This is frustrating, I have had a growing distrust (and just frustration with the software in the first place) of DisplayLink with the Dock that I use, I would love alternative software.
This also just seems stupid to me, you don't pay for the DisplayLink software you pay for the hardware. More options for how to use your hardware would be a good thing to them would it not?
Though it sounds like much of the issue was that it wasn't really "clean-room" which is a separate issue. Though unclear if that really is at the root of it or not.
I've been an extremely unhappy DisplayLink customer because it's clear they don't care about their Linux customers, only I bought the thing because *Synaptics* advertised Linux support!
Vino is the only thing stopping me from throwing the damn thing away and makes me far more likely to buy another / recommend DisplayLink hardware to a friend.
That's the problem when you have lawyers in charge. To a lawyer, Drivers and Hardware are the same thing: IP. That IP needs to be "protected", period, end of story.
Funny thing is hardly anyone wants to buy the bullshit their protecting anymore, enshittification is a direct result of the protectionist economy these lawyers created.
I would want to hear what the sound is like but it seems like it could be a good replacement for my OG HomePods while adding some new features, even if the screen is minimally useful.
I wonder how well the multi-user stuff works? Are we going to have to authenticate to this thing many times a day?
Is this going to work like the Apple TV device? On that you have to pick a user when it starts but then when you open an app like Hulu, you have to pick a user there as well. Why doesn't the Apple TV tell Hulu what profile to use?
Worse, if you open Spotify it just starts with the last user that authenticated so I never know who's account I'm vandalizing as I listen to stuff and star songs as favorites.
Unless they've figured out the multi-user stuff, maybe it would be better to just create a famliy devices Apple ID and use that for shared devices?
HomeKit isnt new though, the accessories are the same accessories that have existed for years. Sure Apple has announced new ones today, but its just more options.
Home Automation has always been expensive regardless of the ecosystem your in.
What I find most surprising, is that I don't think we got any sort of timeline from Apple on this change and its very vague (which just fuels articles like this).
So did this initiative within Apple just start and we could be looking at this change coming in Mac 28?
I don't remember another time of an announcement like this from Apple of a major change with so little information, though I could be wrong or hint of when.
Regarding the concern, while I do hope that there is still a way to grant actual full disk access to some applications. Even Apple called out a non controversial need for something like that, backup software. I can also think of security scanning software, a lot of businesses have those deployed to corporate Mac's. I do also think that better controls around it, especially in this age of vibe coded apps that never actually think about security or actively hostile companies like meta.
With some of what they showed, I wish they never separated iOS and iPadOS. The duo seems to be bringing more of the iPad features and if they could position this as one device to replace both (and the price point sure reflects that) it could be interesting.
But without that, I don't see the use for myself. Though I also rock a 13" iPad Pro so even with that it would be a hard sell to replace both.
I still am not sold on the entire idea of a foldable, there is some interesting things here and I will be interested to see how they position it over the next few generations.
I wish that too. Too many convenience features on both sides that are accidentally or intentionally not making it over, even when they would apply to both. I wish it had to be an explicit decision to lock functionality to only iPad or iPhone, rather than it having to be an explicit decision to make functionality available to both. Make the more likely decision the default.
What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
I don't know of a digital marketplace that works differently.
But instead all of the hate, the boycots, etc are all targeting Sony instead of focusing on actually figuring out how to improve digital purchase rights which extend beyond games (and far beyond Sony).
I know that some online hate it when you compare this situation to PC since there is choice there, but not when it comes to this. Sure you can choose which store you want to not really own things with but its the same result. Steam did this a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1g19n60/steam_now_te...
> What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.
Lik Sang was awesome back in the day for procuring accessories like classic XBOX controller to USB adapters that weren't dodgy duct tape jobs. Hard to believe they were forced out of business by Sony two decades ago.
They had all kinds of weird stuff which the big makers didn't want to exist - adapters to use Xbox controllers on Playstation and every permutation you could think of.
All the big console manufacturers sued them. Said it was about modchips (and maybe it really was). Sony bore the most guilt.
The gaming industry is a little less wonderful these past 20 years.
Indeed. I find myself going back to older games anymore. Aside from maybe looking forward to GTA 6, I can't say I'm terribly interested in many modern titles. It's becoming more soulless.
I maybe should have phrased that better since I do understand their announcement around disks and removing the movies is a reason why they are the current target.
I just find it hypocritical, people keep saying they are going to move to xbox or pc next gen and its like. Their policy is exactly the same. You have the same risk and not really ownership.
And I am not defending Sony, they have a long history of getting cocky with their consoles and pulling some shit. But in this particular case they are following the trend that we allowed by going all digital on PC and buying digital games on consoles.
Sony isnt going to be the one that changes this, the only way to expect change would be targeting all of them including Valve. But everyone, like this article, just seems to gloss right over that and seem to imply its only Sony that is the problem here.
On consoles in general, backing up digital media (if even possible) requires full-system exploits, thus bypassing DRM, and decrypting them also requires breaking DRM
Woah, we're not talking about cracking your games. I think every console from at least the last two generations has supported copying game files to external/removable media.
Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct. Copying doesn't matter if it doesn't produce a usable backup.
If you remove the DRM, then you do actually own the thing for practical purposes. And non-ownership of things you buy is unjust, so entertaining the law here is silly.
> Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct.
Don't move the goalposts.
The only thing I am conceding is that conceptually it still ownership if you own the encrypted bits but they work fine with some other hardware that has the keys to decrypt them. I can backup my games on one playstation and play them on another.
Otherwise, we agree ideologically. At the same time I'm rhetorically supporting the point at the top of the thread that this has been a problem long before Sony decided to go digital. I am copyleft and anti-drm and whatever else you can imagine. It doesn't change the fact that there's a precedent that consumers will purchase drm games that require a rootkit to run under ambiguous terms that make it clear they don't own the bytes and it's a true observation that for some reason people allow this to happen on PC but when Sony does it it's the end of the world. I think to make progress here you need to address the root of the issue legally, not attack Sony for doing what society has condoned for decades.
You can't back up your encrypted bits on one machine and use them on another without constant permission from Sony though. Other hardware doesn't have the keys to decrypt them (actually this is it's own issue: it's obviously a very monopolistic, anticompetitive move that you can't run a PS5 game on a commodity PC because of their encryption). As far as I know, Valve's "DRM" just calls into a dll that asks Steam whether you own it, and you can just give it your own implementation of the Steam API dll that says you do. Or many titles on Steam don't have any DRM at all.
There are reasons to criticize Valve (gambling, microtransactions, "achievements"), but they seem to be too busy making money to want to do DRM.
You can’t back up your games on one PC and use them on another without constant permission from Value either. It’s the same and that is all I’m trying to point out. DRM is a red herring, the real problem is the phone home always online bullshit.
Both Valve and Sony run a completely legal video game platform service. There are minor differences here and there, of course… but this is 100% a general intellectual property law problem, not an instanced technical implementation issue.
Let's put the actual numbers in front of people: 1,924 out of 43,179 games, or 4.4%, as of today (according to PCGamingWiki) are DRM free.
The vast majority check whether you've purchased the game at runtime. If you stick to only indie games and the one off AA or AAA with no license check on Steam then sure thou-art-holier.
I think the argument is more precisely made by saying: on Steam, while the platform supports DRM, the decision is up to the publisher whether or not a game will use it and at least that provides the option for consumers to speak with their wallet and play only DRM free games. On Playstation it's all or nothing, you have to reject the entire platform/ecosystem if you want to avoid DRM.
At large, the problem still remains that our society allows DRM in the first place and if people want to avoid it then they need to be principled activists.
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy... but it is easily removed
And it takes about 2 seconds to find the removal tools on github. So you can treat Steam's DRM as basically non-existent. This is unlike consoles, which require kernel exploits or hardware modifications to bypass.
So we agree that Valve, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all operate platforms that support DRM. Wonderful!
I'm not interesting in bickering over who's DRM is the easiest to remove XD
In the US it's not piracy to make archival backups of digital media that you own in the first place, anyway. Even so, nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA (except for your rights under the DMCA to create archival copies) regardless of whether you backed up the media with or without the DRM.
To put it plainly your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software. I think that's an issue that should be solved, we likely agree, but let's not pretend that the situation with Steam is somehow healthy for society whereas with Sony it's not just because the DRM is slightly easier to circumvent.
> nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA
Correct, that right is innate.
> your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software
It does. Not even morally, but legally. Sony litigated this and lost, but bankrupted the emulator developer in the process. Emulators and compatible hardware and software have been consistently ruled legal. It is only the bypassing of copy protection that is not.
And if you're not interested in the feasibility of asserting your rights by removing the DRM, then naturally you'll never understand why people consider Valve and Sony materially different.
How do you backup game files from a console, to an external drive/location that you own; and ensure the validity of that backup will still be usable on the console later?
It's not, though. Their ToS is the same. They reserve to right to deny you ownership of your games. Only Sony has been stupid enough to actually do it.
Every ToS in the world is designed to screw the signee over as much as it possibly can, so you'd need to go live in the woods if you wanted to escape it, but there is a tangible difference between how much companies actually abuse the provisions in their ToS. I don't know how you can say "Microsoft reserves the legal right to drill a hole in my skull" and "Sony is actively drilling a hole in my skull" are `exactly the same`.
So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?
Instead of actually trying to fix the issue we just hope that Valve never has to do the thing they are legally allowed to do because we agreed they could.
I honestly don't care who has done what, I don't care what company is supposedly better than another company.
Overnight Valve, Microsoft, whoever could just as easily remove access to a bunch of digital purchases.
How about instead we just don't excuse any of the companies?
Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.
Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight.
The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to me that all of this is focused on Sony. And frankly I don't have a good solution here, but just arguing that one TOS is better than another because one company hasn't done the thing yet but could is not a good argument.
