Magnetic charging, iCloud, and AirDrop do the trick. It's not a bad place to cheap out on the entry-level devices.
To me it’s interesting that a phone with that much battery life, CPU, memory, fast Wi-Fi, hi-res OLED display, and a pretty great camera is considered entry-level. It comes with an office suite and great music and video production apps.
The chip inside the iPhone 15 doesn’t have the redesigned I/O block from the iPhone 15 Pro. It’s also the same chip that was designed and used in the iPhone 14 Pro, which had Lightning and USB 2.0.
So they are possibly, more or less, using a chip that was designed for USB 2.0 over Lightning, with an integrated Lightning to USB-C adapter.
The alternative is a full chip redesign, which is not cheap, especially when the iPhone 16s will inherit the redesign next year.
USB3 isn't just a free upgrade though. It costs in terms of routing (extra wires/pins), it costs in terms of power (USB3 uses way more power during transfers), and it costs more in terms of silicon area, obviously. If the USB3 controller is as large as portrayed in the die shots for the new chip, that's actually a considerable cost in die area alone.
It's disingenuous to say "it was released 14 years ago, what took so long?". Plenty of old technology is used when it is appropriate. If there's no valuable reason to adopt newer standards, it's a waste of money and engineering effort. The only reason, as far as I can tell, that other vendors all have USB3 is because Qualcomm put it in their chipset and forces vendors to buy it.
Also, to nitpick, they're supporting 10gbit speeds for the pro, which was a spec released 6 years ago. Relatively recent as far as spec adoption goes.
Also, to nitpick, I have Transcend JetFlash 780 thumb drive from 2014 which allows me to copy files faster than 25MB/s. It wasn't released 6 years ago.
Well, it's fairly obvious if you are reading the tea leaves that they never intended to move on from Lightning, but the EU forced their hand. There's no rational logic otherwise for delaying the move so long.
Also, it takes 1-3 years to design a chip. Apple's probably finished with the A18 design at this moment and working on A19. They might, honestly, even be nearly finished with A19 and talking about A20. When the A16 was designed, the idea of being forced to move to USB-C was probably not a consideration, and they were probably still hoping that the wireless accessories / MagSafe system would take off even though it clearly hasn't by now. Which is stupid on their part but as an investor, I wouldn't want them to waste a billion or so for the sake of undoing the past to give USB 3 on iPhone 15s.
unless they mysteriously want to backup 128gb of stuff. then it more than matters. the speed difference is absurd.
normal people cant care less what majority thinks, because they (normal people) know that in 2023 this is spit in the face for extreme amount of money. none of fanboy excuses can change that.
I can understand some very niche use cases, so it totally makes sense on the Pro. Like if you are using an iPhone for professional video work (sounds suspicious, but let’s go with that) then you can shoot in 4k raw directly onto a SSD. Or if you are doing some video editing on iPhone and want to hook up a 4k display.
People get so weird about this stuff though. I never once heard a complaint that iPhone was limited to USB2 speeds till the Pro finally upgraded to Usb3.
While "do not buy" is too strong, I would agree that the Pro seems like a better deal than in other years. This is probably on purpose, a way to nudge people to buy the Pro, which I'm sure has bigger margins. (I still wouldn't buy it.)
Blanket recommendations almost useless. There are a lot of different situations someone might be in (e.g. someone might have a five year old iPhone and their carrier is offering an incentive).
120Hz is useless without a stack that can run it. My 14 is supposed to have 60Hz, but scrolling through a lyrics page in an Apple Music would have you believe it’s 6Hz.
I’d much rather they go through and fix all the jank that already exists scattered across the floor than raise the ceiling some more.
