Actual tech/science smart people buy—or build—gadgets because they’re useful or interesting for tinkering. The “middle class” of tech/science buy gadgets because they’re fashionable. The former is perfectly happy having an old example of a gadget if it performs admirably and is not on the edge of the person’s tinkering interests; the latter discards old gadgets and buys new. As a result, you basically get two kinds of early adopters. One is the person who consciously adopts new tech, spending money for status, and the other is the person who acquires new tech sporadically, or builds it from parts, or even invents it, because of a tinkering (aka hacking) urge or a specific functionality need.
Obviously, this is an oversimplification, and the lines are typically not so clearly drawn, but there is a definite unfalsifiability issue for the actual tech/science “upper class” as MichaelVassar suggests. The interesting thing about that, though, is that these people are not doing what they’re doing to stay ahead of the “middle class” Joneses the way the clothing/fashion upper class do things; they’re just doing what intrigues or helps them individually.
In the end, though, a certain amount of style consciousness is necessary to maintaining a tech/science “upper class” status, because people who are too badly unstylish are going to be regarded with disdain even in tech/science circles no matter how smart they are and how interesting their gadgetry, except in the most extreme cases (Hawking, for instance). It helps to write books, of course, especially when your field doesn’t deal with visible gadgetry (e.g. cosmology).
Actual tech/science smart people buy—or build—gadgets because they’re useful or interesting for tinkering. The “middle class” of tech/science buy gadgets because they’re fashionable. The former is perfectly happy having an old example of a gadget if it performs admirably and is not on the edge of the person’s tinkering interests; the latter discards old gadgets and buys new. As a result, you basically get two kinds of early adopters. One is the person who consciously adopts new tech, spending money for status, and the other is the person who acquires new tech sporadically, or builds it from parts, or even invents it, because of a tinkering (aka hacking) urge or a specific functionality need.
As an example of this, where I am at least, lore has it that the iPhone is overpriced but not actually better than phones with Android, so usually you buy an iPhone if you want to show off money and a phone with Android if you just find a smart phone useful.
What does “better” mean here? My understanding is that the iPhone is easier to use out of the box, whereas Android requires more tinkering and is better suited to power users.
-shrug- Just upgrading from the phone I had in 2003 in the autumn of last years, I didn’t really see any difference in usability between the two. Both had a bunch of icons, everything you clicked worked out of the box. Stick the sim in, charge it up, punch in your email accounts etc into the startup wizard and away you go.
Yeah, that’s close to my understanding: the iPhone is what you get if you want something that Just Works and don’t care too much about price. Android phones are flakier (mine needed a custom ROM before it would give me a GPS fix, and it wasn’t a low-end phone for its era) but cheaper and a lot more varied, hence more likely to have an offering that matches what you’re looking for if you have specific needs or are tight on money. Android’s a slightly more open ecosystem, but that would only be decisive for me if I was planning to do a lot of low-level hacking; higher-level development support is a toss-up from what I’ve seen.
Actual tech/science smart people buy—or build—gadgets because they’re useful or interesting for tinkering. The “middle class” of tech/science buy gadgets because they’re fashionable. The former is perfectly happy having an old example of a gadget if it performs admirably and is not on the edge of the person’s tinkering interests; the latter discards old gadgets and buys new. As a result, you basically get two kinds of early adopters. One is the person who consciously adopts new tech, spending money for status, and the other is the person who acquires new tech sporadically, or builds it from parts, or even invents it, because of a tinkering (aka hacking) urge or a specific functionality need.
Obviously, this is an oversimplification, and the lines are typically not so clearly drawn, but there is a definite unfalsifiability issue for the actual tech/science “upper class” as MichaelVassar suggests. The interesting thing about that, though, is that these people are not doing what they’re doing to stay ahead of the “middle class” Joneses the way the clothing/fashion upper class do things; they’re just doing what intrigues or helps them individually.
In the end, though, a certain amount of style consciousness is necessary to maintaining a tech/science “upper class” status, because people who are too badly unstylish are going to be regarded with disdain even in tech/science circles no matter how smart they are and how interesting their gadgetry, except in the most extreme cases (Hawking, for instance). It helps to write books, of course, especially when your field doesn’t deal with visible gadgetry (e.g. cosmology).
As an example of this, where I am at least, lore has it that the iPhone is overpriced but not actually better than phones with Android, so usually you buy an iPhone if you want to show off money and a phone with Android if you just find a smart phone useful.
What does “better” mean here? My understanding is that the iPhone is easier to use out of the box, whereas Android requires more tinkering and is better suited to power users.
-shrug- Just upgrading from the phone I had in 2003 in the autumn of last years, I didn’t really see any difference in usability between the two. Both had a bunch of icons, everything you clicked worked out of the box. Stick the sim in, charge it up, punch in your email accounts etc into the startup wizard and away you go.
Yeah, that’s close to my understanding: the iPhone is what you get if you want something that Just Works and don’t care too much about price. Android phones are flakier (mine needed a custom ROM before it would give me a GPS fix, and it wasn’t a low-end phone for its era) but cheaper and a lot more varied, hence more likely to have an offering that matches what you’re looking for if you have specific needs or are tight on money. Android’s a slightly more open ecosystem, but that would only be decisive for me if I was planning to do a lot of low-level hacking; higher-level development support is a toss-up from what I’ve seen.