How many times have we seen management change, companies being bought, whatever and suddenly something really bad happens.
I am just getting really frustrated by Sony this, Sony that. Boycot sony, etc when if all we do is move to another platform with the same policies do we really expect anything to change?
We are in the most emotionally driven period of human history to date where reasoning takes a back seat. It's super frustrating but once you realize this instance isn't a one off you can start to focus on the bigger picture. I'm not saying this makes it less frustrating, but perhaps it'd help you to cast things in a new light. You're mostly talking past people who are dunking on Sony right now, because they are more interested in riding the emotional wave than actually making sense of the situation. Never mind that owning a physical disk has pretty much been dead for the better part of a decade or two anyway with day 1 patches and online activations. GIVE ME PHYSICAL DISK. To be 100% honest I think people want to put games on their shelf and look at them and any whiff of an argument is just people grasping at something, anything, rather than something based.
People did risk assessments with VMWare and we see how that turned out.
Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily.
Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just because of your "risk assessment" doesn't mean that Valve is suddenly safer, just just means so far they have been safer.
I am not saying don't use Valve, but there is zero reason to believe they could not just as easily do this.
Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same. The argument is that the risk posture is the same. You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value, which is an individual value judgement and thus incredibly far from an assumed fact. Some people do care about posture more than value and different people weight value differently as I'm sure your thousands of assessments have uncovered.
In any event, I think with all the data you'd see that Value has also removed games from its platform. So I'm not sure the value gap is even as wide as you seem to be implying.
>Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same.
please re-read the part i quoted from the parent, where they say it's the same risk.
>You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value
i did not say "the only thing that matters" anywhere.
you, and the parent, are reading something into my comments that i have not written. the only thing i said is that the risk is not the same because sony has a pattern of behavior worth considering.
To be clear, you never owned the games, you own the disk that contains the games. The right they are reserving is to revoke your legal access to the games you're licensing. They can't repossess the disk, but they can deny you the right to use what's on it. Obviously digital-only also exists, in which case you own literally nothing. All that remains is the contingent access that they legally have control over.
To be clear, when I use the phrase "deny you ownership of your games", I'm talking in Common English, not legalese. We don't actually have to normalise this. Legalese aside, the social contract for decades has been that you own your digital purchases. Now that the social contract is being violated, we certainly should be striving to enshrine it in law via regulation, which would also render any amount of ToS legalese to be worth as much as digital toilet paper.
I think you're under-appreciating the importance. It's not just pedantry. This has been true since EULAs have existed. And it's kinda insane that people think owning a disk gives them ownership of the intellectual property contained on it. You've always been given a license. The difference is that you can often transfer that license by selling the physical copy of a game whereas most digital licenses are exclusive.
The ability to deny ownership does exist these days. Sony can push an update that bricks your Playstation.
So this whole thing is actually an argument over whether games should be made available in a form that allows license transfer (which I support) or not. But it's a fair point to argue that for any actual benefit the remedy has to be applied globally, not just to Sony.
Like the other commenter said, we don't have to normalize this. A reasonable jury can and should find that Sony pushing an update to intentionally brick Playstations is criminal destruction of property, regardless of what some EULA says. And we can make it very clear in the law that that's the case, and prosecute any individuals involved.
Sony can add a signature to a list and your game stops launching even if it's a physical disk is the point. We should fight back legally and prevent publishers from trampling on the rights of individuals to use bits they paid money to presumptively own. If I buy a digital asset nobody should be able to take that away from me. You can stop selling it but it shouldn't be allowed to be disabled in the field. Seems like something our society could agree on and legislate 100%.
The problem is that ownership is itself a legal fiction, so it's kind of necessarily legalese. It's interchangeable with "legitimate control" in common parlance. IE if I break into your house and throw you out of it, I don't suddenly own your house. Even though I'm in possession of it, the control I have of it isn't legitimate. Ownership is the guarantee that your possession and control of something can be defended by our society's conflict resolution mechanisms, in this case that's the legal system.
While socially we might disagree with the law on the validity of licensure in this context, that changes the domain a bit. I do have ultimate control over the games I've purchased on Steam, regardless of the law's opinion, even though they're technically licensed. I back up every game I buy, away from where Steam could be able to know to delete it or even discover it. If my legal license is revoked, I still have control over the bytes. With a steam emulator I can still access most of them (and the remainder can be fixed by setting an LLM about cracking them) but this isn't legitimate in the eyes of the law. Practically speaking it doesn't matter in the slightest what the law thinks on this matter.
Now let's consider that the rhetoric here generally includes Steam's arrangement as a perpetrator of "you will own nothing". But given the above, that's a hard circle to square. In your proposed notion of ownership, ostensibly I own everything I bought on Steam. With a little bit of technical literacy (and the money for storage, which is easier said than done these days) it can be true of anybody. It's only in the eyes of the law that I don't actually own anything, and the DMCA probably has plenty to say about it.
So do we use the legal definition, or is it merely the possession of the software and means of access that constitute ownership? It's exactly this edge case which is why I insist on this pedantry. Otherwise the violation of ownership at the hands of Sony begins and ends with the fact that it's not an open platform with software freedom. I'm very amenable to making that be our standard here, of course, I think at minimum the freedom to do as you please with a personal computer is an ethical and moral directive.
Perhaps what we as a society need is that what you actually buy is a "license to download". Upon being in possession of the bytes, you own them. For as long as you maintain the integrity of those bytes, they're yours. Of course, redistributing them to other parties would constitute an IP violation, but that's not a problem to concern a storefront. If your license is revoked, what you are actually losing is the ability to download.
1. steam does not have a monopoly on distribution rights for PC games. if steam were to go bankrupt publishers could honor your keys and even other marketplaces could do it. steam themselves let you bring your own key.
2. steam has been a benevolent marketplace leader, even though DRM itself plays against customers, the rest of the stuff they pushed while leading, like game sharing, play and refund, offline playing, are pro consumer.
3. why would your knee jerk reaction to this is pointing a finger to steam, what's your endgame?
Sure they have said and claimed a lot of things, but their TOS says the same thing that Sony is arguing. Its suddenly this big shock now but no one cared before? Sure the way Sony is handling this is fumble after fumble but thats PR.
My problem is that Valve for some reason gets a free pass because "they are the good guys" when their own policy means they could do the exact same thing.
I own a lot of games on Steam, but I am not nieve to assume that there is not a chance that at some point I could loose all or some of those games. People are for some reason in a false sense of security about Steam and that is a problem. They have to be part of the conversation when it comes to digital ownership. Ignoring them means we can't actually solve the issue.
Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago and people can't get over how much they love everything about Valve. Sony follows 20 years later (in a world where internet is faster than installing from BluRay and games are outgrowing three layer discs) and people lose their mind.
There's more noise about this than Microsoft's mass layoffs at the game companies they bought up.
Physical PC games weren't great in the 2000s. Online activated serial keys, optical disc based DRM that caused problems during both the 9x>NT and XP>Vista transitions, the only thing that made PC gaming tolerable for me was gamecopyworld. Valve (eventually) offered something better than that.
PC games can still be physical. Burn some discs or copy the files onto a USB stick and put it in a box. I think it's crazy that boutique companies like Limited Run Games completely avoid the platform when it's the only one left that isn't actively hostile to the core principles of the company. Admittedly PC does have the image of being a digital distribution only platform these days, but it's illusory and breaking that illusion is a marketing problem.
People were pretty pissed about the xbox layoffs, it's just that things move fast and this was the next thing.
I disagree with the assertion that Valve is responsible for the death of physical game copies.
First off, console games have gradually moved away from offering physical copies for years. This had the (probably deliberate) effect of killing the used game market. Earlier attempts to kill that market were driven by the proliferation of digital content that could not be resold.
Second, physical copies on the PC have not been guaranteed for a very long time. I would suggest it was actually the wide-scale proliferation of indie games that did more to kill the physical copy market than any deliberate transition from AAA studios. There are thousands of indie games out there now. Without digital copies, it would be impossible for anyone to actually purchase any of them.
And the momentum to move away from physical copies for PC gaming has been there for a very long time. No one was going to Best Buy to pick up a physical copy of minesweeper. There have been other factors as well, such as the popularization of MMORPGS which provided years of content from a single physical copy.
Really though, the idea that without Valve, the PC gaming market would still be chugging along on physical game copies just isn't realistic. It goes completely against the momentum built over the last 25 years of PC gaming.
- Sony has a track record of removing purchased media en masse, while Valve does not.
- While it could be argued that Valve runs an effective monopoly of the PC platform based on their marketshare, Valve operates on a platform with competitive options including DRM-free stores.
- Game consoles have always been more attached to physical media than PCs.
- Sony is the largest player in the market (disregarding mobile phone gaming) with more total marketshare than Valve and the PC platform. This makes them a much more visible target.
> Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago
Boxed PC games were practically dead by the time Valve started selling 3rd party games on their marketplace. Most game stores around me had stopped selling them or massively shrunk the shelf space for them. Xbox, Gamecube, Playstation 3, they had whole walls of the store dedicated to their stuff. PC games had a couple of shelves in the middle of the store, if even that. Sales for PC games had massively fallen between 1999 and 2005 while the rest of the game industry exploded.
The industry had shrunk over a third in five years before Valve started selling online. You can't say it was "thriving".
Valve doesn't randomly remove stuff I've payed for from my library. Even when the ability to purchase something goes away, people who already bought it keep access to it.
They patched CS:GO away, a game I paid retail price for, with "Counter-Strike 2" and overnight dropped support for my platform (MacOS).
Sony has never stolen a game from me, unlike Valve. The closest incident was that movie thing, which was more a failure on their part to negotiate perpetual licensing with the rightsholder.
