How much does the iPhone 6s cost around the world?

The price of Apple's new iPhone 6s varies around the 12 countries it is going on sale in on September 25. Find out how they differ here

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...does-the-iPhone-6s-cost-around-the-world.html

John.

 

I mean I don't see the price discrepancy as too major, each country has their own VAT?

 

I suppose you could read out of the graph that in all the countries, it also costs too much.

 

I think Apple would disagree and state that they're close to the optimal balance between profit margin and units sold.

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Appl...e-orders-are-on-a-record-setting-pace_id73734

The base iPhones are pricey for the spec sheets they have, but, arguably, not the user experience. The icing on the cake is the charge for extra storage, and the base 16GB is too sparse for most people. We're not talking class-leading, fast UFS 2.0 chips either, which would have made the insane pricing slightly more bearable.

 

I've owned both Android and iPhone's. I don't particularly think the iPhone is "overpriced", sure maybe if you are just comparing bare "specs" (RAM, CPU, etc) to a comparable Android flagship (Nexus 6, S6, etc). But does the average consumer care about specs? They want a phone that works, is smooth, will give timely updates. iPhones also I think have superior build quality over MOST Android phones. And it's also no shocker that they keep people in the Apple ecosystem (OS X partial integration, Facetime with other iOS/OS X users). Also Apple's support is top notch. I could walk into ANY Apple store and get help with my iPhone (not that I needed it). I can't say that about any other Android phone except maybe Samsung, and you can't always find a Samsung kiosk to get help out.

I went iPhone back in 2013 because at the time Verizon didn't have any Android phones I wanted (LG Optimus G, Note 3 had just come out, Galaxy S3/4, HTC One M7). And my iPhone 5 served me well for 20 months until the LTE radio decided to go doo-doo 2 months before I could swap it out. My iPhone was smooth out of the box, had okay battery life at the time, and the 32 GB of onboard storage was overkill for me. I probably will not return to iOS until they make 2 GB of RAM standard on an iPhone, I felt 1 GB if you did a TON of multi-tasking was not enough.

If you want to see who makes the smoothest, and most responsive phone overall, the iPhones are always top tier contenders. Android is so fragmented with all the custom ROMs, bloatware, varying levels of crappy OEM roms, it's no wonder why some people leave Android. One could have a very good user experience, and another a terrible one. Apple has the advantage of writing iOS for essentially 3 devices, iPod, iPhone and iPad, and they control the hardware unlike Android.

 

I suppose I shouldn't talk, since I sometimes buy galvanized screws that cost ten times as much as the cheapest brand. And easily fork out comical sums of money for a mooring rope made from woven polymer mesh with flexible lead weave in the middle, in the belief that it'll last a few years longer than the other one.. (you know, the cheap one, made out of just spun gold or something like that).

And sure, I have at one point picked just the more expensive speaker cables without having any idea whether they were actually possible to distinguish from the cheaper ones, and subjectively felt that spending more money on it clearly was the right choice, since it seemed to me that the sound in the speakers was quite good. Even though I didn't actually try the other ones first.

And yeah - if you have two brands of hemp-rope made from the same material. But one of them is woven in such a way that it doesn't cut your hands to pieces if you pull on it without gloves - then that product is worth more than the other one.

But what we're talking about with the iPhones is that the amount of work that actually went into customizing what tends to be the same or lesser hardware than what you find in other phones, is very small. Not only that, it tends to limit your choices. So while perhaps the standard package is all right, it's not actually either faster or more convenient than what you can get on literally any other config. That's kind of the problem.

The first iPhone was interesting in the way that it offered an if very limited UI and very limited amount of software, that it popularized what used to be "smartphones" designed for work. But in practice, at the time, it was an ordinary proprietary format disposable consumer phone that essentially ensured that any amount of brilliant smartphone designs died. Not because it usurped the smartphone market, but because it used the same hardware and made more money with it.

So some of us sit there with phones that can be used as computers, we know what the limitations are on these kits, we don't particularly love the UI - but they're functional and the battery lasts a week. And the guys who make them look at Apple and they see that they've got it all wrong - the future is in making phones for the common market that cost 5 times as much as a slim phone you can fit in your pocket (I mean remember those?), but still last just about a year or so anyway. Here are people who thought smartphones had to cost more because of r&d and because they were built with material that would survive the apocalypse - and they are given this opportunity here to just put an arm-platform with an embedded piece of ram on it and no external connectors, and a glued on cheap lithium ion battery, which is all cheap to make - and still take "smartphone prices" for it.

