People will spend $700 on a phone because paying $100 a month is easier to swallow vs a $700 charge now so it doesn’t feel like as much money. Like, even if you’re paying with a credit card, that’s still a $770 (if you’re in California with that almost 10% sales tax) charge to that card. This is why you’re seeing so many financing options now on websites that sell higher-priced entertainment shit. Even if you can afford it, nobody wants to dump $700 on one thing, but, if you’re only being charged once per pay check or once per month, then hey, that’s a lot easier and $700 doesn’t seem so bad.
So, it doesn’t seem odd to me that people will dump a bunch of money on a phone vs a console. Even back when I had no credit at all, I was able to find a provider that would allow me to pay for the phone in installments; a lot of these financing options depend on your credit being at least in the 650s to 700s, so that eliminates a lot of people. Plus, I’m willing to bet on average the average person uses their phone more than their console.
In fact I literally don’t know a single person in real life who doesn’t use their phone as long as humanly possible, “humanly” here usually meaning “when the battery starts to suck”
i would not be surprised if literally every single person who upgrades their phone as soon as a new model comes out is someone who makes a living making youtube videos about upgrading their phone
also came here to marvel at the ad copy brilliance of the Official PS5 Pro Slogan: “Witness Play Unleashed” i hope whichever mad man came up with that one treated himself to an elegant 4 martini and cocaine lunch as a personal reward
The best side effect of console cruddification is that every desktop-class computer is now great at running video games. The steam deck, a decade-old tower, post-ice lake Intel/most AMD Ryzen notebooks, ARM macbooks despite two layers of incompatibility etc.
I’ve literally never bought a mobile phone in my life and I’ve owned, like, six or seven since 2003—three of them smartphones. People have loads of these things laying around and they can just give them to you once they become worthless.
Yeah, tbh, budget gaming w/ what you already have is probably the best choice, but like…
Doesn’t anyone here play modern games? $500 or even $700 to play modern games well is kind of amazing. You can’t build a PC that matches a PS5 unless you put down like $1000 and that’s before ‘acquiring’ a Windows license.
Yeah, for a lot of people I think it is the age old I buy it and it works after some quick initial setup and patches. I don’t have to build it and troubleshoot it. They want to play fortnite or roblox or NBA 2K with minimal fucking around.