Valve pivoting away from MacOS is a consequence of choices Apple has made for their platform, many of which made it a more hostile place for Steam to exist. This is baked into the long standing Apple model of software distribution, where API and architectural changes inevitably obsolete software with Apple usually providing only a limited time window for cross compatibility.
You can still play your purchases on an operating system that isn't actively fighting against you running them.
CS:GO is still accessible via the beta feature. Not sure if you can still play it on MacOS. I agree that that's the wrong way to do it, but at least you still have access to it in theory.
Valve was a plucky underdog against the established publishers and, while dominant today, still has reasonable competition, sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
> sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
That's like saying Volkswagen has a monopoly on Volkswagen cars.
Sony clearly does not have a monopoly on the video game industry, and a plurality of video games are cross-platform across consoles, PCs (Windows/Linux), and even MacOS.
It would be slightly more accurate to say "volkswagen has a monopoly on volkswagen cars... and all accessories and replacement parts"
But the analogy breakdown because a car is more or less a complete item you buy and use for a purpose (aside from consumables) whereas a playstation is completely useless without games to play on it.
So maybe volkswagen brand gas would be the best analogy here.
Not really. I can plug a generic usb cable into my Playstation and it charges my aftermarket controller just fine. I can even use aftermarket screws or put the console in an aftermarket enclosure.
Except for the software ecosystem which is the main driver of revenue for consoles and exists largely to support the sale and distribution of products from third parties, all of which is centrally controlled by the platform holder.
Someone else in the thread made the comparison to fuel, I'll go with that. Last time I checked, there was no such thing as petroleum DRM.
Sony doesn't DRM the power that you use to run the Playstation either. But to try and meet the comparison: there are different manufacturers of fuel just like there are different publishers of games and while Volkswagen can't force you to not put standard fuel in your car they can certainly void your warranty if you don't use premium (and fuel is still tested and regulated for industry compliance).
I'm getting a tad lost, though. The point of the sub-thread is that Sony does not have a monopoly over the video game industry. They get to choose which games are allowed on their platform and under what terms. Consoles and Cars both have proprietary components and open interfaces. A console and car have different purposes. And the average consumer has broad discretion to use cars and consoles from whatever manufacturer they wish to.
It's easy to get lost in arguments where analogies are used. They're almost always terrible and are the death of nuance and detail. Fuck car analogies, a car isn't a video game console.
Sony host a massive, massive marketplace. That's where their monopoly lies, they have end to end control over distribution of not only their games, but anyone else who chooses to publish on the platform, in addition to control over how those games are played and on what hardware.
This hands them an enourmous amount of power over the third parties that make up the majority of software sales on their store. The way they've constructed their ecosystem and services also greatly disincentivises it's users from switching. Games aren't cross-compatible, so buying in for another console means they have to either keep their console (which they could otherwise have sold) or give up their library. Even keeping both means having to choose for one online service over another. These kinds of decisions might not matter to someone over a certain socioeconomic status, but it still matters to many.
I don't think that a market of it's size should legally be allowed to exist. It's exploitative by default and I would be supportive of the EU recognizing Sony as a "Gate Keeper" under the Digital Markets Act and taking appropriate regulatory action.
If as a society we want to create an information age bill of rights and (1) protect hardware ownership and right to root (without exploits), (2) require platform marketplace neutrality, and (3) require digital intellectual property be distributed under lifetime irrevocable and transferable licenses, then I’d happily sign my name, and not least because you’re solving the problem at the core.
> And the average consumer has broad discretion to use cars and consoles from whatever manufacturer they wish to.
Until you actually buy one.
Obviously there are levels of wealth where this is all irrelevant, either because buying every console is a relatively minor expense or because you can't afford any console whatsoever, but for the people in the middle where you can more or less afford a console, once you buy into one, you're now kinda stuck with it.
Volkswagen cars aren't a platform that fosters a billion dollar marketplace of third party sellers that contribute the bulk of value delivered by the product.
Apples and oranges. If you goal is to simply play games, well then there's plenty of hardware out there for you to use. If you want to play Sony exclusives then you have to use their hardware. If I want to get from point A to point B then I can use any vehicle. If I want to get from point A to point B in a Volkswagen then I have to buy a one.
A BMW and a Volkswagen are two kinds of apples. Both get you from A to B, which was the entire goal. A Sony exclusive and any other game are not two kinds of anything. If you can't tell these apart, perhaps you should go back to elementary school.
> A Sony exclusive and any other game are not two kinds of anything.
Are they not two kinds of games?
I'm arguing that your comparison isn't the right one.
A BMW and a Volkswagen are two types of apples. They both let you drive form A to B.
A Playstation and a Nintendo Switch are two types of oranges. They both provide entertainment in the form of video games.
How you drive (and how enjoyable your drive is) from A to B, or which games you play, are specific characteristics of the hardware you chose to use to accomplish the task. Neither of those are two types of anything, as it were.
steam also sells drm free binaries. the steam drm is optional and the publisher or Dev can choose to go without it
of course it's better that gog requires you go without it for the customer, but I'm not sure it helps in terms of legal rights. If gog shuts down you'll need to have your games backed up and downloaded to still own them and you won't have any license to a new download or etc
I honestly keep forgetting GoG exists but fair, maybe saying there is no choice is a bit much but if you want to play a given game it may not be available there meaning your choice is to not play it or deal with this.
I think it's because they're a huge player in the space and the PS5 appears to be the dominant player in the console space this generation. This affects so many people in their faces right now, where as the switch to "buying" movies on an online platform was more gradual as it was a new platform offering and not one that had had ownership from day one (arguably since 1994 with the PS1).
So in short, I think it's because they're the big guy making a very visible change to the broader public, instead of a new platform with a new way of doing things (how Steam was).
Sony announced they're not going to print more physical discs for games. So far no one else in the big three has confirmed they're doing this, so obviously the controversy goes to them
What they should do is just stay silent and stay the course. Everyone fucking knows in 10 years time physical media will be dead and all of this is water under the bridge.
I think the difference here is that sony is in the middle of taking down their ps3 store, and while they say you'll be able to download the games for the "foreseeable future" I don't think many folks have a great deal of confidence in this being true for for that long.
Valve has spent the better part of 20 years fostering a good relations with the gaming community and pretty much every gamer has a great deal of confidence that they'll protect your purchases.
Nintendo is the only one still selling video games that you own practically speaking, ie you own the cartridge and it has the game on it or at least has the key. Unless I'm out of the loop on that.
I gave up long ago trying to optimize any rewards, it just ended up being stressful and not really worth it ultimately.
Now I just use my apple card everywhere, pay it off every month and get whatever rewards I get.
It feels like a weird situation, those that stand to gain the most from credit cards are also the ones that should feel a difference of under $100 in rewards the least.
The one exception I see is bonus sign up rewards since those can be fairly significant, or making sure you use an airline card at the airline since those bonuses can be fairly significant (with sometimes other benefits). But outside of those exceptions, just choose a card with good rewards and stick with that and pay it off every month.
I gave up on optimizing and just use the Robinhood Gold 3% cashback card everywhere (except Amazon/WF, where I use their 5% Chase card). I can probably get more than 3% cashback in some categories on other cards, or more ROI by switch to points, high-tier cards like Chase Sapphire, and churning, but I just don't care.
The gain of a few thousand per annum is not worth the mental distraction.
I do the same. Just a single card for most spending, but has a bunch of handy features. I pay $50 a year for that, the convenience in case it gets stolen etc. I will say though that it's a little annoying to constantly transfer to the brokerage and then to the bank, but not too bad.
I've generally tried to stay with cash back rewards in categories that don't change, that's been the best way to balance complexity with rewards for me while not nudging me to buy stuff I don't actually need. I don't like messing with points or rotating categories or included subscriptions. With one exception I avoid annual fees as well.
So like, I have a card that's 6% on groceries, another that's 3% on gas and restaurants, Apple Card does 2% on Apple Pay transactions, and I have a 1.5% card for everything else.
> It feels like a weird situation, those that stand to gain the most from credit cards are also the ones that should feel a difference of under $100 in rewards the least.
It’s expensive to be poor. Higher interest rates, no credit card rewards, higher unit prices at places like Dollar General, etc.
I don't bother with rewards either, be it cards or memberships or whatnot - too much hassle if you're also working full time. BUT: one thing I use the credit card for and that is for the pay and travel insurance attached to it. Could I get it otherwise? Maybe, no idea. But if you don't carry debt (and I never do) there's no downside.
When I saw the announcement I was kinda hoping that they were taking a magic keyboard, tearing it apart and adding the extra hardware to make having this possible.
> If you decide to buy the device, the purchase option fee is the list price minus any lease payments you’ve made minus any remaining discounts or trade-in credit. (excluding tax and any damage fees).
Lets look at a couple examples:
iPhone 17 pro max would be $1199 to buy (~1273 with tax) or $34.99 for 24 months totaling $839.76. So would cost 433.33 at the end of the lease to keep it
The cheapest 16" MBP would be 2,999 to buy (3186.44 with tax) or $57.99 for 36 months (or 80.99 for 24 months). 2087.64 or 1943.76. So around ~1k to buy it at the end.
It looks like you can keep making payments for 6 months to lower the buyout price a little bit.
So worst case scenario this is a 3 and a half year interest free loan with a higher payment at the end.
Seems not terrible? As long as you treat it as a loan and not a lease you can end at any point it seems fine and nothing really shady about it. You still have the option to own the device for the original cost.
Other than the loss of the iPhone upgrade program and the yearly upgrades, am I missing something here? I guess the biggest thing is you likely can't just pay it off and be done with it if you had the money.
