> Why does the price of the iPhone, which you already own and which is a sunk cost, factor into it?
Exchanging $500 for an iPhone was a sunk cost. You now have an iPhone with an expected future value to you of at least $500 (or why did you pay that much for it?). Using an Android phone instead of the iPhone you already have prevents you from extracting that expected future value from the iPhone. The more you use the Android phone instead, the less value you can extract from the iPhone. It's effectively a $500 opportunity cost.
> Further, why do cellular services factor into any of this? Both iOS and Android devices run apps fine without cellular service. In fact, lots of them don't even have the ability to use cellular service.
If cellular service is so unimportant then why does everybody pay so much for it?
> If you're insisting on only examining the scenario where you own an iPhone and a long-term cellular contract, then you can still switch to Android for $30-50 through the simple expedient of buying an unlocked Android phone, taking the SIM out of your iPhone, and placing it in the Android phone.
Your efforts to reduce the switching cost are doing nothing but incurring more switching costs. A $30 Android phone is not comparable to a $500 iPhone. It will have a slower CPU, less memory, less storage, a lower resolution screen, etc. It's liable to be running an old version of Android that doesn't support newer apps, and any apps it does run will run more slowly and otherwise not work as well as they would on the newer iPhone (or newer Android device). These are all costs -- costs the market values at hundreds of dollars or the price disparity wouldn't exist. Meanwhile even $30 is a significant price to pay against a market for $1 apps.
And sharing a SIM card is an enormous pain in the ass. If you have an iPhone, other iPhones remember that and route text messages to iMessage. Your Android phone won't receive them when it has the SIM card. Any app you use on either device which is dependent on receiving events from the network won't work outside of WiFi whenever you put the SIM card in the other device, and every time you go to a new place you get to type the WiFi password twice. "Is an enormous pain in the ass" is a significant switching cost.
Which is before we even get to all the other costs of switching platforms, like trying to move your data, which is only difficult when it isn't impossible.
Exchanging $500 for an iPhone was a sunk cost. You now have an iPhone with an expected future value to you of at least $500 (or why did you pay that much for it?). Using an Android phone instead of the iPhone you already have prevents you from extracting that expected future value from the iPhone. The more you use the Android phone instead, the less value you can extract from the iPhone. It's effectively a $500 opportunity cost.
> Further, why do cellular services factor into any of this? Both iOS and Android devices run apps fine without cellular service. In fact, lots of them don't even have the ability to use cellular service.
If cellular service is so unimportant then why does everybody pay so much for it?
> If you're insisting on only examining the scenario where you own an iPhone and a long-term cellular contract, then you can still switch to Android for $30-50 through the simple expedient of buying an unlocked Android phone, taking the SIM out of your iPhone, and placing it in the Android phone.
Your efforts to reduce the switching cost are doing nothing but incurring more switching costs. A $30 Android phone is not comparable to a $500 iPhone. It will have a slower CPU, less memory, less storage, a lower resolution screen, etc. It's liable to be running an old version of Android that doesn't support newer apps, and any apps it does run will run more slowly and otherwise not work as well as they would on the newer iPhone (or newer Android device). These are all costs -- costs the market values at hundreds of dollars or the price disparity wouldn't exist. Meanwhile even $30 is a significant price to pay against a market for $1 apps.
And sharing a SIM card is an enormous pain in the ass. If you have an iPhone, other iPhones remember that and route text messages to iMessage. Your Android phone won't receive them when it has the SIM card. Any app you use on either device which is dependent on receiving events from the network won't work outside of WiFi whenever you put the SIM card in the other device, and every time you go to a new place you get to type the WiFi password twice. "Is an enormous pain in the ass" is a significant switching cost.
Which is before we even get to all the other costs of switching platforms, like trying to move your data, which is only difficult when it isn't impossible.