Defining a phone as worth owning as "being able to run android" is very arbitrary. I believe that nothing but the iphone is worth owning because the other's can't run iOS yet. Android just isn't suitable for real world usage yet.
Hand me an iPhone, and I have zero clue what to do beyond the superficial launcher similarities; I'd have to Google anything that's not immediately obvious. Android is simple to use because it already uses the semi-universal UI language that all other OSes (Windows, Linux's gaggle of DEs, ChromeOS, etc) and apps use.
The only people I know that own iPhones IRL are older people who aren't tech savvy (and all of them admit they don't know how to use their phone, and only make phone calls, text messages, and Facebook shit with it); I don't know a single Gen X, Millennial, or Gen Z (in or outside of the tech industry, in or outside of the US) with one.
If Android is "not suitable for real world usage", then no phone is.
If like 50% of people use iPhones, which they do, how can it be possible to not know anyone young who uses one? Just doesn’t pass a common sense test to be true.
How does that change if the majority is small or large? Like 1% or 10% what difference do you think that makes?
> The only people I know that own iPhones IRL are older people who aren't tech savvy
Where do you live? Overwhelming majority of tech people I know in the US and UK use MacBooks and iPhones. That’s academia, systems programming, web services. Very very rarely see anyone using anything but macOS.
Probably a developing country. In the US iPhones have almost 100% market share among young people. I'm in Australia and almost everywhere I have worked has been a Mac place. Schools also all use Macbooks unless they can't afford them.
Most of the tech people I know have long since dropped Apple because of death by a thousand cuts. If you would have asked me even 5 years ago, I would have said half of them still belong to the cult of Mac, but not anymore; the only ones remaining are non-tech older folk.
A lot of HN's userbase lives in the silicon valley and the SF area, so maybe this is just a rather narrow focused regional thing? I only ever hear of cult members living in either the valley or SF, or alternatively, in Seattle, hardly anywhere else.
The proportion nationally is literally over 50%. They can't all be older people - that just doesn't factually add up, does it? You must be living in a very strange bubble, completely unrepresentative of the rest of the country.
The reality is most people with a phone use an iPhone. Any tech or academic conference I go to, most people are using MacBooks.
The people I know who used to only buy Macbooks have switched to Surfaces or those Dells and HPs that have milled aluminum bodies like Macs; and now, recently, I know several that recently bought Frameworks (and love them).
Are you sure you aren't just confusing all the milled aluminum laptops with Macs, and all the black glass slabs with iPhones? I've even had someone confuse my OnePlus as an iPhone (until I showed them that I didn't have that giant ugly notch that iPhones have; apparently running Android wasn't a big enough hint to them).
I don't know how they qualify those results; they don't publish anything resembling scientific work. Like, how do they counter-balance that Android users need to replace their phones less often? Apple users usually buy the new phone every gen, instead of every 3rd or 4th gen (Apple screens and batteries tend to die quickly); so, it seems active Apple users should be 1/3rd or 1/4th of active devices, not half.
Sales in of themselves don't mean much if you're comparing Apples to oranges (ahem) with a disposable phone vs one that isn't.
You are also saying on one hand that most iPhones are purchased by older non tech-savvy people while at the same time claiming that those same people buy a new phone every generation. That is hard to believe.