> iPhone 17 pro max would be $1199 to buy (~1273 with tax) or $34.99 for 24 months totaling $839.76. So would cost 433.33 at the end of the lease to keep it
A lot of people aren’t going to have that $433 at the end of the lease to purchase the device outright, and so will have to roll it into another 2-year monthly payment, and another one after that.
So the goal of the program is the same as every other similar one - they want to turn a one-time device purchase into a perpetual monthly revenue stream, while keeping ownership of the asset at the end.
> A lot of people aren’t going to have that $433 at the end of the lease to purchase the device outright
I think you're looking at this too much from the perspective of someone who wants to own the phone, not as someone who wants to consider a lease.
Leases are not a new invention. A lot of people, including very financially savvy and well off people, choose to lease rather than buy depending on the circumstances.
It preserves optionality. If you get to the end of the lease period and there’s a new iPhone you want or the battery isn’t holding up, you can choose not to buy it. You don’t have to deal with selling it or trading in.
If someone doesn’t have $400 to buy out the residual then I doubt they would have had the cash to pay for the whole thing up front. I don’t understand what your argument is.
> So the goal of the program is the same as every other similar one - they want to turn a one-time device purchase into a perpetual monthly revenue stream, while keeping ownership of the asset at the end.
It’s an option. They’re not turning anything into anything. Anyone who wants to buy the device can buy it. You now also have the option to lease it for 12 or 24 months and then after that you can still buy it if you want. Or you can not buy it.
I think this is exactly right — when the options on the table are:
- iPhone 17 (~$800)
- iPhone 17 Pro Max (~$1200)
a person may reasonably make the choice that they don't need the Pro Max and buy the regular 17.
Now, when the options are:
- iPhone 17 ($23/month)
- iPhone 17 Pro Max ($35/month)
$12/month extra doesn't seem too bad, except the fact that after 24 months you can't afford to keep the phone and are effectively forced to upgrade to a new iPhone.
I agree that more options are generally better for consumers, but these types of leasing programs are predatory and come at a time when everything is becoming a subscription.
Look, I have one camera with me and one child. As long as the camera gets better every year, I’m gonna want a better camera, every year. I don’t want to deal with carriers and trade-in shopping. Unfortunately this particular deal sucks compared tot he old one.
I’m not financially irresponsible. I value these devices highly and value my time.
They did - they turned a 24 month loan/AppleCare that you could re-swizzle with a new phone and exchange the device on the same terms (except the cost delta for the phone) to a shitty leasing arrangement that costs 25% more.
> That’s the entire point. They would have bought a cheaper phone
This kinda sounds like, "We should make it hard for people to make poor financial decisions." Which seems like an answer completely orthogonal to the problem at hand.
You know those financially irresponsible people don’t need this program, right? They would have used a credit card to buy it with much worse terms
You seem tilted at Apple for offering a financing option, but your real gripe is apparently with some people who have poor financial decision making skills. Those people could (and probably would) do a lot worse with traditional options like a credit card.
Can we at least compare apples to apples (hah) and look at the actual terms of the program here? Honestly they're not bad, and I say that as someone who leans toward purchasing outright.
> You know those financially irresponsible people don’t need this program, right? They would have used a credit card to buy it with much worse terms
I thought of this also. The question is whether they will now spend even more on the phone since they won't be paying as much in interest. If so, it's savvy of Apple to suck up that difference instead of letting it go to credit card companies.
Presumably Klarna's share is lower because Apple is rumored to be able to nerf these devices if a series of payments are missed. [1]
Leasing is just a financial transaction. You need to run the numbers, evaluate the alternatives, and peer at least a bit into the future. I've never leased a car and I doubt I'd lease a phone if only to keep my options open. (At the moment, I'm in the situation where I trashed an older phone on a hiking trip so I'll probably upgrade my iPhone 15 Pro sooner than I otherwise would just so I have a usable backup while traveling again.)
Those numbers aren't typical but it's still the case that credit cards generally have significantly higher interest rates if you don't pay in full by the due date than just about any other sort of loan (that admittedly not everyone can qualify for).
I still make jokes, even though it results in the occasional swipe from folks with deprecated sense of humor, that feel the need to take swipes at others.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> They would have used a credit card to buy it with much worse terms
average credit card interest rate: 18-25% APR [0][1]
average klarna effective interest rate:25-33% APR [2]
getting what are effectively individual lines of credit per-burrito or iphone is crazy work and I wouldn't recommend it most of the time. Save some money up, people!
> average klarna effective interest rate:25-33% APR [2]
> getting what are effectively individual lines of credit per-burrito or iphone is crazy work and I wouldn't recommend it most of the time.
I think this whole sub-thread has gone off track from people who aren't reading the actual terms of the Apple deal.
Nobody's talking about getting a 33% Klarna loan for an iPhone or burrito. You included 2 statistics and 3 citations that have nothing to do with the program we're talking about.
We're trying to talk about the Apple program in the link, not some other financial services complaints that people have about other things.
People are keeping their phones for longer and longer. This makes it as attractive as possible to pay for a new phone at a more frequent rate.
The bet here is that Apple would much rather you spend ~$35/month perpetually than $1200 every 4 years.
This is a 'good deal' if you're already someone who upgrades their phone frequently, but I would imagine this would end up getting a whole bunch of people to pay more money in the long run to Apple.
> It preserves optionality. If you get to the end of the lease period and there’s a new iPhone you want or the battery isn’t holding up, you can choose not to buy it. You don’t have to deal with selling it or trading in.
If you don't buy it at the end of the 24 month, you've been paying for a very costly lease.
2/3 of the price for a 24 month lease whereas iphones are updated for 7, 8 years ? And the resell value is very good.
Apple clearly pay the fees for the customers loan but at the end, the only real mistake the customer can make and might regret is switching out of the Apple ecosystem.
That's clever and only mildly evil. Financial savvy people will use it as a "no fee loan" if they can't pay upfront. Less savvy will be more receptive to the commercial discourse at the end of the lease. Eco-deniers will think twice before renewing every year.
And it's actually a consolidation of existing options because Apple already offered "no fee loan" here in EU but you had to choose the option to begin with. Now it's look like this is a single contract and you choose the option at the end of the lease.
I think people don't really buy phones every year anymore because they can't afford it. But because they're kinda meh year on year. I don't buy apple anymore but my Samsung S23 from 3 years ago has the exact same cameras as the current S26. Same screen, same form factor. Only thing that's new is a slightly faster SoC and a bit more memory for AI features I dont really use anyway. I just don't see the point in upgrading anymore.
Some upgrades are meh, occasionally I want one thing. Like next upgrade I really want a higher optical zoom than 3x.
But I think unlike leasing vehicles, where the vehicle has the same power (approximately and within usable limits) the new phones bring a new battery. If swappable battery was a thing everywhere; that would further depress the sale of new phones.
Is Apple going higher with optical then? Samsung has been going back with their optical zoom, from 10x to 5x and I heard they might even go back to 3x :'(
Oh ok that is impressive, true. The 10x lens from Samsung was also nice, I don't understand why they went back on that. I never got it though because it was only available on the ultra and I hate huge phones.
- from this thread: iPhone 17 pro max would be $1199 to buy (~1273 with tax) or $34.99 for 24 months totaling $839.76. So would cost 433.33 at the end of the lease to keep it
If you upgrade your phone every 1-2 years then what you pay for the phone is something like "full cost - optimistic trade-in value". I see no reason not to do if you know you going to upgrade.
I don't understand this mindset. I get that people who are going to upgrade to the latest flagship phone every 18-24 months will probably do better with this, but realistically... those people are fucking insanely financially irresponsible (and if you can afford it - no shade, I guess, its your money - lord knows I burn lots of cash on hobby projects of my own, although I tend to buy things that are actually projects, and not just glitz...)
But there's just nothing to run on phones built in the last 5+ years that actually puts the hardware through its paces (in the phone form factor, laptops and desktops I'd be lot more forgiving on). The cameras aren't really getting better. The battery capacities seem to be mostly "the same". There's just no practical "reason" to justify the expense at this point (and I'll fully acknowledge this wasn't always the case - there was a period there in the early 2010s where phones were getting better rapidly and upgrading was a big deal).
They're basically buying an expensive piece of jewelry that they'll throw away in 24 months. Like... just buy a cheaper model and get some real jewelry. At least that could be passed down at some point instead of becoming e-waste.
So how much annually do you spend on your hobbies, anyways, if you're going to declare getting a new phone every two years "fucking insanely financially irresponsible" :p Glass houses and all that, right?
I buy more tools than I should - Wood working, electronic, and more general purpose. It's not always cost effective, but I generally pick a new project (ex - making my dining room table, installing solar panels, building my own dining room chairs, making my wedding ring, etc) and then buy a new tool for that project.
Am I saving money vs just buying a decent premade thing? Usually not really (although sometimes!). But I get to learn, work with my hands, and expand capabilities, and feel nice having made a thing.
I can get a lot of tools (or a couple very nice tools) for the amount you'd spend on a new iphone.
Since we're having the conversation - I'll make a value judgement. I think more folks would be happier with the tools than a new iphone, and I think buying one every 2 years is a perfect example of "keeping up with the jones" style behavior - compulsive consumerism that's not improving happiness (With an understanding that there are exceptions - ex: if you develop mobile applications, I'll accept that a new iphone is essentially a new tool).
Do you know what’s cool about hobbies? They don’t have to be reasonable! They don’t have to be financially responsible! They’re hobbies! That’s the whole point!
Listen, whatever you do that’s your hobby I’m certain is also a giant waste of money and very financially irresponsible. And if not, learn how to have fun and stop being so boring.
They do if you don't have the money to throw away. That's the whole point - far too often, the people who throw their money away on these things are the same people who spend all their time complaining they're struggling to afford the basics, like feeding their family.
Yes it's fine if you have plenty of money to waste on what you enjoy, but the majority of people don't.
