Especially teens and college students
Source: i’m a college student
Kids are like that. Most adults don’t care.
I disagree, kids are taught by adults, so whatever they are learning its from their teachers and families. In my experience I have seen more adults give a status symbols to Apple products than children.
It is still cliqueish even if they don’t do it intentionally when you have things like they assume you have apple things like the iPhone charger( deprecated now) or airdrop.
Some people need to justify their choice to overspend on something…
… is there ever any logic to what people think are status symbols?
My labubu bandolier says there is.
labubu
What the hell is that? Are beanie babies popular again?
Pretty much, yeah.
They’re like cutesyfied Monchichi
Some Iphone users behave as if they’re in a cult. Worse, Apple treats customers without Iphones/Macs as inferior to their golden children even while selling services that don’t require Apple hardware.
I subscribed to Apple TV+ and dealing with the company was infuriating. Every single support rep instructed me to do something to solve a problem using my Iphone or Mac. The last straw was when I wanted to add another profile to my account and was told the company has made it impossible without Apple hardware. The rep actually told me to find someone with an Iphone to help. I cancelled Apple TV+ instead.
One member of the Iphone cult I know was going on and on about a problem she was having receiving calls. When I mentioned a relatively minor problem with my phone her immediate response was “That’s because you have Android.” It was comical.
People shallow enough to believe they’re superior because they own an Iphone aren’t worth being around anyway.
That is how they market their products.
And those demographics are very susceptible to marketing and peer pressure. The chat bubble colors are designed to make you think of alternative phone users as outcasts. Used to be the same with photos and videos in MMS.
By your late 20s most people don’t give a shit about being labeled outcast, but by then you’re locked into their ecosystem.
Nobody will actually mind if you brag about how you bought a new phone. Also if you are not a rich person you having an expensive phone means you did something smart to “cheat the system.”
As an example I had an old coworker when I used to work at a warehouse and he would combo things like service provider sales to buy an iphone.
He did sound smart when explaining the roundabout way he got the phone despite making same money as us. And I don’t mind what other people chose to spend money on.
What I do mind is college students thinking macbooks are some “programmers’ laptops.”
I had to constantly hand-hold group members that think they can get away with not learning how to code and using AI for all the homeworks because they bought a mac and that makes them a good programmer anyway.
“But I thought the program should automatically wait for the threads on this line since it’s POSIX.”
Yes I love troubleshooting professor’s makefile for an OS I don’t have because you never learned your own laptop has a symlink from gcc to clang.
I see my deGoogled Android device as a higher status symbol than any overpriced stock Apple device.
I remember a friend of mine whining about how my text bubble was a different color and it “made it weird” to text because of that.
By then I was already super over the whole tribalistic iphone/android bs from people I know when it wasn’t being meme’d on, so I just told her “you can either get over it, or we can stop talking and being friends”
Wouldn’t you know it, the color of a text bubble isn’t enough to end a friendship over.
Wait people really give a shit? Never seen or heard about that
Source: I’m also a college student
Nope - no one gives a shit what phone you have. Maybe I’m just old but I haven’t heard this from literally anyone or anywhere.
Her iPhone is a status symbol to my wife. Filipinos are kinda weird about brand names as symbols, like they’re living in the 80s.
Because they paid a lot of money for them and they need to convince themselves that it was worth the cost.
Cheapest iPhone is $600, cheapest android phone can go as low as $20 (like those walmart prepaid phones locked to a carrier).
When the average person think of android, instead of thinking about a flagship samsung phone, they think of the lowest budget phone.
So in their mind, if you have android, you’re automatically categorized as “poor”/“cheap”, regardless how much it actually costs.
I‘m the tech guy most people ask for help. If they want a new phone, my first question is for how long it should last and what their price range is - then I mostly suggest an iPhone. You get 5-6 years of support for $600, while Android you need to pay that every 1-2 years.
Every TWO years, as a best-case scenario?! What parallel universe do you live in
I don’t think I’ve owned a phone for fewer than three years. That was an Apple device at work and it had dead touchscreen pixels for half the time, a bad battery from day one, and software bugs galore (couldn’t reset an app, for example. It kept b0rked data between reinstalls and it’s not like there’s a way to go into the filesystem and actually delete it yourself, so I just couldn’t use the app at all and only had the work calendar on my laptop. Very convenient at events. “It just works” they say, but if it ever doesn’t, you’re screwed)
I‘m the tech guy most people ask for help. If they want a new phone, my first question is for how long it should last and what their price range is - then I mostly suggest an iPhone. You get 5-6 years of support for $600, while Android you need to pay that every 1-2 years.
Incorrect. A Samsung Galaxy A16 (USD $200) has 6 years of security updates.
Since when does Samsung do that? I switched back in 2017 and haven’t been interested in the mobile phone market since the Galaxy fold 2
The Galaxy A12 was released in 2020, it had 4 years of updates, Galaxy A15 released in 2023, had 5 years of updates, Galaxy A16 released in late 2024 (for the US, it was early 2025), now has 6 years of updates. S-Series phones (most of those cost $550 and above) have 7 years of updates)
It’s just security updates tho, new features are not guaranteed for budget phones (like no “AI” features for A-series phones, but then again, its just more marketing gimmics anyways, who really uses those?), but its secure enough for banking.
The people who come to me only care about their pictures. It is I who has to make sure that those who click on every link they receive and open everything attached are unable to fuck something up.
Tribalism didn’t end when civilization started. Anyone not in the tribe is lesser, because the alternative would mean your tribe is lesser.
More specific to an iPhone, if you have one, you can do all the social iPhone things like FaceTime. Don’t have one? You can’t FaceTime, so there is a social friction or impediment to socializing. Then there is the “othering” of the green bubble and blue bubble thing. You can’t share photos or videos the same if you don’t have an iPhone. Since we are in a digital age and less physically present, not being able to digitally socialize the same way also inhibits socialization.
All of this is by design. Apple intentionally creates an ecosystem that will excert social pressure on people to buy their products so they can be part of the group like their friends.
Because they’re teens
If there was another decent mobile phone, the same size as the SE, I would seriously consider it.
ASUS Zenfone 10
Can’t unlock bootloader :(
Otherwise I’d be typing this comment on one right now. It’s the only otherwise-perfect device that I could find earlier this year. Why did they go out of their way to modify AOSP and lock everyone out of their own device…
Oh wow. That’s unfortunate. It’s an enthusiast phone. It’s a requirement.
They don’t. You do.
explain how the people who always have the newest iPhone and show it off to all their friends DONT think it’s a status symbol
better yet explain how, I, the person with a several year old android phone who HATES apple considers an iphone more important than they do
It’s just a phone? I’d have an android or fairphone if my job didn’t have apple devices and apps I use all the time. Just makes sense to not need two sets of a lot of things.
