It’s the same thing every September. Y’all concern yourself with how others pay for their iPhones. Worry about you.

— 730. (@mistersunshinee) September 13, 2017

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Apple announced more than one new phone yesterday, and like most years, a certain percentage of current iPhone owners are debating which one to upgrade to as our older iPhones are now more than two years old. More than one person I know is still hanging onto the same iPhone they’ve owned for three years and not sure that they will upgrade this year or wait a bit. But Apple haters all act as if all of us blindly rush out to buy the newest one every year. We don’t, but hey, if your life is so hollow that you need to make fun of other people’s choices of what goods and services to use, I guess that’s what you have to do.

But the really funny thing for me is how many of the haters are making fun of the cost of the high end Apply phone (not the shiny new iPhone 8 that the vast majority of us will buy, but the premium model that literally most of us can’t—not just because of the price, but because of manufacturing limits, but I’ll come back to that) are also comparing it to a particular Samsung Galaxy, about which others were asking just last month: Why does Samsung think you’d be willing to spend nearly $1,000 on a Galaxy Note 8?. Seriously, you can’t complain about price by comparing it to a phone that is just as expensive.

The answer to the question isn’t about either company being greedy—it’s about first the fact that some of those components simply cost more. The OLED screen currently used in the Galaxy Note 8 and that will be in the iPhone X costs at least $100 more each at wholesale than the screen used in the iPhone 8 and comparable screens on other Samsung phones that are less costly than the Galaxy Note 8. And that isn’t the only more expensive component either phone has.

But there’s another factor that a lot of people don’t get: manufacturing scale. The last few years, Apple has sold, on average, 800,000 new iPhones a day. In order to meet the demand, not only do they have to manufacture phones close to that rate, but all of the components that they buy from other companies have to be manufactured by those other companies at that rate. Samsung, currently the only source of the high-end OLED screen mentioned above, literally can’t manufacture them fast enough to meet that kind of demand. And that isn’t the only component in the premium phones like that. So part of the reason that both Samsung and Apple are charging nearly 1000 bucks for their highest-end phones is because they want most of their customers to buy the other models, the ones that don’t have components which can’t (yet) be produced at that quantity.

So, chill. You buy the phone you want, or stick with the one you have already, and don’t be a douche making remarks that are far less clever than you think they are about other people’s choices and preferences. As more than one person has observed: asshole is the failure mode of clever.

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I had a couple more posts about writing ready to go up this week. One was kind of a sequel to Monday’s Confessions of a writing tool addict—good intentions paving the way, while the other was a follow up on a much older post: Trust the reader to keep up. But then on Tuesday morning I read an essay that made me want to rethink some advice that I give out all of the time, but that I suspect I don’t follow as much as I think I do. And even more importantly, it makes me want to rethink some of my assumptions. You should really go read Celcilia Tan’s essay, “Let Me Tell You” at Uncanny Magazine.

Anyway, I unscheduled my two posts. I may rewrite them and post them eventually. Or I may just scrap them and start over. Tan’s essay has got me thinking about several things.

And an old and dear acquaintance reminded me that this excellent music video exists, and that in addition to being a good song, the lyrics speak truth:

Propellerheads feat: Miss Shirley Bassey – History Repeating:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)