Comments on: One Reason to Buy Less Stuff

By: The Art of Justifying iPhone Costs : Brazen Careerist

The Art of Justifying iPhone Costs : Brazen Careerist — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 06:33:18 +0000

[...] previously wrote about how I would approach the decision to buy an iPhone. I appealed to a marginal cost/benefit framework, where I concluded the marginal benefit, the added [...]

By: Presh Talwalkar

Presh Talwalkar — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 06:45:39 +0000

@KyleJB and chrischow: Thanks for commenting. My thoughts echo RohoMech’s, so I’ll let his responses be the final detailed answer

By: RohoMech

RohoMech — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:52:59 +0000

@Presh – I wonder if the apple commercial hints at a huge cost of having those things constantly nearby you.

In the past, if you called someone’s home and they didn’t answer, you’d assume they were unreachable. Eventually pagers were common and that at least alerted people to someone’s call, but then if you didn’t return the page quickly that person could get upset. The same thing is happening with cellphones.

So, by the same analogy, by having a device which lets you be increasingly available, you could end up sacrificing your alone-time.

By: RohoMech

RohoMech — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:43:50 +0000

@KyleJB – Funny, your response includes how you survived before (calling your friends), and that’s something I’ve done to my brother a few times (usually when I’m lost). I think you forgot to mention the pleasure some people get in showing off their new gadgets, which can change depending who’s with you at the time.

I used to think having fewer gadgets was an advantage, I’ve been using my cell phone’s camera instead of buying a new one, however, I think the benefit is almost entirely miraged by the failure of my phone do really do what a camera can. In any low-light situation, I will not be able to get a decent picture. My phone also has GPS & Navigation, but compared to a stand-alone device it falls very short. Same with its music & video functions. Everything just sort of works.

So, I think your comparison to AAA insurance falls apart for that reason, because the addition features don’t always work. So, a better comparison would be having some kind of auto-insurance that includes road-side assistance, but its restricted by location or hours or type of emergency. Most of the time you’ll be covered but there are certainly situations where the full-blown AAA would be the only option.

This actually DECREASES the marginal utility even further, and perhaps its worse because it gives you a false sense of increase in the marginal utility. So, while it might be more expensive to buy a camera/music player/phone/gps, and difficult to carry them around with you, having a single device that tries to do all of them will surely fail for each device it tries to replace.

By: chrischow

chrischow — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 03:57:50 +0000

An excellent post!

Did you know that the original iPod profit margin at time of release was nearly 50%? Prices have since come down since then…

http://www.isuppli.com/news/default.asp?id=7308

…I personally couldn’t justify the expense when a blackberry (erm ok its turned into a crackberry now) could do the same things an iPod but with much less initial cost with contract rebates, etc.