
Shitphone: A Love Story - interkats
https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love-story-a44e66434807
======
phlo
The dichotomy of premium products and the shitworld makes a fun read, but
between Shitphone, Premium Shitphone and iPhone, the author skips right over
the most worthwile category: price-performance, value, or whatever you want to
call it.

Extremes, of course, always make for more interesting writing. Still, let's
not forget about the perfectly viable middle ground: Where an $80 Shitphone is
a hassle to use and an $800 iPhone seems wasteful, a $300 OnePlus One or Nexus
5 will deliver about the same utility at a bit than half the price. As far as
I can tell, this will hold true for almost anything: $10 headphones typically
won't fit well or sound good, but at $60, a pair of Shure SE215s sounds just
as good as $200 beats. A $10k Kia will teach you to hate your commute, while
either a $25k Jetta or a $75k Model S will get you to work comfortably -- one
of them will just cost three times as much.

It's an interesting testament to an excess of purchasing power that premium
brands like Apple, beats (or large parts of the fashion industry) managed to
grow to their current sizes. And it'll be interesting to watch how this whole
"good enough computing" plays out.

~~~
nick_urban
I have a somewhat different approach. I generally either prefer to get a
"shit" version of something or a super-premium version. If the thing is simple
and timeless and easy to transport, I opt for the timeless route. If I think I
might not keep it for more than a year or two, I usually get the cheap one.

Midrange "luxury" items seem to be barely better quality than the best-cheap-
options available, while most of their cost seems to go to marketing (or
styling, in the case of clothes/fashion products). They also quickly
depreciate.

Super premium items, however, usually retain their value and are significantly
more satisfying to hold/use. The place where this has been the _least_ true,
in my experience, is with electronics. All electronics depreciate quickly.
There is no timeless smart phone.

Incidentally, Kia has been doing a great job lately. I rent a car almost every
week, and after comparing the Kia Forte with the Jetta and the Optima with the
Passat, I prefer the Kia in both cases. The VW automatic transmissions don't
seem to shift very smoothly, and I actually found the trim levels to be
comparable and the Kias more fun to drive.

~~~
phlo
As someone who found a bit of an interest in fountain pens some years ago, I
understand and shared your penchant to go for super-premium when it comes to
timeless items. I have bought the occasional $500 pen (Graf von Faber Castell
and Caran d'Ache have a couple of very beautiful items), but after one of the
more expensive pens suffered some scuffs from light use and a friend of mine
broke another one's clip, I came to the conclusion that I have a tendency to,
as they say, break shit. I enjoy using them. To me, the little marks in the
pens' platinum-covered cap don't take away from their sentimental value, but
if I were to ever try and sell them, I wouldn't hope to ever get my purchase
price back. The same, I believe, holds true for watches. When I noticed I had
lost my $30 Cadence in a Metro, I barely scoffed. Since I had liked the
design, I had an identical backup at home. Losing a timeless super-premium
$10k Omega, on the other hand would've been a more severe problem. The pens,
the Rolex watch and many things like them will retain their value just fine --
if you never touch, use, or in any way enjoy them.

My initial comment went in exactly the same direction as yours on midrange
"luxury" items, with the possible difference that I would consider an iPhone,
the beats earphones or (to a lesser degree) the Tesla as the midrange pseudo-
luxury choice. In my opinion, a large part of the retail price of each of
those lies in the brand value and in the marketing done by those brands. As I
view it, their prices are determined not by their cost or performance, but
mostly on what the customers will pay. In my perception, the midrange choice
(Shure Earphones, Nexus or -- as others mentioned -- Moto E/G, Jetta) more
closely reflects the cost to manufacture the item. Their profit margins are
slimmer and, more importantly, more consistent.