Yeah I'm on the same page - I spend a couple hundred bucks on a low-end-of-midrange android phone every few years (usually because I broke the old one by doing something stupid like walking into the ocean with it in my pocket). I can't fathom why I would want to spend 5-10x on a flagship to do... what exactly?
My current phone (Motorola g34) runs all the games fine, and that's probably the heaviest thing people use phones for. I do take photos, but like I'm not running a photography business, and social media compresses them to shit anyway so the quality is perfectly fine.
Well, you could buy a waterproof phone, which wouldn't break if you walked into the ocean with it in your pocket?
I use my phones as GPS attached to my motorbike's handlebars. They get drenched in downpours, frozen in the winter, and baked in the summer sun multiple times a year. They don't skip a beat and only require the occasional battery change.
My current phone is an iphone 14, still on its original battery. It replaced a 7 which had its battery changed 5 years in. The 7 replaced a galaxy s5 which I stupidly forgot in a taxi, but it was still good enough for my uses.
There are uses for higher-end phones, among which "longer periods between changes".
LLMs are set to.increase hardware demands a lot. Although I don't necessarily think this is related to the program change.
I know this comment is deep in a thread, but to me it looks like they simply prefer to own the whole apple device payment cycle and not use partners.
BNPL has been a huge bubble outside the traditional credit bubble, this is the same. It doesn't seem like a big divergence excepting that it gives them a contact point and a stick with which to prod customer into a new phone sooner.
For me, the primary value of my phone is the camera, and the telephoto on the iPhone Pro Max models has gotten significantly better in the 2.5 years since mine was released.
Were it not for the camera, I could have stopped upgrading 10 years ago.
My point is, not everyone values the same things you do. The new Siri AI only runs on 15 Pro and higher, I think. New features do arrive in newer phones.
iPhone 17 Pro is binoculars and also eliminated 16 Pro battery anxiety.
Value in being part of the discussion for a whole year every year too. You realllly have to care about stuff like these factors though (or hate investing your money or have too much).
Foldables may be an exception (or at least that's what I'm telling myself). The combination of larger screen when unfolded + logistics of a phone when folded means a foldable is basically a tablet that you don't have to actively plan around carrying, and it lends itself to much more multitasking. And the last round of upgrades actually was a qualitative jump big enough to drag Apple into the market kicking and screaming.
> I get that people who are going to upgrade to the latest flagship phone every 18-24 months will probably do better with this, but realistically... those people are fucking insanely financially irresponsible
This is not remotely true. I buy each and every flagship iPhone every year on or near release day for cash. I have done so every release since the first iPhone came out.
Each September or October my old phone goes into a desk drawer forever, or is wiped and gifted to a partner or close friend. I do not recover any of the costs at the end of the 12 months.
In total, it is way less than $200 per month. That’s not “fucking insanely financially irresponsible” by any stretch of the imagination. $2k per year is a trivial amount of money for the most-often-used computer in my entire life. It pays for itself in the first few weeks of the year.
Separately, I spend another 10-20k per year on computer software and services, because it assists my business in making many times that in revenue. Hell, even my hobby AWS S3 account is like $35/mo and that’s like the same as the lease payment for the flagship iPhone Pro under this program.
Upgrading each year brings real performance benefits, despite your claim that phones don’t materially improve each generation. Whether or not that is worth replacing it before it breaks or not is a separate conversation, but let’s not pretend that upgrading annually is exactly equivalent to lighting $2k on fire. Anyone who participates regularly in US “bar culture”, for example, is spending more each month on drinks than I spend to carry the latest flagship iPhone, and nobody is claiming that eating out three times a month or going to the bar with your buddies every Friday night is “fucking insanely financially irresponsible”. Tech is so cheap now that it’s a trivial amount of money in the grand scheme of things.
(You’ll probably flip when you hear I replace my $7k work laptop every 12-24 months, too.)
Furthermore, I’m not even an extreme outlier. I know people who regularly buy the flagship iPhone for their entire family, in cash, every year. It’s a bit spendy if you’re not using it for business (but who isn’t, in 2026, where every single thing you do is an app) but it’s still simply not that much money in real terms when you consider it’s well under $2k/year/device. Hell, a nice lunch for two people at a decent restaurant even without alcohol is pushing $100 in most cities.
For the vast majority of consumers, these prices are insane.
> trivial amount of money... I’m not even an extreme outlier
It's also true that the majority of high-earners refuse to understand that they're in the top few percent for income. I'm not sure whether what I'm reading here is a sincere mistaken belief - the general psychological effect where a person believes their own sense of "normal" is normal to everyone - or a deliberate attempt to get a rise out of other commenters.
> another 10-20k per year on computer software and services, because it assists my business in making many times that in revenue... replace my $7k work laptop every 12-24 months
So those are business costs? They don't belong in this discussion.
This math is what lead me to the iUp program in the first place. It's effectively a guaranteed 50% trade-in, which came out to about $200-300 in actual money that I was theoretically sacrificing in exchange for not having to worry about the cosmetic condition of the phone or weirdos on ebay.
And it came with AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss. I stopped using a case. I lived free.
This. They're also too big, so if you don't wear baggy pants it can be a pain to maneuver in and out of jeans pockets. But then, if I'm visiting somewhere unfamiliar in the middle of nowhere and drop it and it becomes unusable, I can have a pretty bad time.
I don't think so. Maybe I'm just used to it but I like the gripiness of my Otterbox case in addition to the protection it provides. My prior iPhoen might have survived a hiking trip if I had an equivalently robust case (and the newer Otterbox Defender cases are much less clunky than the older ones were).
I've handled the Maxes and they're just too big for my taste. It's not a financial thing. I'm by no means a phone size minimalist but my 15 Pro feels like just the right size for a phone at this point.
I'm a little confused on why anyone would pay this much for a phone. (Although if you consider it conspicuous consumption that happens to work as a phone, I can believe that.)
I’m certain there are things you pay for that I would look at and go “I’m a little confused on why anyone would pay this much for x. (Although if you consider it conspicuous consumption that happens to work as x, I can believe that.)”
But I wouldn’t, because I actually understand that people are different and like it that way.
Consider: your opinion is worthless when it comes to what I care about in terms of luxuries I enjoy, just as mine is worthless when it comes to what you care about in terms of luxuries you enjoy.
It’s way better when you don’t run around judging other people for liking different things than you.
I’ve always been told when computer shopping to “buy the fastest cpu and the most ram you can afford”. This goes doubly for revenue-generating devices.
My iPhone is the computer I use most every day, by a WIDE margin.
I’m not sure this is the best advice anymore. So many people’s needs don’t demand much of a computer.
My last personal computer purchase was an M1 Pro MBP 4 years ago. I could have maxed it out and my life would be the same, but instead I bought on the low end… or somewhere in the middle if we look at Apple’s lineup as a whole.
It’s now 4 years later. This is the longest I’ve probably ever kept a laptop. It’s still running fine, I’m not hurting for more power, and will like wait another 1-3 years before an upgrade… maybe more, we’ll see.
The laptop is a glorified Chromebook for me. I do edit some photos from time to time, encode some video, and code a bit. But 95% of the time, I’m just looking at webpages. Maxing the thing out would have been a massive waste of money.
My work laptop is also a MBP of a similar generation. It’s not up to me when it’s upgraded, but it also wasn’t maxed out, and it’s still fine. VS Code and Outlook aren’t going to run fast enough to matter with a M5 Mac and 128GB or RAM. The bottleneck isn’t my laptop, it’s bureaucracy.
For some, having top end specs will matter, but that is a shrinking percentage of the overall market.
I think that's right. My M1 MBP suits me just fine. (I do have a lighter MacBook Air but that's because my old Intel-based MacBook finally gave up the ghost and was out of support anyway--and I mostly work downstairs but want my "main" computer in my office. As well as for travel.)
>"buy the fastest cpu and the most ram you can afford”.
I would append "subject to diminishing returns" for your use cases.
I could afford maxed-out computers (within reason) but, for most purposes, the premiums for the very top-of-line exceeds any discernible increase in functionality I would experience.
The market must be stalling to the point the companies can't afford to innovate anymore.
Or at least that's how I understand why Samsung recently introduced literal first-party program for renting phones and is advertising it heavily. The flagships got too expensive.
The Davos ghouls are proven right each and every day:
> You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy
Back to indentured servitude we go, where by "we" I mean us, the poors, not the wealthy, nor their relatively still well-off direct servants (like many of the users here working for Big Tech).
The median US household has a net worth of $200,000. Even a 50th percentile US household is very wealthy by global standards.
Credit card statistics are heavily manipulated because it's easy to make them sound terrible. I don't know which factoid specifically you're referring to, but the studies about "X percent of Americans couldn't handle an emergency expense without putting it on a credit card" often use tricks like including anyone who would pay by credit card if they could. I remember reading some of these studies and realizing that I would have been included in the statistic because I prefer to use a credit card where I can, even though I pay it off before interest accrues.
Net worth or net income? Being 40yo with only 200k of worth between two when you’re halfway through your working life and have had 10y of appreciation of assets isn’t very much to go forward with.
That includes savings. The median checking account is $2800. People can burn from that $8000 but it’ll be at the expense of being able to handle an unexpected emergency expense, or a goal they’re saving up for.
And this is the median, which means that half of US households have less than this. Which is quite a lot of people who still use phones.
>Even a 50th percentile US household is very wealthy by global standards.
Not by purchasing power. We're also in a weird position compared to our "peers" in that most of them have relatively easy access to much less wealthy neighbors via over-land transit or a cheap plane ride, whereas we have to travel quite a distance or pay for extremely expensive plane tickets. Which means that we're stuck here with what a USD buys in the US, instead of being able to hop over to someplace else where a dollar goes further. We also work more than our peers, so our per-hour earnings take a hit compared to theirs.
