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On iPhones as a status symbol--
Quick preamble: Not sure if there is a formal name for the phenomenon whereby someone supposedly intelligent and/or scientific declares certain human behavior to be illogical or irrational, often with an undercurrent of smugness or contempt, when said behavior can fairly obviously be explained away in logical/rational terms. For example, I've read in more than one pop psychology/economics book that consumers are irrational when they pay attention to celebrity endorsements, because a move star has no professional expertise in whether say a particular make or model of car is any good. Yet celebrities have personal brands to protect, and rationally one expects the most famous ones to have teams perform some level of due diligence on what they are endorsing. Furthermore, expensive endorsement deals signal a basic level of liquidity and financial strength in the brand, which in turn means it's less likely for what it sells to be crap, given that will in turn dilute the brand value, etc. You don't typically pump and dump by signing multi-year branding deals. Then there is the reality that fans of a particular celebrity tend to align with them in tribal identification and values/preferences in general, so there is reason to believe that say a machismo star will like the same type of cars as a machismo fan, etc.
So when I encounter a behavior that doesn't seem rational, I generally assume I'm missing something under the surface rather than conclude that people are simply stupid. Well, here's a behavior that doesn't seem rational, and I'd like to understand what I'm missing:
iPhones are seen as minor status symbols--they're not Rolexes or Porsches, but still have what I consider to be outsized gatekeeping power relative to their cost. In particular, at least here in the US, younger people make a big deal out of blue/green bubbles, as the latter signals someone who does not have an iPhone. Beyond cosmetics, iPhone intentionally makes communication with Androids more difficult by refusing to integrate with RCS, which does complicate communicating with non-iPhones, but this complication is more a problem for the Android user than the iPhone user (e.g., picture Android sends iPhone is fine, but the reverse is low-res), since the lack of integration is largely unidirectional.
But the problem is iPhones really aren't a very useful signal in terms of conspicuous consumption, because they have a huge price range. For anyone looking, Walmart is about to sell the SE for $99, and the 11 for $199. Of course, plenty of Androids can be bought for even cheaper, but plenty are also premium phones costing the same as any iPhone, in particular the Samsung Galaxies and Google Pixels. Phones also look more or less identical in recent years, especially when you wrap a cover around it, so it takes effort to tell whether you have the latest Pro Max or the standard from a couple of years back. And to be honest, among women I know (who literally ALL have iPhones), at least half own ones that are 2 or more years old, and like a quarter have cracked screens. This doesn't exactly scream affluence.
Signals are useful when they are harder to fake. It's hard to fake being tall, so height (in real life) is often used as a proxy for a man's worth. Many also often anchor on Ivy League degrees for the same reason. When signals are easier to fake, people tend to place less value on them--you automatically assume the inbound message featuring a beautiful woman to be a bot, that people will look worse than they do in their Instagram. A Rolex (might be counterfeit) is less trustworthy than a Porsche (might be leased), which in turn is less trustworthy than a penthouse apartment or a mansion in SF.
So why do people seem to rely upon iPhones and blue bubbles so much, when it's so cheap and trivial to "fake"? Obviously all the Reddit/Twitter posts about women rejecting men when they find out their numbers are green bubbles are not representative of all, but it's prevalent enough to be part of the culture, and at some point the masses consciously or subconsciously adhere to that default.
The only thing I can think of is that buying iPhone is less about whether you have money, and more about whether you conform to the norm. When you own one, you signal that you accept that is what you are supposed to get, and that can be helpful in filtering out weirdos who post thousands-word essays on the internet about how buying one is so irrational.
I think there are two main forces contributing to this:
Signalling being "hard to fake" is not just about the physical/financial difficulty of sending the signal, but also the knowledge of how to send it, or that the signal even exists in the first place. You have to know who the fashionable celebrities are and pay attention to them, and avoid paying attention to the wrong celebrities (doing so signals you have good judgement, or more likely know the right people who inform you about who is cool and who isn't). You have to keep up to date with new information and new products as the fashions shift, and not be stuck with yesterdays fashion (doing so signals you still know the right people and aren't getting your information second hand as fashion slowly propagates). And most importantly, you have to actually care enough to spend your time and money for pure signalling, indicating that you are committed and loyal to this signal and not just sending it out frivolously. Anyone with a few hundred bucks can buy an iphone, but only someone who actually cares about being cool will willingly sacrifice the superior quality/price ratio of android devices for an overpriced apple product just to look cool. It's a costly signal not just in money but in time, knowledge, and dignity. (The last two sentences are exaggerated for comedic effect, but hopefully you get the point)
Signals are more diverse than a one dimensional quality slider that you want to maximize. A lot of signals are about belonging to a particular group. You might wear lots of dark clothing and makeup to signal that you're a goth, or conspicuously listen to Taylor Swift music to signal you're a fan and belong to groups which tend to like her, or go to church every Sunday to signal you're a good Christian, or wear giant ear gauges to signal... I'm not even sure what those signal, probably nonconformity and a rejection of normal beauty standards. And while people in each group will see these as good qualities, people outside the groups may consider them weakly positive, neutral, or even negative signals if they dislike that group. You can't send signals favorable to every group simultaneously, so choosing one demonstrates some level of solidarity, loyalty, camaraderie with those people in particular.