As a final point, my apologies to Kia. Being European I tend to stick to
public transport, rarely drive, and if so, tend to get cars with a manual
gearbox. I was going to go with Dacia (Renault's Low-End Brand, I believe)
first, but couldn't tell how well-known they were in the States. I also was
under the impression that VW's interior was considered to be of rather high
quality while I have read some negative comments on Tesla's.

~~~
colanderman
I've slowly come to the belief that if a product can't survive light use
without damage, it's not a quality product, no matter how expensive it is.

This is why I prefer tough soft-touch-plastic ThinkPads to dentable aluminum
MacBooks, super-reliable Hondas to repair-prone BMWs, and unbreakable Corelle
dinner ware to delicate fine china.

I don't need my belongings to punish me for being a clumsy monkey. A product
which silently conforms to the realities of human use is a beautiful, and
sometimes rare, thing.

~~~
bronson
Interesting, I have the same sentiment but the opposite conclusion. The
plastic case on my most recent Thinkpad spontaneously cracked around the fan
vent. Never dropped, babied it everywhere, no idea how it could have happened.
The laptop still works, it just can't be moved anymore.

So I switched to an aluminum laptop. Life's too short to put up with crappy
Lenovo plastics.

------
anigbrowl
This is a really excellent (and funny) article, founded on an excellent
premise: _The highest-end branded version of a product offers a chance to
taste the luxurious future of technology; the shitworld version lets you
preview a more practical future — the future most of the global electronics-
buying public will actually enjoy._

I bought a 'shitphone' last year after I damaged my main one in a fall, but it
was mostly still working and I thought that I would be able to repair it (I
wasn't). Some things the new phone does significantly better; the camera is
slow but turns in surprisingly good images (in sunlight; there's no flash),
the battery life is excellent and it recharges super-fast, it feels a bit more
rugged and so forth. As the article says, the big downside is delay - I use
Android and the hardware in this thing is really not up to multi-tasking, so
now I mainly use the phone for texting, calling, and email, occasionally maps
or web searches but only when necessary, sometimes as a music player.

At this point I'm thinking about buying a good phone again, because the
downsides are an annoyance if I'm busy and need to depend on it for work
stuff; on the other hand, I rather like the fact that I spend a bit less time
fiddling with my phone than I used to do, and am more engaged with the world
and whoever I'm with. This includes the dog; I'm increasingly struck by how
many people go to a dog park and then spend the whole time sitting on a bench
hunched over their smartphones. I'm seeing more overweight dogs whose owners
take them out as a matter of necessity but don't really exercise them, and
then give them extra treats out of a sense of guilt. I love that I _can_ put a
computer in my pocket and use it anywhere, but I don't want to go back to
being buried in it.

------
mrbill
For just a tiny bit more, he could move up to the Moto E/Moto G, which are a
lot nicer than the BLU phones I've seen and experienced. The sub-$200 phone
market is an amazing quality-for-money price point right now.

~~~
jasonhanley
My wife and I both have Moto G's and they are amazing value. I couldn't
imagine spending the kind of money some people do on smartphones when great
options like the Moto G are around.

------
forkandwait
I recently dropped and broke my smartphone, which, by Iphone standards was
probably shit, but it cost 300.00 bucks, which is nice for me. I bought a
$40.00 ZTE piece of stinker at Target, and I am a VERY satisfied customer.

I can look up restaurant addresses, read HN, shop for crap on Amazon and REI,
play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup while waiting for a haircut, and send all the
texts and make all the phone calls I want. If I run it over or fall overboard
with it in my pocket I don't care. With the money I saved I bought the
shittiest Garmin GPS available for about $100.00, which I can even use without
a cell network. Sometimes my friends complain about the sound on my shitty
phone, but I don't care.

Plus, I stare at a computer all fucking day, I know all I need to know about
programming for at least the next five years of stateworker career, and I
would FAR rather read a print book, go for a sailboat ride, have a dinner
party, or dig some vegetables than spend another f-ing second computing even
with a really nice screen.

Oh -- I write this on a 12 year old macbook running FreeBSD, which I used for
my dissertation, from ~2000 lines of Octave matrix code to typing it up in
Lyx/ Latex. Works far better than any new Windows piece of crap for actual
computing, isn't occupying space in a landfill, and I have money left over to
buy rain gear and boots for getting outside.

It's not shit -- it's manure...

------
grownseed
For what it's worth, I pre-ordered a Samsung Galaxy S2 in 2011, at a time when
I decided to join the ranks of the "edgiest" among us (after going through an
HTC diamond and a Nokia N900).

Five years later, almost to the day, I'm still sporting my S2; I just haven't
had any compelling reason to change it. It does its job now as well as it did
back then, and in some cases actually performs better thanks to software
updates. The battery outlasts most of my friends' phones even though it was
never changed. The phone itself seems to be indestructible: I never protected
it (cases, screen protectors, etc.) in 5 years, it has been through just about
everything you can imagine and more, yet the only damage is a vague scratch on
the screen I can only see in a very awkward angle and a some slightly chipped
paint by the ear piece.

I don't know what makes this phone so particular, but for the same reason I
wonder more and more what genuinely makes a lot of the new expensive hardware
that particular either. In any case, it will be a sad day when I have to part
with this phone.