I could go on. The trick is trying to gaslight Americans into second-guessing the economic pain they've increasingly felt over the past few decades. The 50th percentile American household lives worse than the 50th percentile household of quite a few less-wealthy countries.
Median wealth in the U.S just around $100k - see Wikipedia & other databases.
how many people own houses ? & for those people that own houses - average equity in those houses is less than 45%.
ain't no factoid - but lived reality of most people. maybe on the coasts where techies and finance bros live - but the rest of america is facing a bleak financial reality.
The number was for household wealth. I think you're looking at individual wealth, which would naturally be lower because it's spread across more people.
>when I mean most people - I mean 50% of the population.
That's not really applicable because:
1. the study is for an "unexpected" expense. This you can see from 2 years away
2. The wording in the study was something along the lines of "would have to dip into savings", not that they literally don't have any money for it. The fed's survey of consumer finances shows the median household has between 7-13k (depending whether you're counting median income or median wealth) in their checking accounts
Should people be more financially responsible? Yes
Are they today? No
In a rational world payday loans, predatory auto loans, BNPL, perpetually rolling credit card debt etc would not need to exist. Yet these sectors are rapidly growing and companies in it are thriving.
I'm saying the specific claim of "most people live on credit cards as bridge finance between paychecks. when I mean most people - I mean 50% of the population" is false.
I think what he means is that if you can't swallow $433 on one payment, it is more likely you can't support and accumulate monthly subscriptions either and you should look at sub $200 smartphones.
It is not like having a $1200 flagship smartphone is a requirement to earn a living like, say, having a mean of transportation is to many people not living close to their workplace. There is nothing one do in a flagship that you can't do - albeit maybe with less quality or slower - than a lower end one. All allows to make and receive calls, use messaging, have a browser, apps.
To be honest, I am clumsy and break stuff easily so I have never spent more than $200 on a smartphone, my current one is a pixel 6a running grapheneos that I bought for 180€ 2.5 years ago. It makes very good photos actually and is fast enough for everything I do. I understand people can want something nicer but it is not a need.
There are phones that cost a lot less though. 50% of Americans being unable to afford iPhones doesn't mean they should just lease them. People need to stop associating so much personal sense of worth with their handheld computer.
For many that is their only computer in that context having a smartphone definitely isn’t a bad thing. What’s bad is not saving up to buy it. Do not buy it on credit if you don’t have to, however, it must be said that if you get an iPhone, it does have better resale value (all Apple computers, and iPads) have a longer lifespan software wise, probably more than most other smartphones, which comes back to the question why are you renting or leasing? Just buy it on time with minimum interest upfront if you absolutely must buy it? Owner of an 11 Pro iPhone from 2019. With one or two years of Apple software support left?
A lot of people buy phones as conventional status symbols rather than for nerd points. My massive generalisation is hn values doing something interesting with the hardware.
Exactly. I'm talking about the green bubble vs blue bubble social nonsense that causes people to spend >$1k on a device that they use for talk, text, and basic media functions. It's essentially jewelry, nothing to do with nerddom.
And those people never get to a point where they save anything, renting, leasing, pay as you go, credit cards, reverse mortgages are a losing game the house always wins.
Selling my car that I fully owned in favor of a nice bicycle and an e-scooter was one of my best financial decisions in the last few years.
I don't have to deal with insurance, parking (if parking is free by you, it shouldn't be), maintenance (I work on them myself, I just pay for cheap parts), and fuel is effectively free. That's all on top of the car payment for people who haven't paid off their car.
Genuinely wish I had done so when I lost my job at the beginning of the pandemic. I've dumped so much money into a vehicle that's falling apart, which I've driven probably less than 25k miles since. If you can't justify car ownership with your income, they're a money pit.
So was mine, but time saved driving didn't justify the amount of maintenance I would have had to do on my car/sanity with 5 min in car + 2 hours on a coach vs 50 minutes fighting interstate traffic + paying for parking.
Tell me you’ve never slipped on ice riding a bike in Europe in the winter without telling me you’ve never slipped on ice riding a bike in Europe in the winter.
Isn't the 0% APR financing essentially just a sales expense? Even if people generally don't immediately roll into another 2-year agreement, the main reason zero-interest financing works for the sellers is simply that it makes it easier for people to spend money on expensive high-margin stuff.
Multi-year zero-interest loans are also commonplace in high-price, high-margin specialty retail: think La-Z-Boy, Sleep Number, home improvement, hot tubs, home gym equipment, etc.
> So the goal of the program is the same as every other similar one - they want to turn a one-time device purchase into a perpetual monthly revenue stream, while keeping ownership of the asset at the end.
Yep, which reduces the need to make new devices notably better than old ones, since you'll always have a steady stream of customers coming off their leases.
That gets it backwards. They're not doing this because they want to make devices that are less compelling purchases, but they are aware that their coming pipeline will in general not as be compelling to potential upgraders as in the past. This is largely because the category has matured, and people don't feel the need to upgrade nearly as often as 5-10 years ago.
By getting people to be default-subscribers rather than purchasers who may decide to upgrade, they improve their odds of keeping a larger chunk of their hardware revenue stream.
its not that they wont have $433, it is that people will be unwilling to shell out $433 for two year old device, if they have an option to renew it for a shiny new model and roll forward into another BNPL loan
I checked the price for a used iPhone 15 pro (ie. 2 year old iPhone) on ebay and it's around $400-$500. Therefore the implied depreciation of the lease is pretty fair, unlike the lowball offers you typically get for trading in a phone.
It is not rolled forward. If they don't want to pay the $433, then they don't. They return the device and the new device's lease doesn't include that $433.
It's not like a used car loan that some people have that keeps growing with each transaction (and at insane interest rates).
> A lot of people aren’t going to have that $433 at the end of the lease to purchase the device outright
If someone can’t plan ahead 2 years for a $433 expense, they definitely should not have a top of the line iPhone. When my income was low I had an iPhone SE that cost $329.
If everyone was as rational as you, Americans wouldn't be living in debt that most cannot afford. Most Indians have a healthy fear of debt, and that is why the iPhone doesn't have a larger share of the mobile phone market here as it really is unaffordable to most Indians (as it is for many in America). Americans however have accepted debt as a normal part of their lifestyle. When a rich man says poor people shouldn't be ordering food through Door Dash, it sounds very cynical but there is a basis of truth in it that some poor people really do not know how to manage their finances.
I wasn't making a general statement on the American poor (poverty and debt can turn into a vicious cycle, sometimes one has no choice but to borrow and there are complex political factors at play too that is driving American poverty), and only on what we are discussing - Poor Americans who don't mind getting into debt to buy an iPhone (or some other luxury item) even when affordable alternatives are available. You can't really disagree with me that it is poor financial judgement to give into your wants over your actual practical needs, when you can't afford to do so.
Most people don’t take a personal finance class and they also don’t plan ahead short term thinking is the norm and that percentage is over 50% of the population.
>they want to turn a one-time device purchase into a perpetual monthly revenue stream,
Precisely what they should have done for service revenue instead of milking App Store for the past 10 years. They should also have bundled Apple Care as part of it.
It would also allow them to hike up their price for iPhone. For example I wouldn't be surprised if the upcoming iPhone Fold and next year's iPhone 20 / XX start at $1499 to $1999.
My question is how will this roll out world wide, is this going to be like Apple Credit Card, Apple Cash and other things that is US only? Who is actually paying for the interest free loan. Somewhere along the line someone has got to give.
This is all good direction that is happening in the past 12 months, MacBook Neo, Apple Upgrade. Hopefully they will also fix the software part. macOS doesn't need annual upgrade. Perhaps neither do iOS. And the last thing would be about the App Store. But I guess that will take a lot longer.
A refurbished iPhone 15 Pro is selling for $929 on their website right now. Trade in price for that exact model is $410. So yes they are very interested in that old phone.
I take it you’ve never purchased an Apple refurbished product? They’re in excellent condition. They do not look like 2-year used and abused trade ins. If trade-ins are going back to the refurb inventory (which I don’t know if they do) then it’s only after extensive actual refurbishment and new parts.
They’re not putting it back into a box, listing it for sale, and pocketing the difference.
It's still obviously making them money. How much, who's to say, likely highly variable depending on the condition of the phone. But if it didn't make them money they wouldn't do it, they're not a charity.
I'd imagine even a phone they can't fix to sell still has some value, even as scrap to them especially as the costs of every damn material that goes into any electronic device continue to soar.
And that all being said: two things can be simultaneously true at once. Leasing is a perfectly valid form of... well you can't really say ownership, acquiring goods I guess? And it also does mean Apple can now turn what may have been one-shot purchases into people who are just fine paying a monthly payment ad infinitum. And that, in turn, opens the door for keeping people on a perpetual new-phone treadmill of monthly payments that involve them never actually owning anything.
You can very easily tie this into the Samuel Vimes Boots Theory of Economics:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
They’re obviously making money on the whole purchase and program because they’re a business, not a charity.
The assumption that they’re making significantly more money on this than direct sales may or may not hold. It could be that they’re targeting a similar level of end-to-end profit as direct sales but using this to expand their market by providing more purchasing options.
Some people get angry at the prospect of a company making money, but they’re not charities. Everyone should do the math and decide which purchase options work for them. What works for you may not be appropriate to force on to the rest of the population.
Since the days of Samuel Vimes, durable goods have undergone spectacular deflation and health care, housing, and education have undergone spectacular inflation.
Really? How many fridges have you gone through in 10 years? This might be the way you treat things, because for me and mine all of these are still a single digit: 1.
They have the ability to tear the whole thing down to guts and screws. They absolutely do replace the case, glass and battery and sell as refurbished. They already do complete case swaps on their Macs.