Personally, I think Apple products are decent-ish but overpriced relative to their quality (or equivalently, low quality relative to their price), and have unfriendly business practices such as making all their stuff incompatible with other brands when it would be trivial to have otherwise, especially when they do petty things like change the shape of their usb cables so they won't plug in to non-Apple devices (and normal usb cables won't plug in to Apple devices). As such, I consider ownership of Apple devices to signal some combination of uninformedness, susceptibility to advertisements, and hive-minded prioritization of signalling over substance. A person who buys things because they're cool instead of because they're useful. So I treat it as a (weak) negative signal and respect people with Apple devices slightly less. But also I'm a weird nerd and I am neither cool nor popular, so people who send those signals are in fact successful in signalling that I am not one of them, they are part of a different group, and that's probably the signal they want to send. If everyone wanted to send the same signal then money would be the only hurdle, and you're correct that it's not all that much money so not a strong signal. But by choosing an arbitrary product that's worse in some aspects you select for people who care about the signal strongly enough to make arbitrary choices in exchange for status with the group, and exclude people who just choose the best product and don't know or care about the group. And that becomes part of the signal and its cost.
Ha, yes. I myself would go farther and say I think the same for any kind of modification like tattoos, piercings, or nose rings, but I realize that's more objectionable than just making fun of giant ear gauges.
I hear your logic, but I'm still skeptical if it applies to more than just the margins. My belief is that people in aggregate tend to be fairly rational when it comes to their self-interest, and I stated as such at my original post. Take two examples. One, it may seem irrational for WEIRD voters to support BLM riots when doing so threatens safety, which should be more fundamental than any other value, but the reconciliation is that the riots don't tend to take place in the suburbs where said voters live, and so all the smashed stores can be safely written off as someone else's problem. Two, look at ESG investing. Even though universities and unions are avowedly in support culturally, socially, and politically, their endowment and pension funds don't blindly go all-in on ESG, because when money is on the line, people tend to stick to maximum returns.
In other words, while I see many of the same problems in iPhones that you've outlined, I wouldn't go so far as saying that their users actually think they are inferior to Android, but that it's a trade-off they're willing to make for status reasons. I think the vast majority genuinely believes iPhones to be superior, and anti-features like incompatibility with Androids or the closed ecosystem are seen as pros.
Don't forget that popularity within a group is itself a source of value, otherwise nobody would ever spend any money on it, so it's entirely consistent for a rational individual to pay more for a functionally inferior but socially superior (for their social environment) device if the sum of both effects end up positive. iPhones aren't massively inferior to android devices, they're close enough that the functional difference can be outweighed by the social component without too much pressure. So I would consider this comparable to the BLM supporters: there is a negative effect but the actual effect on the individual is small enough to be outweighed by social forces.
Now, I don't believe that all or even more iPhone users explicitly believe that they're inferior but use them anyway because they're cool. That's not how signalling usually works, usually there's some element of cognitive bias (halo effect?) going on such that individuals rationalize the behavior as being actually superior in all aspects. Even in cases where two products have genuine tradeoffs where one is good at certain things while the other product is good at different things, rabid fans will incorrectly attribute all good things to their thing and all bad things to the other thing. Or in some cases dismiss the faults of their thing as unimportant while the superior thing is what actually matters.
I don't think people are perfectly rational, or perfectly irrational, but instead are some mix of both. If tides somehow magically shift to make Androids cool and iPhones uncool, without any of their functional qualities actually changing I expect more than half of existing iPhone users would eventually switch to Android, and simultaneously convince themselves that Android is superior. It would take some time, as habits and built-in biases can be slow and stubborn, but I expect it would happen. And others would stick to iPhone devices because they genuine prefer them (and others genuinely prefer iPhones but would switch anyway out of conformity).
I guess the way I'm modeling it is to assume that everyone is mentally doing a weighted sum on all the evidence in favor of each side, and coolness increases the weight people place on evidence in favor of the cool side. So if one side is massively superior according to the evidence, people will side with it regardless, but if there's a small change then enough coolness on the other side will outweigh it, and the smaller the difference in evidence is, the smaller the coolness needs to be to make up the difference. But all of these calculations are done implicitly and in the end the person mostly just ends up concluding that one side is "better" without a full rational understanding of why they believe that.
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