~~~
dropit_sphere
YES, I'm typing this from my uncased, unscreened S2, which has been dropped
_hard_ , _many_ times. The thing is indestructible, which is all the more
incredible when you consider that it doesn't really look it

------
peterwwillis
I am also a lover of shitpliances. A long-time shitphone user (before Android
shitphones it was years-old Sony Ericssons and Nokias), I also buy shitty used
laptops, tablets, TVs, sound bars, and... that's it actually, I don't own any
other technology. But I always buy the lowest possible priced hardware that
will do something I want. I like to think that i'm cheating an industry
founded on selling the hapless techno-dweeb on electronic appliances that will
lose 80% of their value in two years.

I can remember exactly the moment I realized the ridiculousness of the
overvalued tech gadget. Finally armed with enough money to buy my own
computer, I remembered how my parents paid $2,000 for a an IBM with a 200MHZ
Pentium Pro [w/MMX], 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. I decided I would never
value a tech gadget that highly, and would only pay the bare-bones price.
(That idea is probably why there literally became a market called the
"barebones PC", computers with random commodity parts pieced together by the
purchaser, like a made-to-order self-assembled Model T Ford).

My current shitphone is a $75 AT&T Go-phone with 1GB RAM and a dual-core
1.4ghz processor. I refuse to update any apps for fear they might use more RAM
or CPU for some improved feature and make the apps less stable than they
already are. I enjoy dropping it onto concrete in front of people and watching
their gasps and cringes, only to show them how the seemingly plastic screen
remains unblemished. I might be a shitphone sadist.

~~~
bsder
> I remembered how my parents paid $2,000 for a an IBM with a 200MHZ Pentium
> Pro [w/MMX], 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. I decided I would never value a
> tech gadget that highly

You are overlooking the fact that that machine was right at a breakpoint where
we switched over to heavy commoditization. 64MB of RAM was big and very
expensive at that point, 4GB hard drives were only surpassed by 9GB SCSI
drives (which were full 5.25" and almost 1.5-2" thick--they would jump out of
your hand if you flipped one over due to gyroscopic moment), and the Pentium
Pro 200 was a _LOT_ faster than anything short of a high end RISC
microprocessor _IF_ you were running Windows NT.

Then everything went haywire. Memory prices crashed, disk drive densities shot
through the roof, and processor development underwent massive acceleration.
All of these absolutely crashed the price of computers.

Realistically, however, the primary driver of computer performance was
_NETWORKING_ performance. Every time your "internet connection" jumped an
order of magnitude, we needed better computers. You can see the break points--
300 bps, 1200bps, 9.6kbps-14.4kbps, 28kbps-56kbps, 128kbps-512kbps, and
1Mbps-3Mbps. New apps also popped out at each of those points: bbs, email,
graphical internet, the web, audio/MP3, and finally video.

At the 1Mbps mark, the telecom companies started dragging their feet about
network speeds and computer sales slowed down.

------
roma1n
We could have shitphones.

Or, you know, do what Google did with the Moto G: unspectacular but very
usable hardware, no crufty software layer above the OS, at a good price point.

------
von_tenia
The other solution is to buy used phone. Premium phones are outdated so
quickly, you can easily find a good deal on swappa or similar websites. I'm on
my third smartphone since I left my flip-phone in 2009 and I never paid more
than $200.

