Brand new iPhones have been available for $430 on apple.com for many years now.
And most young minimum wage employees with very little money and no "status" also use iPhones.
It is not a signal of poor/status, it is a signal of weird/not weird, without commenting on the validity of that, of course.
For example, people do not opt out of dating Android users because they think Android users are poor, they opt out because they think Android users have a higher likelihood of being sufficiently "weird" such that they do not want to engage.
Discord is actually an interesting analogy because they share apple’s overall philosophy here. Discord doesn’t absolutely firewall themselves with attestation/etc but they will absolutely ban you for using alternative clients like Discord Advanced if they notice you behaving differently from an official client on the API. Some of the things the discord advanced client can do like animated smilies or cross-server smilies are things that discord has locked away behind a paywall (with no real technical basis) and that’s in conflict with how a small minority of users want to interact with the platform.
Should discord be forced to interoperate? Bearing in mind that of course forcing them open will undercut their whole business model - but that whole model is built on gouging consumers for trivial technical features that cost nothing to implement or support.
Similarly, while there is choice in the market (just like apple and android), it still doesn’t change the network-effect problem. If my friends are on discord, and I’m left in some group sms side chat, that’s not really a substitute, right?
Now layer on 30 years of brand warrior sports-team mentality and abrasive interactions in both directions, and you’ve roughly got the iMessage problem. But of course everyone likes discord…
I mean why shouldn’t I get to use discord for free like everyone else? And I also should get the paywalled features since it’s an arbitrary and abusive paywall and the environment has been designed to tacitly funnel you into using them. Isn’t that like, super abusive?
At least Discord is available on every platform I use regularly (MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android). That alone is a massive step up from iMessage lock-in for me.
Discord excels particularly in group communications involving more than a dozen people. Its ability to organize access levels through roles and topics is a standout feature, offering significant advantages over other platforms. However, these features may not be as crucial in casual conversations among friends.
This whole “controversy” is because of Americans collectively stamping their feet and throwing a tantrum refusing to install WhatsApp or Signal. It’s really quite incredible.
But I share your view about Discord, I think it’s one app positioned to be the “American WeChat” in a few years if they don’t screw it up.
No one has even asked me to install WhatsApp or Signal or anything. I'm not sure where the tantrum is happening. I mean, if someone wanted to send me a message, I'd ask them to do it with SMS first, since I already use that. But I've never seen any evidence of any tantrums.
And most young minimum wage employees with very little money and no "status" also use iPhones.
It is not a signal of poor/status, it is a signal of weird/not weird, without commenting on the validity of that, of course.
For example, people do not opt out of dating Android users because they think Android users are poor, they opt out because they think Android users have a higher likelihood of being sufficiently "weird" such that they do not want to engage.