And it works. The iPhone offers slightly more functionality than what your average pocket phone did in 2000. Though arguably that wasn't really the case. But it costs a bunch of money and it costs very little to make as well. So why wouldn't you do that - instead of making a phone that can double as your laptop in a pinch? Because for that, you have another Apple product that you can buy for comical amounts of money.

So it's not that I begrudge people the joy of owning a super-expensive phone with pretty buttons, not at all! It's more that I blame people for buying crap and forcing out of the market the kind of phones that were actually being made around 2000, that were useful and actually did last a few years.

Other than that - no, you're not going to convince me that a variable user-experience on Android, compared to the supposedly predictable user-experience on Apple-platforms, make the iPhones worth the price. The first iPhone admittedly had something unique with how they made use of the embedded instruction set options on arm for the UI. That was well done. But on the later iterations, you do have lag on the iPhones, and there's no such thing as everything being smooth and snappy. It's a myth, and it survives purely for the reason that when people buy an expensive product, they are more likely to have a more positive subjective experience with it. Like with me and my speaker-cables.

 

But hardware is only half the battle. Remember, engineers and software developers still have to write an operating system that will ensure stability, a good fluid user experience, be upgradable, available in multitude of variations (different carriers, regions, countries). I'm not arguing that the hardware is better, it's not. But the iPhone/iOS is definitely more optimized to run with lesser hardware (ironically the same goes with Windows Phone OS). While some skinned versions of Android NEED all that RAM or the phone would run slow as molasses. My Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition is an example. TouchWiz is super heavy on the OS, and honestly the tablet would run even worse if it had less than the 3 GB of RAM it has.

Who are we to judge what people want to buy, and their spending habits? And my iPhone most certainly lasted more than 1 year, so that generalization has no basis in fact. And how many people actually care about external connections? When I had my iPhone, I didn't care it didn't have a MicroSD, I dealt with the limited storage, it's not a huge deal. If it was, iPhones wouldn't sell like they would. And no micro USB? I'll live, I had multiple Lightning cables.

iOS and Android both have their pros and cos. iOS I feel is far easier to teach people how to use (my mom and dad both got iPhones pretty recently, and they haven't really needed any explaining to figure out anything). I think iPhones are built better than most cheapo plastic framed Android flagships. The downsides of iOS (if you can call it that) is the "locked" interface. But how many people are actually modding their phones? I used my iPhone as a phone and used it to surf the net and play some games. Rooting and modding phones is IMO kinda pointless, you should use the phone as the manufacturer intended. Samsung also makes that much more complicated with KNOX, if you value your warranty. And you say why why iPhones worth the price? Have you owned ANY Apple product ever? I have plenty, I'm still a Windows person, but I've seen the otherside. Apple is worth the price for SOME products because of the overall user experience. I think iOS is great, runs smooth, is stable (unlike early Android Lollipop with the memory leaks), and I would gladly buy another iPhone if it met all my needs. Apple support far outstrips any other electronics manufacturer for consumer end support. No I am not an Apple fanboy, I don't have my iPhone anymore, I have 2 Android devices, and I got my fiance 2 Android devices. Most Android phones are a better "value" for the money, but with Verzion EDGE the iPhone comes to the same price most of the time. I wouldn't mind getting another iPhone TBH.

I ended up getting the Sony Xperia Z3V on Verizon over other Android/Apple smartphones because:

- I wanted to get back to Android as I did quite miss it alot
- I wanted a phone larger than ~4.7" but smaller than 5.5" (which ruled out the iPhone 6/6+ earlier this year)
- I did not want any Samsung phone (bloat, crappy build quality, the S5 was aging, the Note 4 was plastic, already had a Samsung S-Pen device)
- The Nexus 6 had too many compromises (bad battery life, tiny battery for chassis size, 1440p screen causing SoC to work overtime draining battery life faster, 5.96" screen size, Motorola)
- I do not like the LG G series (button placement, ergonomics)
- Sony's UI is pretty clean, had a ginormous battery for its chassis size (I get 2-4 days battery life on average), 1080p screen, microSD slot, excellent camera, very little use of cheapo plastic, glass back (premium feeling IMO), oh it's also dustproof and water resistant.

