They’re being sold to in terms of dollars per month, which makes a very oversized purchase sound reasonable if no one spells out the end results. We tend to value having the thing now more than being totally broke later.
Also, peoples means keep staying the same or shrinking while everyday purchases get more expensive.
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I think that’s the hidden cause of increasing phone pricing. I’m still using my note 9. The battery is starting to give so maybe this time next year I finally upgrade.
Smartphone sales are at their lowest since 2013. Everyone has figured this out now.
Since 2018, the trend seemed to be going toward removing features instead… sd card slot, headphone jack, physical buttons, intrusions of screen space…
Foldable are pretty neat, but still too expensive for most
Been eyeing that (still on a 6 year old phone), actual compactness is one of the few things I’d be willing to sacrifice most of the smartphone things I like for.
I have the fold and I wouldn’t call it compact, the flip style phones seem better for that aspect, I just enjoy the large screen when I use it for gaming or watching videos, it’s certainly more compact then if I had a tablet instead I suppose.
Might be better to wait and let it mature a bit if size is your main concern.
I was going to go with the Z Flip over the Fold, I’d want that half size phone.
The flip is pretty great, you can close the pockets on the front of your shirt now if you wear those type. First phone I’ve managed to not smash or send up a grain auger.
consumers have noticed, since sales of smartphones have plateaued
I saw commercials last december encouraging people to take out a special low interest loan specifically for holiday shopping. LOADS of shopping platforms offer a “buy now, pay later” option.
Yowch that’s like a free ticket to January misery…
Trucks (In the USA)
I’m in this FB group that does financial advice with a little sarcasm and jokes mixed in. Suggest that someone should downsize to a car or get rid of their gas guzzling truck they have no real utility for and it’s like you’ve insulted their religion. Never seen such a group of grown adults throwing temper tantrums like that in my life.
thats just an average facebook group, for anything
where i live renting a small room is more expensive than all minimum starting salaries i have seen, and you also need to pay two months rent upfront, and the security deposit is equal to 12 months of rent and because of high inflation that means you are literally paying an extra months worth of rent just on the deposit alone (which goes up by inflation).
so people telling me how much life is worth living? cause that’s certainly beyond my means.
security deposit is equal to 12 months of rent
Jeez. Why the hell are landlords asking for a downpayment on a home they are leasing?
Silly, that’s a down payment for the next house to turn into a rental.
Because some tenants will just stop paying and refuse to leave. Some will trash the place and sell everything they can pry off and either disappear or just move on. Trying to go after them is a long legal battle and the end result can be that they have no money and you’ll get nothing.
Security deposits are security deposits. 12 months sounds crazy though. That really is enough for a downoayment in many places.
cause they can, and it’s a good source for an interest free loan. i mean who would pass on the opportunity to get an interest free loan where you can arbitrarily deduct the amount you owe?
Iphones being some sort of standard
Peer pressure on behalf for corporations is such a silly thing in my opinion…
My preferences only extend to what I want, I don’t really care what others use unless they are looking for suggestions/advice.
One big thing is people will often buy for a niche that they don’t need (like buying a big truck because they go to home depot once a month to get 2x4 and the other (in tech mostly) is “its for future proofing bro”
What if we future proof with full intent to use until it’s chugging?
Because I will be very unhappy if my pc needs new parts by 2045
Let me put it this way, you could buy a 4090 now for 2k, then get prolly like 7-10 years out of it, or you could get something more midranged for like 300-400, and if you upgrade every other gen for the same price that means you spent at most 1200 which is more than 50% less than if you’d gone for the 4090 to be “future proof”
Just wait until 2031 when they end support for Windows 11 and require you to have an 18th Gen CPU to run Windows 12.
Running Windows clearly belongs on this list.
I manage about three dozen PCs, it’s only like 5% of my job. I’m starting to move some of them to a Linux Mint Cinnamon distro but it doesn’t work for all of my use cases. Even at home, I have a lot of really niche software solutions for things I do and games I like that aren’t supported yet on Linux. I honestly don’t know what I’ll do when Win10 support ends, my PC is pretty decent, I’m nowhere near ready to replace it. I play new games at 1440p/144fps at nax settings with very few frame drops.
The problem with future proofing is that you can never predict what new feature will end up becoming the next big thing or the next bottleneck. Sure, if everything works out exactly as predicted, if what the companies said was going to be the next big thing, really did end up being the next big thing, then you’d be future proof for up to 10 years. But then what if it turns out that the next big thing wasn’t what anyone predicted it was going to be? Think about the whole VRAM issue that came up last year. Almost overnight, supposedly high end GPU’s got instantly re-evaluated to be not worth the money. DLSS, too - the newest version only supports the newest generation. And mesh shaders - even some GPU’s from a couple years back don’t support it. Out of all the things that people predicted was going to be the next big feature, how many actually ended up being the next big feature? You end up just as worse off as if you had just went for a lower-tier option.
I’m not advocating for replacing your GPU frequently. Far from it. But the argument of splurging on an excessively overkill tech part for futureproofing is just marketing mumbo jumbo
I paid like $29 for Taco Bell the other day 😉
The $5 Value box became the $6 Value Box, then the $9, then the 10, 15, 20…
I’m still amazed anything on that menu costs more than fifty-nine cents 😅
You can ruin a bathroom for far cheaper.
LOL yeah, but they closed my local Arby’s 😌
Home Depot sells hot dogs.
Yeah, but when you try to order one the guy takes off in the other direction.
Shop like a billionaire
Mountains of people bad at math convincing bigger mountains of people even worse at math that they can’t afford anything of major value.
So in turn they go and spend what money they do have because why bother saving it if you’ll “never afford a x”
In reality most of the “you can’t afford this and that” shit is built on top of bad math and content creators that don’t understand how shit works.
And literally anyone with basic math skills can just go look for themselves and discover how bogus the claims are, or how much they misrepresent the state of things.
But nope, it’s easier to give up and just buy forty Stanley Cups instead!
They are paying 2/3rds of their income from a 80 hour warehouse job for a 1 futon closet in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, and then being told they are living too frivolously by assholes.
rent and housing run by the bank
collecting tumbler
Why is everyone so excited about NHL trophies this year?
That’s one thing that I’ve only heard about second-hand.
Buy Now Pay Later is what’s exacerbating this. People are dumb, have short attention spans and most of them are statistically bad at basic math, so when they see a purchase that they can make without paying anything now they’ll hit buy and they’ll do it many times as the e-commerce platform will usually recommend other products to them they’ll likely want, they won’t do the calculation to see if they really can afford the split payments + the interest.
Be selling them the idea the end of the world is nigh. Who cares about the 30 year mortgage if everything’s going to be gone in 10 years?
That sort of thing. By selling the idea that our existence is short, they encourage near-term thinking.
