Wrote books on Apple software. Bought five figures of gear over decades. Then bought an Apple giftcard, & suddenly permabanned in spite of raising issue with internal contacts.
932 comments: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114
Wrote books on Apple software. Bought five figures of gear over decades. Then bought an Apple giftcard, & suddenly permabanned in spite of raising issue with internal contacts.
932 comments: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114
Not everyone can afford to have a back up plan.
If you can afford apple products you can afford a back up plan.
That’s a terrible take, one you wouldn’t use if this was Google or Samsung.
I would actually, that’s the point. A backup plan is cheap. If you can afford a modern smartphone you can afford a backup plan.
That seems to be a very North American point of view, as it ignores the fact that many people worldwide cannot afford not to own a smartphone.
There are billions out there who must use smartphones because entire economies run on apps like WeChat, WhatsApp, or Line, from government appointments to QR based payments. Slowly but surely, many countries are moving towards smartphone centric societies. Not saying it is good or bad, just the way it is.
A sizeable part of those societies have to weight the price of a backup plan, which is, let’s say, $2 a month forever, or else they will lose access to their backup data. And when they have spent $300-$500 on a device that will have to last them for 7 to 10 years, $24 a year is hard to justify.
I’m not suggesting anyone gets a recurring subscription at all. You can buy the most dogshit pc or even something like an off brand raspberry pi and a $10 microsd card with hundreds of gigabytes of storage and have a permanent data backup solution. You can even skip the device if you’re really struggling. Microsd cards are dirt cheap.
Combine that with grabbing several free tiers of data storage like Google, Proton, mega, filen, etc, you can rack up hundreds of gigabytes of storage, each with its own account so if one goes down or you lose access you can have the same data on the others. This can be for maximum priority data but even for low priority you can fit a lot of data on 15gb if it’s not all high quality photos and videos.
And if I can reach a bit, even a 2nd phone is viable. Many phones are under $100 and they, at the bare minimum, “work” so one such phone can be kept as a backup.
There are many, many ways to have a very cheap backup plan. It’s more about logistics than storage, and only requires a little bit of thinking and planning.
I was once in a place where I couldn’t afford an extra $2 a month, like you mentioned. But I ALWAYS had a backup plan, and sometimes it was completely free.
Now you are assuming that most people are literate enough to do any of those things.
If that was true, repair stores making money off dirty phone USB connectors wouldn’t be a thing.
Okay I think you’re intentionally missing the point. If someone isn’t literate enough to make a Google drive account they are going to have a hard time with more things than a backup plan. They might not even be able to use a smartphone at all. We can nitpick the reasons why someone can’t make a backup plan all day. What if they have a learning disability? What if they’re in prison? What if they have no arms?
It doesn’t matter. My point is if you can use a smartphone at a below-average level, without assistance, you can easily and affordably (free) have a data backup plan. If you can’t use a smartphone at a below average level without assistance, you have much bigger problems than a backup plan and a backup plan shouldn’t be one of your worries.
I think you are missing the bigger point here.
Most smartphone users cannot operate a local backup using a RPi. In fact, most users worldwide cannot afford to buy and run a RPi 24/7.
Most smartphone users are not able to afford a Google Drive plan that holds all their pics.
Most smartphone users are just not literate enough to even understand where they pics are, or that they may need a backup plan at all.
You cannot apply your life experiences to quite literally a billion people for whom smartphones are likely the only thing with a screen they own. And yeah, among those, plenty of iPhone users who bought it for cheap or got it for free with their cellular plan.
Yeah, we get it, you know what is needed and how it needs to be done, and you have the cash to do it. But maybe you should realize that you are the exception, a tiny minority.