The ones that are not in great condition get sent to third parties and sold for slightly less. But Apple will replace the screen or battery and sell them themselves as well. I've gotten Apple refurb products with minimal signs of wear.
Given how rapidly iPhones depreciate, being able to just give it back after 2 years is pretty reasonable. My 16 Pro Max is worth maybe $500 on the resale market.
Let's suppose that Apple somehow doesn't release any new iPhones during this leasing window, what happens then? Does Apple ship you back a new phone that's essentially the same model? I know this is unlikely, but I am curious.
The other thing to consider, that while Apple might sell you the phone for $400 or whatever, they might re-sell it as refurbished for $700.
It feels like there’s a psychological component here for you to feel obliged to upgrade at the end of the 2 or 3 year term. Who wants to pay $1k for a 3 year old MacBook? Trading in/up will feel natural. It does feel less and less like you own the hardware though.
You literally don’t own the hardware, it’s a lease.
That said, you can purchase with financing with an Apple Card, or with numerous other financing options like carrier financing. However, leasing allows the purchase prices of phones to continue climbing while still presenting a palatable monthly payment.
I think what’s going to happen with this is a lot of people will be lured in with low payments and then be surprised with the ending “keep your phone” payment, where it will feel like it makes more sense to just get the new phone and continue the same payments.
Paying a $400 payment on a 2 year iPhone will look insane as that’s the depreciated value of a 2 year old phone.
If you're the person who has leased this phone, you make all your payments and get to the end and your bill to keep the phone forever is going to seem kind of high.
Obviously, that's logical. In your lease, you have only paid the price of depreciation.
Just like with cars leasing is the most expensive way to own them, but I guess there's a certain buyer who doesn't want old stuff.
You all really do not understand. Many people will gladly pay the $433 at the end because they’ve been able to get a new job and make more money in the interim.
I think that a big chunk of those lessees will be deciding between coming up with $433 in cash or give the phone back and continue with the same payment and they’ll choose the latter.
But then again maybe the person doing the lease knows this already and just wants a new phone frequently.
My worry is that a lot of people will see a lower payment and not realize that they’re getting the phone at the end of the term.
Except in this case you're not paying any extra. In fact it's cheaper to lease and then own an iPhone with this program because of the time value of money.
Yes it is, because of the way they have structured the program. This is not like a car lease.
With a car lease, the total of payments plus residual is more than the cash purchase price. That is how the financing company makes money. But in the case of Apple, the total of the lease payments plus the residual is exactly equal to the cash price.
Apple is eating the loss on the financing, for some reason. Probably what is happening is their lease provider is being given a discount on the price, so they keep the difference. Apple probably believes they will sell more phones this way.
But this is great for you the buyer, because it means instead of spending your cash now, you spend it over three years. And since the money has less buying power after three years because of inflation, it's technically cheaper for you to spread out the payments.
Especially if you put the rest of the money in the bank and earn interest on it!
Or, they can still pay the $400 and try to resell it for higher. And then buy a cheaper Android when they finally realise being in debt for making a fashion statement is stupid.
I don't think this is about Android versus Apple, there are definitely Android phones sold on credit and there are definitely high-end expensive Android phones out there (Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra).
When it comes to smartphones, there are only two practical options - ios and Android - and amongst both, only Android based smartphones are available really cheap (there are Android smartphones that retail for $100 too) - that is the only context in which Android was mentioned.
That I could see, I guess the question comes down to how often to people upgrade. That comes down to discipline.
Is a 3 year upgrade cycle for a MacBook Pro unreasonable? Would you get a lower spec machine since you were not trying to maximize the life of the machine? I know I always tend to overspec my machine to keep it for as long as possible.
My M3 MBP with 36GB of ram (looks like it was about 2500 3 years ago) would get me $945 in trade in credit. May be able to get more on eBay but I can't argue with just doing trade in is easier. A bit less than I would "save" by just upgrading at the end of the lease and this already is not the base model so the number does shift.
Especially when I look at the payment options right now I could finance that MBP about $250 on my Apple Card for 12 months no interest, or $57.99 for 36 months. and then I get a new one.
Would probably depend on what it is I was doing with the machine, am I doing tasks that would actually benefit from better and better machines like video editing and similar tasks or am I just using my computer fairly basic in a way that even an M1 machine still handles just fine.
> Is a 3 year upgrade cycle for a MacBook Pro unreasonable?
For a personal machine? Yes that’s something I see as unreasonable, MacBook Pros have a very long lifespan. M1 laptop are still pretty awesome machines. For a business an upgrade every 3 years could make sense
I still use a 16GB MacBook Air for all my development and simulation work (4P+4E+8GPU cores). Even wrote my own Metal gpu code to offload part of the simulation workflow. Modded the MacBook Air with thermal pads and a homemade cooling pad made from cardboard and a usb fan to limit throttling. I’ve run simulations for over 24 hours and kept temps below 90C successfully. A newer Mac mini would be better, but those are so expensive now.
I have an M1 Pro with 32GB of RAM and am hoping to make it through the rampocalypse. This may be my longest upgrade cycle, but fortunately the machine is fast enough for most things including LLMs.
I mean we are talking about the "Pro" machine. I think there is likely an argument to be made that if you are not doing a task that would genuinely improve with more powerful hardware do you actually need the Pro machine and you could instead go with a MacBook Air that you keep for far longer since your doing basic tasks. I do think there is still some ideas of the pro vs the Air that we are still stuck with from the Intel days.
Is that threshold for using a Pro machine 3 years, I don't know probably not for most people. My M3 Pro from almost 3 years ago is still running beautifully. I could make the argument that more power would benefit what I do with this machine without a doubt, is it worth the upgrade? I don't know, but I would be lying if I have not been thinking about it.
But I also think about the mentality I had when I bought this machine, and the mentality I had when I was looking at possible upgrades just a few weeks ago. Possibly paying more to overspec the machine compared to my current use case assuming that I want to continue to use it in 3 to 4 years.
I don't know if that calculation is necessary as cut as dry.
> do you actually need the Pro machine and you could instead go with a MacBook Air that you keep for far longer since your doing basic tasks
This is probably the case for a lot of people, but Apple is smart with their lineup and there are several what I'd call "not pro" features that are gated by the MBP (and iPad pro) which is unfortunate.
Primarily, 120hz screen, SD card reader, HDMI port. None of those are really "pro" featuers, they're just basics I'd expect on any premium laptop.
That being said, 3 years is a tad on the aggressive side for an upgrade cycle for a laptop. I just upgraded my M1 last year, and this M4 Pro will easily last a year or two longer before I feel a compelling need to upgrade, outside of getting RAM constrained. Use case is photo+video production. So for me, a 5 year cycle would be about right.
But also depends on how you spec it out. If you are just buying the base model, then 3 years makes sense. If you spend extra to max it out, you'll be able to hold onto it for 6+ years.
Is that terrible though? You're saving $1000 on a 2/3 year cadence. I'm not a fan of the one size must fit all mentality, and that the one size is the conception that we must all run every piece of he into the ground before replacing it.
> my guess is that they are hoping that most people just will send in the device and upgrade.
That's precisely why they set it up this way, honestly leasing always made more sense for businesses. I prefer to keep my phones, peace of mind knowing, if I lose something that somehow did not make it to the backups, I can just turn on my old phone and find it.
Yeah I switch between android and iPhone sometimes so there's always something I forget to transfer over. After a long enough time I can wipe it and have it as a backup phone.
Yeah, same, I've consistently stayed on iOS since 2020 but I used to do the same, I had given a relative my "last Android" a few times, but they kept losing it, so I would never get those back at all, and I realized I lost files I didn't backup anywhere, so I stopped doing hand-me-down phones. So many photos from when I started dating my wife, completely gone as a result.
It’s all about the AppleCare. I’ve used the upgrade program from the beginning. The issue with it from Apple is if I have an iPhone, iPad, MacBook I’m not gonna buy the $20/mo AppleCare.
They are also dumping a weird risk premium on the end user. I literally get a new phone every year with the upgrade program, there’s no way I’ll be doing that going forward, at least through the lease. I’ll just buy it with cash and wait for a deal.
AppleCare is even more important with the lease. If you lose the phone you have to pay Klarna to replace it. There might also be lease cancellation fees on top of that.
That is my big problem with leasing portable things. I never get AppleCare because I can self insure. But if I lose the phone 8 months into the lease I am deep in a hole.
It’s a forcing function for an upgrade. You pay 75% of the cost of the device for each 2 year cycle and many people will keep doing that in perpetuity. Compared to someone that keeps their phone for 6-7 years, the leasee will pay 3x as much over that 6 year period. Apple will also get the phone back and resell the refurbished one for 50% of its original price.
Apple will benefit in two ways. They will make 125% of what they used to make on every phone they sold because they can sell it twice and more people will be forced into the two year upgrade cycle (because they can’t afford the buyout at the end) increasing their overall sales numbers in general. If you’re a consumer, you should just treat this as a 24 month interest free loan and then buy the phone outright at the end of that period. If you put the outright cost of the phone into a bond (say 7.5%) during that period, you will even get 3 months payment free and only pay for 21 out of those 24 months.
I see this as psychology driven, not math. It pushes people to look at new options and tempt an upgrade at the end of the lease (pay $1000 for a 3 year old mac or just upgrade ?).
This also pushes term completion with early termination charges (discourage selling before term ends).
And they know money will be tight for their consumers, they can't lower prices anytime soon so give out 0% loans.
Following their tradition of screwing the frugal, cheapest options seem to be excluded.
I also wonder whether this leasing thing is also a covert way to get people to be subject to more tracking. If you own a device you have a legal right to do anything to it you want, including jailbreak it or install your own OS that executes things differently. If you lease it you don't necessarily have that right since you are only leasing the rights to use it, not modify it.