 

On the other hand, in Apple's defence, they have improved over time

Well, it's dumb, and it killed off UIQ, Symbian and any of the planned semi-open OS offshots. We were in a situation where all of the smartphone makers were looking for a way to keep producing technically edgy phones to have a platform to experiment on, and looked into ways to cut costs on OS development by - for the first time since gsm was invented - separating out the functionality of the phone from the OS outside it. Suggestions were made about developing mobile phone-applications that wouldn't be strictly dependent on a phone, in order to utilize gsm and umts more dynamically. I know phone operators that had previously thought the idea of simply moving on to pure datatraffic and free voice-plans as heresy, as a way to end the mobile phone business for good - who were warming up to the idea of moving on to operators dealing with gsm voice and data traffic as a service for an increasing amount of different devices. This is in about 2000.

And then we get the iPhone, with a protected OS, inside protected networks on exorbitant data-plans. And it's declared that this is the choice everyone wants.

So pack your bags, throw that pc-like phone and mobile platform in the trash. Cuddle down with your tablet (without gsm or data modems, of course), and wait another 20 years before anything happens on the smartphone market again. At which point we get a bigger phone! With bigger screen to get the bigger buttons in. You know...

But who am I to judge people's spending habits, right?

Yeah. I sort of get that. Apple has an approach to user-interfaces that - once you get past the sheer annoyance of the hand-holding - actually makes sense. That it's not the gui of a barely understandable scripting language that some programmer mashed together in two minutes because they hear stupid users can't use the command console. That's real.

But on the other hand, the tutorial for the swiping gui pretty much everyone has on android now needs a two-page tutorial with two pictures on them. And that's that. It's been like that since the second major android release..

Think all you'd like The Iphones have been a way for sellers to get rid of cheap, outdated TN panels and thick capacitive touch-meshes for years. The glass they use is heavy, it breaks - actually cracks. And the construction is in such a way that the parts in the chassis can shift and make the tn panels and the mesh misaligned. So you get in the situation that you need to treat it nicely so it won't fall apart. That's not normally a mark of quality for me. Water comes in very easily, the contacts are put in in such a way that dust and grit from the socket falls inside the chassis. They've finally managed to stop using lithium ion cells that are glued to the back plate, thankfully, but it took ten years of sporadic recalls to get there. The stereo contact is probably my favorite part - several of the versions have had a contact soldered on to an open non-isolated wire, that then leads to the 2 dollar "dsp". And they chose that over a closed module completely deliberately - and people think it's fantastic. Note that an external "dsp" (that is outside the closed module before the signal is amplified) to soften the noise is not really an ideal way to produce hifi. If you showed this to an engineer who did radio or speakers in the 60s, they would laugh at you and mock whoever taught you electrical engineering, and assume that you literally wouldn't know U from RI. The entire thing is a joke. It's a cavalcade of engineering blunders. It's this super-example of a dry cracker with smelly cheese on it - that somehow turns into a deliciously exclusive hors d'oeouvre when served in the right way.

But it sells, so who am I to judge, right..? And embedded bloggers get paid by PR companies to write articles about how a standard ARM5 processor, available and indeed deployed earlier on many phones - once put inside an apple product - becomes a beacon of hope for technological advancement, and an ideal for how to make use of technical inventions, and also cure that cancer in your ear from the antenna radiation due to how the chassis on the phone actually creates noise and isolates the signal. That is the phone-signal, in a phone, used to call people on. So who am I to judge, right..?

..you know...

I mean, I have no problem with people preferring Mac UI - I do as well. My linux desktops are often organised in a way that would be familiar to an OSX user. But trust me - what you're paying for here is not uniquely developed, nor uniquely available only on Apple platforms. And if you could choose - wouldn't you want a usb slot or a memory card that you could hotswap with your camera, or with another phone, or whatever? Or wouldn't you want a thinner IPS screen, and get that motherboard module flattened and shortened a bit, so you'd finally get this touch-phone down in your pocket? What about a phone-application that doesn't magically unlock the phone in your pocket, because it's running at a more exclusive access context than other user-software..? I mean, it's been possible to create all of that for at least 10 years - but no one wants it over a freaking toy-phone with huge pictures you can tap on with your fists.

So yeah. Not entirely happy about this. But people buy what they want, of course. And informed customers in an actual open market is for communists nowadays, apparently, so there's that too.

...seriously, though. I'm pretty bitter about the entire thing. Some of us sat on pretty neat opportunities here - and then Apple turns up and upends the entire thing. And it's not all that comfortable to sit and listen to people convincing themselves it's actually a technically superior, or even cutting edge product as well. Because.. you know.. it isn't. That was never the point with the iPhone.

