Ged Carroll

iPhone pragmatism

Published: (Updated: ) in consumer behaviour | 消費者行為 | 소비자 행동, gadget | 小工具 | 가제트 | ガジェット, software | 軟件 | 소프트웨어 | ソフトウェア, technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー, telecoms | 電信 | 통신 | テレコム, wireless | 無線 |무선 네트워크 | 無線 by .

The estimated reading time for this post is 139 seconds

Despite working as a digital strategist and creative thinker (whatever the hell that means) agencyside, I have a very pragmatic relationship with technology both past and present from the iPhone to my original Mac. I have had Macs since 1989, primarily because they were the closest thing I found to a computer that just worked.

I had analogue mobile phones from my time DJing and having friends who worked in cell phone service centres. My first phone that I had to buy was digital, the mobile phone was a Motorola; mainly because One2One (now Everything Everywhere) sold a package where you paid just over 100 pounds and had a phone for 12 months, with a small amount of inbuilt local call time. At the time I used it as a more reliable version of my pager. Even back then SMS proved to be more reliable than the pager that I had used previously

I went from Motorola to Ericsson, mostly because Ericsson handsets were really well made and then moved to Nokia when Ericsson merged its handset business with Sony. I moved from Nokia to the Apple iPhone and a Samsung feature phone for two reasons:

My iPhone was also expensive, like the price of a cheap laptop kind of expensive, which means that I look at it in a different way to previous smartphones. Instead of getting rid of my phone every 18 months, I am thinking closer to three years, just like my laptop.  An additional factor  is that whilst the first iPhones were a radical leap forward,  the iPhone 4 and 4S don’t have sufficient must-have value for me to move on until my current phone dies or the next iteration of the iPhone comes out.

Now I wouldn’t say that I am an everyman for the iPhone using population; but this has to have some effect on sales. For every iPad that Apple sells there maybe at least a few iPhone upgrades put on hold as an opportunity cost.