~~~
nadams
> The other solution is to buy used phone.

This is a good idea if you can find a reputable service that will guarantee
your money back.

I bought a used Note 3 off of ebay. I got it, popped my SIM card in and worked
perfectly. Then one day I couldn't make calls, use data or register at all on
the network. Turned out it was on a carrier payment plan and the original
owner stopped making payments. So T-Mobile blocked/blacklisted the IMEI
number. T-Mobile refused to talk to me about it or even let me pay it off. I
sold it on ebay for about $350 - afterwards I realized that for $50 I could
have had it "fixed".

And I'm sure I'm not the only one that has been scammed like this. The sad
part is that it only scares people away from wanting to do business with
honest people like me because of all the idiots out there.

~~~
what_ever
I have had good experience with swappa.com (Bought 2 devices from there). I am
not sure if it would have helped in your case though.

~~~
djloche
Swappa has a 100% refund if you get burned by a bad ESN. I too bought a
premium used phone through Swappa without any issue.

>" If you were to buy a device on Swappa that could not be activated due to a
blacklisted ESN then you would be entitled to a refund no matter the seller's
stated return policy."

~~~
nadams
I don't think would have helped me. When I got it - the phone worked
perfectly. It wasn't until months later when the guy stopped paying the
monthly fee and T-Mobile blacklisted the IMEI number.

------
kijin
Here's another alternative for the frugal technologist: _Get a secondhand
phone._

In 2012, I bought a used Nexus One for $30, wiped it clean, and put
Cyanogenmod on it. The phone was already two years old when I bought it, and
it had scratches all over the place (except, thankfully, the screen itself),
but it served me well for another two years.

Recently, the Nexus One finally broke, so I replaced it with a Samsung Galaxy
S4 Mini. The previous owner had only had it for 6 months, and it was in an
impeccable condition (not a single scratch), so I had to pay a hefty $100 for
it. Again, I wiped it clean and put Cyanogenmod on it. It feels twice as fast
without all the Samsung bloatware and carrier garbage. I fully expect to keep
using the Mini for the next two or three years, at which point I'll probably
buy another used phone.

Sure, it takes a fair amount of research and luck to find a phone that has
been well cared for. And I obviously won't take any chances with the stock
ROM, who knows what it might be infected with? But as long as you're careful,
and if you buy locally from ordinary people (not professional dealers), you
can get last year's mid-range phone for the price of this year's shitphone.
Why get a $80 shitphone if you can buy a non-shit phone for $60? People in
wealthy countries switch phones a lot more often than what even the cheapest
phones are designed to last, especially if said phones are kept encased in
lots of fancy fabric, rubber, and plastic.

In addition, since you're no longer a slave of your contract, you can also
save a lot on the monthly phone bill. I only pay $8/mo on average, while
everyone else in my country seems to be stuck with $40+/mo two-year plans.

~~~
doublerebel
Cyanogenmod -- which includes Privacy Guard -- does wonders for old hardware.
When apps can't wake the device every minute to ask for location or hammer on
background data, suddenly the lowest hardware becomes snappy. The updated
graphics drivers help too. It literally added another year of life to both my
Galaxy S1 and S3s.

Just picked up the octacore Galaxy Alpha for $350 off-contract. Just like new
cars, the premium for brand new on-contract phones rarely pays itself back in
productivity.

~~~
readmitchell
Custom roms all the way. I am surprised why so-called tech writers cannot
root/install ROM and continue to be unhappy about their phone.

~~~
kijin
Well, you might not want to void the warranty on your new expensive gadget.

Which is actually ridiculous, if you think about it. Wiping the stock OS
(usually Windows) and installing some other OS on a typical laptop does not
void the warranty, and even if it does, nobody will care if you restore the
stock OS before taking your laptop in for service. Why should it be any
different for phones and tablets?

------
thanatosmin
> Last month my fourth iPhone in six years was, in medical terms, crashing.
> The screen, which had pulled away from its glue, was behaving strangely. The
> charging port, no matter how thoroughly I cleaned it, only occasionally took
> power.