 

Early reports are that the iPhone 6S has 2 gb of RAM. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/0...ports-2gb-ram-for-iphone-6s-4gb-for-ipad-pro/

I like the concept of Android more--from a market ideology standpoint, I like the idea of multiple OEMs competing to offer the best selection of features and low price to win consumers away from each other--but the recent series of security SNAFUs with Android has got me contemplating an iPhone as my next device. I'm not in love with iOS, but I'm at least debating it. Plus, the real-world camera performance on iPhones historically has been very, very good, and that's a big part of what I use a smartphone for.

 

I'm not sure which people you're referring to, but just because some want to point out the merits of a product doesn't mean that they won't point out downsides as well. It would be wrong to call the iPhone a cutting edge product when Apple primarely refines concepts that already exist. Some of the biggest gripes to me are the low-capacity batteries without QuickCharge, low screen resolution on the small iPhones, no OIS on the regular iPhones, and the low screen-to-body ratio on both the Plus and regular model. Most of the pros over Android flagships have to do with the optimisation work and closed nature of the ecosystem.

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Firs...ry-idea-of-what-the-phones-capable-of_id73601
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Firs...vs-Z3-vs-G4-camera-samples-comparison_id73408

The iPhone 6 often outdoes the Xperia Z5 (non final software), an Android phone with a hallmark camera, when it comes to sharpness/overall level of detail captured. Sony's current RGBW sensors are being pegged as upper mid-range sensors in phones like the Huawei P8, but in the iPhone 6S, it should offer a clear improvement over the iPhone 6.



The Xperia Z5, again, is running on non-final software, but it will have to compete against the 6S, not the 6. The iPhone 6 in this video isn't trailing behind, and it's competing against a modern S810 Android phone running the UI at 1080p. Sony's ROMs are fairly lag-free too due to the minimal amount of bloat.

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Here...erent-flagships-Galaxy-S6-vs-iPhone-6_id71318

Then there's the texture compression standard PowerVR uses and scaling...

I have to admit that the new iPhone 6S plus is somewhat tempting to me, but I think I might've ended up regretting it, cost not taken into account, since I prefer Google's smartphone OS vision, and I'd probably end up jailbreaking it early on. My temptation may also stem from a lessened interest in Android flagships available this year compared to previous generations along with a curiosity towards the grass on the other side of the fence.

 

The biggest issue with this is, users will have very very different Android experiences. I can assure you TouchWiz was horrible on pre 4.0 Android phones, as was HTC Sense. But if you had a Nexus phone, you wouldn't have that issue. That's my thing, Android is so fragmented, it's really depressing and frustrating. Also carriers aren't innocent from this, Verizon is apparently holding back Sony's push for lollipop for the Z3V, it was supposed to get 5.0 or 5.1 months ago. Whereas my iPhone got timely iOS updates/upgrades, even being a carrier iPhone at the time. iPhone camera is pretty good, I never had an issue with it or the scratched/fuzzy lens. But can you live with locked storage (unless you opt for the 64 GB version) and a Lightning cable?

Nipsen, you think too much about this. :\

Sure your wall of text may show you disdain for Apple, but how many people ACTUALLY care? They want a phone that works. I dropped my iPhone 5 plenty of times, and it never broke broke. Honestly I don't really care if a phone has a microSD, sure it's nice but it isn't a necessity for me. And again if a USB port or microSD card was so important to people, why do they buy an iPhone? The iPhone never had those features. I've used Android phones without microSD card slots and I lived.

 

I know, I know. But imagine you're in a position to dictate the standard features of future smartphones, because they need to change to survive, and start to swim somewhere - and then have carriers and phone-makers cling to the old schema with the iphone like it was a plank bobbing up nearby in the middle of an empty pacific ocean. It's fun at first, to see them drift away. But in the end they still own the networks and have the money.

Anyway - with platform abstraction of the phone-tools, for example, what you would be looking at would be a sneak-peek of what mobile carriers will have to do fairly soon to make mobile bands more effectively distributed. Namely move on from analog to digital on the client interfaces. And essentially make the mobile networks carriers of a data streaming service. Where you then would utilize the lookup functionality of the phone networks, along with having certain standards for response and bandwidth, routing time, etc. (that you don't currently have on facebook phone-chat, or skype, and so on). This was a viable solution, at least then, because it would have protected the carriers from slowly trickling away and disappearing when competing against .. in most of the cases.. their own "mobile broadband" services..

But yeah, this could have been real 15 years ago. And then Apple happened.