Definitely ridiculous and mostly an exaggeration on my part. There is some truth to it because the features of iMessage group chats are fun (stickers, message animations, etc.) but more generally I just like the Apple ecosystem.
My personal devices are usually Apple products and they all work together pretty seamlessly. Then I have all my other Linux servers, Windows desktops, random tablets, etc. for my hobby projects which generally require more manual configuration to work together.
I just like having my “personal” things within an aesthetically pleasing, relatively privacy preserving ecosystem but I get my kicks outside of that ecosystem aplenty.
> iPhones have become the default smartphone, and is a status symbol compared to Android.
It does not function as a status symbol in the west. It's not a big deal to get one if you really want to and live in a developed country. People in asian countries making 1/8th of their american counterparts can afford iPhones. Someone making minimum wage in Germany can buy one using about 3-4 months worth of saved disposable income. In the states they'll throw one after you on credit without looking at you twice. It's only a status symbol if you want to set yourself apart from someone living in Zimbabwe... oh wait they also have lots of iPhone users. From who exactly? Afghanis?
Honestly if the bar for status symbol's is that low, you should sooner consider excercise and good dietary habits. These days in many western counties that will do many orders of magnitude more for how people perceive you and your dating life. Certainly more than what flavour of annoying chiming piece of shit you bought.
What says a lot is that you had to dredge up some up to 7 years old posts on reddit, on which replies still overwhelmingly call the idea silly. This smells like an attempt to manufacture consent, but it'd be pretty low effort for even that.
As a rule, if something sounds stupid to you, it will probably be just as silly to most people you should give a damn about. Certainly don't let some posts that look like the lowest-effort FUD imaginable tell you what other people think.
> I may have something to teach you about indicators, averages, and population samples/biases.
You didn't sample. You filtered. You used a search engine to zero in on a couple dozen in a population of 350 million, then suggest to me that the mere fact that there's at least some means it's an opinion held by enough people to matter, when in fact it's probably not - even going by the references you selected yourself.
That you throw around some statistics lingo after all that is hysterically funny to me.
Scientific rigor never was the bar to convincing me, but since you brought it up yourself, be my guest.
> People exist that judge and exclude based on if you have have an Android.
We're not debating whether such people exist, we're interested in what the experience of someone using an Android phone is likely to be. Remember that an original claim was "Which means if your an Android user in a relatively average social group: [the following will happen]"
This conversation is very much about average/majority opinion and has been from the beginning. I might let you weaken that to "an android user is likely to have at least occasional bad experiences in some social groups" - if you're willing to at least provide evidence to support that much.
After all, what could be your purpose in bringing something up that has no relevance to almost anyone? You'd just be wasting both of our time.
Maybe, but let me pose you mental model that a lot of NA iPhone users have.
For a long time, if you were on iOS and added a android user to your group chat. All threading was broken. It was no longer a group chat just a bunch of out of band messages.
So iOS users naturally started leaving the android user out of the chat. They would text their 5 friends on iOS in one group to make plans, then text their Android friend separately to update them when plans were made.
I believe this is relatively fixed in latest iOS, but that habit is still very much their in iOS users today.
Anecdotally I did just experience a group chat of 4 iOS users this year that was very active, then died when one person switched to Android.
It's hardly surprising when a large percentage of HN users will whiteknight a trillion dollar company whenever EU tells them to stop anti-competitive practices.
The fact that this is a real thing is ridiculous. Say no and move on with life. This is the type of freedom that is actually freeing.