Maybe a solution is to treat your next expensive phone with a modicum of care?
My partner and I have each had four iPhones over the same period with one
cracked screen, and that's it (and I consider us heavy users). I can't even
picture how to make the screen come unglued if I wanted it to...

~~~
dagw
If I have to go out of my way to wrap my phone in a protective case and treat
it with extra care just for it to not fall apart under what I consider normal
day to day use, then it is not fit for purpose as far as I'm concerned.

------
ForHackernews
I'm surprised this article didn't mention the sweet spot of affordable-but-
still-good phones out there. The Moto G could reasonably be called the
flagship for this category: [http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/26/moto-g-
review/](http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/26/moto-g-review/)

~~~
teh_klev
I have a Moto G, it's excellent. Ok the camera isn't fantastic, but it's fine
for snaps.

I found myself finally out of an 18 month contract back in 2009 (Palm Treo
750v) and hung onto it for another year eventually biting the bullet and
bought outright an unlocked vanilla HTC Desire for around GBP360 in early
2010.

Sadly wear and tear got the better of it in September 2014 and it wasn't
behaving very well, but still not bad for a four year plus device that saw
quite a bit of action.

After reading favourable reviews of the "G" I picked up a PAYG for GBP99. It's
bloody brilliant for the money, it's also at a price point that if I do
accidentally lose it, or drop it in the loo, a replacement isn't going to be
an eye-watering expense. The only sad thing was that I managed to drop it in a
carpark after owning it for only three days and cracked the upper LHS of the
screen. My HTC would have just bounced, as it often did. However the "G" still
works just fine.

------
detaro
I feel like this is going to get bigger and bigger if the "premium"
manufacturers don't get their act together. Premium hardware is nice, but if
it is slowed down by bloatware and doesn't get software updates or patches
either it has a hard time to justify the price. Replacing a 80$ "shitphone" (I
don't like the term) every 2 years is easier to stomach than a 400$+ "premium
device".

------
teh_klev
Not a phone story but...I was in the market for a new portable DAB radio for
the kitchen, I also needed one that I could plug my Android into and play
podcasts. I'd previously been stung by paying £160 for a "quality" brand
(Roberts) only to become less satisfied with it over the years (I'm a wee bit
of an audiophile) plus it didn't even have an AUX input. I'd also auditioned
Pure and Revo models but couldn't really audibly detect that they were worth
the extra money - getting something with an AUX input seems to mean hitting
the premium model price ranges.

To cut a long story short I ended up with a "Sandstrom" SDABXRW13 which is PC
World (UK)/Dixon's own brand. Ok, it's not a total Shit-Brand but you all know
the sort of thing, built-to-a-retail-price but passing itself off as some
fancy Scandinavian make, often ending in disappointment after getting it home.

This is it here:

[http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/tv-dvd-
audio/audio/radios/sand...](http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/tv-dvd-
audio/audio/radios/sandstrom-sdabxrw13-dab-radio-black-wood-20841554-pdt.html)

The reality is that it's a well built, fairly decent sounding portable DAB
radio and has exactly the same features I needed as an equivalent Pure,
Roberts or Sony, which was going to cost me at the time £80-100 more. It
doesn't have tone/eq controls but neither did many of the more expensive
brands and to be honest it I mostly only listen to spoken word radio and
podcasts, that said BBC Radio 6 sounds just fine.

I've had this unit for three months now and would happily recommend over a
prestige brand leader.

------
nextos
If one takes a bit of time to choose well, it's possible to buy good quality
stuff at almost steal prices. Think Moto E, Acer C720, Nexus 7, Casio F-91,
Duralex glassware, etc. None of those qualify as shit-x, yet their prices do.

------
SwellJoe
I bought an Amazon Fire Phone when they were on sale for $199 (and it included
a year of Amazon Prime, which I already have paid for for nearly as long as
the service has existed). It is basically a shitphone, though a quite high
quality one (from a hardware perspective, the software is soundly in the
"shitware" category). It has a weird/broken/old version of Android, has the
Amazon store instead of Google Play (though Play can be side-loaded), and has
some weird and ridiculous features that nobody wants and everybody laughs at
when I explain it to them (the 3D stuff and the _four_ cameras on the face to
provide the 3D stuff).