So the buyout price is never going to match depreciation, and in almost all cases keeping the device doesn't make sense.
The flip side of this, Apple gets more control of the resale market, pushing more buyers into the new device market.
In theory it lets them solve any market problems that emerge where independent resale markets let high quality devices cannibalize sales of new devices.
Are there any “gotchas” of leasing vs owning the device? Do your rights to the data change? Does your responsibility to maintain the fit and function of the device change? How does lease vs buy benefit the consumer?
If I were good at financial math (which I'm not), I would calculate that against a regular loan. E.g., how high would the interest be, if you were to keep the device.
It's not common (I think average upgrade cycle on iPhone is a little more than 3 1/2 years now, and getting longer every cycle) but it's not unheard of. The iPhone hold value well enough that you can often trade it in at something like a $200 discount and just get the new one.
Considering the cost of a battery replacement, it's not the worst value proposition in the world.
Cost and compliance are still 2 major factors that have not been solved.
We also have education and stigma. While within the LGBT community it is far more common to be open about status and taking prep and doxy (far from perfect though), it still feels like outside of that the conversations are not happening as much as they should.
Throw in doctors that are not being proactive about the conversation.
Right now it seems like having prep and doxy is largely considered only if you are engaged in "risky" behavior (not saying that in a judgmental way to be clear), instead of just being sexually active and protecting yourself. Money and investment alone won't fix that, that is a societal shift around how we talk about sex.
That is also before we get into the cost issues in many other countries just for those that do need it.
PReP has some side effects. While they are rare, they are things you need to be aware of. If you are not doing risky sex it isn't for you.
Most people want to believe they are in a monogamous relationship and thus not having risky sex - even though they are the one cheating. Either PReP needs to be more common, are people need to stop their risky sex activities (that they are not even admitting to).
> If you are not doing risky sex it isn't for you.
That blanket statement I very much disagree with. Sure there are side effects but that is part of why you also get tested every 3 months for liver issues (not that it is the only side effect, but still).
Instead of it being a blanket statement it should be a conversation with your doctor about the pros and cons.
You can still get HIV even if not engaging in risky behavior. Same with people getting pregnant when they did not intend too.
I am thinking college kids that are still figuring out their sexuality and exploring new things. You're going to make mistakes so having a conversation about prep with your doctor is a really good idea.
You are extremely unlikely to get HIV from anything other than risky sex. That's what "risk" means: it's another word for "probability," just a probability of negative outcomes. These probabilities are known: https://www.aidsmap.com/about-hiv/estimated-hiv-risk-exposur...
Some of that table is already mitigated: we test blood for HIV, so transmission by blood transfusion is unlikely. Transmission by pregnancy is less likely simply because few women have HIV: 80% of new cases in the US are male, 20% female.
The real question is whether "having a conversation about prep with your doctor" is going to lead to someone caring enough to pursue a prophylactic course of medication when that same person doesn't care enough about his own health or others' to avoid risky sexual encounters. Is someone irresponsible enough to pursue causal, unprotected sex with random partners also likely to be responsible enough to visit a doctor proactively and comply with a prep regimen? Sure, it's a "really good idea," but a simpler and better idea is not to have random sex in the first place. A "really good idea" depends on a level of self-control that some people obviously lack.
Is someone irresponsible enough to pursue causal, unprotected sex with random partners also likely to be responsible enough to visit a doctor proactively and comply with a prep regimen?
Anecdotally, very much so - at least among the gay/MSM community.
The thing is, people generally quite like having sex. That comes with some level of risk, which can be mitigated in various different ways - and PrEP is one of those tools.
All humans engage in some level of risky behaviour; evidence suggests that moralising about “responsible behaviour” or “self control” is rarely effective at mitigating that risk.
> Is someone irresponsible enough to pursue causal, unprotected sex with random partners also likely to be responsible enough to visit a doctor proactively and comply with a prep regimen?
Yeah, me. What a wild statement to make. It’s a big world out there, my friend.
I dunno man if you want to answer claims about probability with single a data point that's up to you, but nobody can take that seriously, whatever the topic.
“Is someone irresponsible enough to drive a car (the second leading cause of accidental death) also likely to be responsible enough to comply with seatbelt laws?”
The word likely doesn’t make this argument any less dumb
> Is someone irresponsible enough to pursue causal, unprotected sex with random partners also likely to be responsible enough to visit a doctor proactively and comply with a prep regimen?
Yes, it's the exact reason that it is widely available on the NHS. 20,000 people took it, adherence was high, HIV rates dropped significantly.
> Sure, it's a "really good idea," but a simpler and better idea is not to have random sex in the first place
Shaming people has been tried for centuries, maybe millennia and famously _does not work_. We have ample evidence that PrEP does.
> Is someone irresponsible enough to pursue causal, unprotected sex with random partners also likely to be responsible enough to visit a doctor proactively and comply with a prep regimen?
Er, I mean, a decent portion of gay men in the developed world, honestly. (I say this as a gay man in the developed world.)
> You are extremely unlikely to get HIV from anything other than risky sex.
Yes because it is such a fantastic idea to just ignore that there is still a risk regardless of what we call "risky" sex just because it doesn't fit in your puritanical views of sex.
If someone can get HIV the first time they have sex than your entire argument is moot.
Just have the conversation with your doctor and protect yourself and stop trying to push your views on others.
This is such a simple thing to say, talk to your doctor. Thats it. If doing so stops one person who is not engaging in anything that we would deem being risky from getting HIV, that is a win. There is nothing in your world that would stop someone who is having sex with someone that maybe they have been going on several dates, from getting HIV from that person if a mistake happens.
And yet, you seem to think that we are saying that you should be going to an orgy every other day.
Oh and let's not ignore that there are monogamous couples that one may have HIV and they need to also protect themselves.
I am arguing that all sexually active people (except maybe those in a fully confirmed monogamous relationship) should at a minimum have a conversation with their doctor about it and their doctor should bring it up.
Maybe it isn't worth it for you in the end after that conversation, but we should also not assume that the only way you get HIV is through "risky" behavior. That is irresponsible.
At least you would know it's an option and you can make the decision yourself, I know a lot of straight people that do not know prep exists because it just isn't talked about. Or maybe they have heard about it but they don't really understand what it is. That is a problem.
In developed nations like the US, health economic models estimate that deploying PrEP across generalized heterosexual groups costs anywhere from $150,000 to over $1 million per single HIV transmission prevented.
Yes there is the additional costs of the tests on top of that, but people should already be doing regular STD testing if they are sexually active.
Regardless, nothing about that changes that you should still be having this conversation with your doctor if you are sexually active. I do not understand how this is an argument, a conversation about prep or doxy should be in the same conversation about condoms and your general sexual health.
The worst that is going to happen from that conversation is that you don't take it, but at the very least you are educated on its existence and that decision is made between you and your doctor based on your risk factors.
I guess it depends on what we call risky, I mean if someone is actively trying to get pregnant are we considering that "risky"?
Someone could be taking the necessary precautions and a mistake happens, a condom breaks, whatever. Someone could have sex with one person in their life and they got it from that person. I would not consider that "risky" in any real sense of the word.
Any sex carries some amount of risk, and the key is being risk aware and not assuming that just because you are not engaging in what is generally deemed "risky" that you are safe. Instead you should be having that conversation with your doctor and determining what your risk tolerance is.
That is where I disagree, how many people are positive that never considered themselves engaging in risky behavior.
To me it is very dangerous, and leads to the situation we are in now, to just say only even consider prep if you are engaging in risky behavior.
Someone trying to get pregnant is most likely to be low risk since odds are good they have a specific partner in mind and are having enough sex that they don't care to stray. Not always but in general
There are many pregnancies that result from one night stands and those are high risk, but only rarely was pregnancy a goal.
Also HIV spreads most often from anal sex. Someone trying to get pregnant is less likely to get HIV just because of how they are having sex and so lower risk. (Not zero though, don't rely on statistics with your life of your partner has HIV)
The topic here is HIV risk. Obviously getting pregnant requires unprotected sex, but the risk of HIV is about sex with someone who has it.
It doesn’t take a lot for the risks to far outweigh any potential side effects. As far as I’m aware, every healthcare system in the developed world either recommends or enforces checkups after starting PrEP.
The “LGBT community” broadly does not engage in risky sex practices. Lesbians don’t have regular, no strings attached sex and are at lower risk of contracting HIV than straight women. The common denominator is horny men, specifically horny men that have access to a variety of different sex partners.
Any solution to a public health problem that involves moralising about how groups should change their behaviour is not only doomed, it’s actively counterproductive.
And doxycycline is a PEP treatment, not a PrEP treatment; respectfully you should probably take a step back from conversations where you obviously aren’t informed about the basics.
The solution to the STD epidemic was moralizing teenagers to tell them to put on condoms. I was told personally several times in sex ed, biology classes and on-the fly by teachers and adults that condoms were not an option for casual sex. It worked.
Regarding PEP/PreP, Doxy has been researched and shown effective as PreP as well:
> But I guess that sex without condoms is worth it, right?
Not speaking about LGBT related matters; Sex without condom is just like everything else - it depends on the person. For some people there is little to no difference. For others, wearing the condom removes all sensation, reducing the act to physical exercise. So is sex without condoms worth it? For some people, yes, it is.
PrEP is freely available in the UK and there is almost no requirement in practice of engaging in risky sex. I don't know anyone turned down for not having risky enough sex
Which countries are you talking about out of curiosity?
This also just seems stupid to me, you don't pay for the DisplayLink software you pay for the hardware. More options for how to use your hardware would be a good thing to them would it not?
Though it sounds like much of the issue was that it wasn't really "clean-room" which is a separate issue. Though unclear if that really is at the root of it or not.
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