But, for effectively $100 I got a quite high end phone. And, it was fun to
tinker with it, getting it whipped into proper shape. I may eventually root it
and pop Cyanogen or some other ROM onto it, for now, it's a pretty solid
phone.

If I hadn't gotten the Fire, I probably would have gotten one of the cheap
Chinese imports like the author of this post. I refuse to do a subsidized
phone, and $650 for a high end phone seems absurd.

------
pcurve
This thread has attracted some hilarious HNers.

Over the years, I've learned not to buy shitronics.

Not because they have shitty reliability.

I avoid buying shitronics because I run my electronics to the ground.

I'm currently typing this on 9 year old Core 2 Duo Dell that runs plenty fast.

Down in the basement is another Dell about 11 years old that's been running
24/7 for the past 10 years. Unlike my high-end Core 2 Duo Dell, the basement
one is a Celeron POS that was a $299 special.

It was slow on day 1 and it is still slow on day 4015, but it keeps chugging
along. And every time I use it, I curse myself for not spending a little bit
extra for faster machine.

~~~
sireat
There are some really cheap options to upgrade that POS, if it is a socket 775
desktop.

Core 2 Duo is about the time when Moore's law really started slowing down,
that is you can get by just fine with a 9 year old Core 2 Duo.

Even if you had bought a top of line CPU(Pentium D?) 11 years ago you it would
still be sluggish today.

~~~
pcurve
socket 478... lol

~~~
sireat
Yikes, socket 478 is pretty much a lost cause, you can't even get any dual
cores for it.

You could buy a low end NUC (Celeron is fine) and it would pay for itself in a
year and be faster.

------
TeMPOraL
Oh yeah, shitphones. My first smartphone was a shitphone, and after three
years of living with a device that was constantly unresponsive, hung itself
every other time someone called me (no kidding) and that I had to reset by
taking out the battery every time I turned on Wi-Fi because syncing would
overwhelm the hardware - after those three years of extreme frustration, I
decided to never again be cheap on tools. There are things one shouldn't save
money on - a mattress, a work chair and - for me - a smartphone. The constant
stress and frustration just isn't worth it.

------
josteink
> Whether you choose the luxury option, the commodity option, or something in
> between, you are buying future garbage.

I think this is one of the biggest differences between today and when our
parents grew up.

When something was made back then and when someone bought it, it was bought
with the expectation that this should last. And it did. It probably still
works and could probably be used by you if you wanted to use it. Basically
decades (or in some case centuries) of durability.

Contrast that with today. If you buy something this year, servicing it next
year will be unprofitable compared to throwing it away and buying a new one.

Take a wild _guess_ at which is the eco-sustainable one.

I wonder if or when the pendulum will swing back and we will try to strive for
durability, and just how bad things needs to get before we understand that we
need to go there.

------
ajuc
I don't understand smartphones. I just carry a tablet in backpack, and still
use my 10 years old dumbphone for calls and smses. I had company iphone 4 and
it was worse phone and worse tablet, and was probably more expansive.

------
keithpeter
Just tripped over this. $80 a month for a phone contract seems hugely
expensive to me (and my Blackberry 9000). UK sim only contracts around £10 to
£20 depending on term and usage levels. Not LTE/G4 of course.

------
Synaesthesia
You can get Nokia Lumias for really cheap too, and they're very nice to use.

------
WorldWideWayne
The idea that if something isn't Apple, it's shit, is wearing a little thin.

Apple simply doesn't give me what I want in terms of features and freedom. I
think their products look boring and ugly. So to me, Apple products are shit.

~~~
aet
I think features and freedom are valid. And boring, but ugly? Can you please
point out less ugly tech products? I'm sincerely interested.

~~~
WorldWideWayne
All of their computers reminds me of 70's stereo systems and appliances. The
only thing missing is some wood paneling.

