When To Spend More

Buying things seems to get more complicated every year. This increased complexity can include opportunity costs, the choices and sometimes, even the price. Then at some point in your life, you get a job and now you have more disposable income to spend. It's a lot easier to make a decision when you have a small budget. Good things at low prices generally don't come in huge varieties – take headphones for example. There is the Koss KSC75 at $15 - and then a huge gaping chasm in quality until you can afford at least a pair of Grado SR60s, which come in at around $80. When you have more to spend, you have a lot more choice. At the $100 - $150 price range, you have an abundance of excellent choices. In fact, you can now choose based on other criteria, like comfort, open or closed, size and portability. Unfortunately, the inverse is also true – there are also few choices at the high end of the market. If you are in the market for a new car that costs more than $2 million dollars, you have little choice besides a Bugatti Veyron Super Sports.

Needless to say, this leaves us with a conundrum most of the time. When should you splurge for the better product? There are probably a couple of factors to consider, some more obvious than others.

Is the more expensive product better? This could be an objective scale or a subjective scale. Sometimes, the comparison is simple: 3-ply toilet paper is strictly better than 1-ply toilet paper (maybe, in the case where you aren't using for its intended purpose, you could make an argument otherwise). Other times, like choosing between the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S III, you can have read countless comparisons and reviews and not come to a good conclusion.

Can you tell the difference? Don't just read what you can find on the Internet and take it as gospel. Sure, a 24k gold plated HDMI cable from Monster Cable is probably strictly better than a $2 cable from Monoprice; but you won't be able to tell the difference. After all, the signals are digital and the cable is going to be hidden behind your television. Nobody (except, perhaps you) would ever care how much you spent on your damn cable.

Are you buying it because of the brand? A lot of geeks and nerds look down on this pattern of buying. Why? This behaviour means that you might be buying a product (and paying more) based simply on marketing – not its actual merit. A good example of this are Beats headphones; they aren't actually bad, but they sure are expensive. Most Beats headphones have excellent Sennheiser alternatives for less than half the price - so if you own Beats headphones, it's pretty clear your intention sways more towards flaunting your purchasing power rather proving than your audiophile cred.

Now, I'm giving pretty specific examples with clear cut differences. Really, the product you can comparing can come with numerous differences that have their tradeoffs – and this can include things like after sales service, included accessories, aesthetics and even seemingly tiny items like a special hinge on a laptop or an additional button on a mouse.

So when should you spend more? It's really all up to you. Buy what's best for you. Who cares what angry people on the Internet think?

Being Evil or Just Following Incentives?

Anyone who has studied economics has heard of this word many times: ‘incentives’. It is what shapes our behaviours. It can explain pretty much why any of us do what do we do. The difference is merely that some of us have lines we do not cross. (You could say, we have an incentive to not cross that line chasing another more selfish incentive.)

In the past couple of weeks, we have watched the true nature of many companies come to light or fruition. Twitter announced a change to their API. This was seen by the first of many unwanted changes to come – and they’re probably right. The first casualty of the new API changes was the Tweetbot alpha. They couldn’t get enough tokens under the new token limit and Twitter refused to give them more. While Tapbots are reassuring us that the full Mac version will not be affected, one can’t help but be skeptical of the whole debacle.

If you look at the way the announcement was worded, and how Twitter has been behaving over the past couple of months (not just the recent announcement), you’d know that these changes were probably a matter of time. There’s somewhat of a huge uproar on the Internet over how Twitter has become another massive overlord, wielding its power over the Internet. All that has really happened is that Twitter is now focused on making money. People forget really quickly what a free service is really selling. In this case, Twitter really, is selling access to you.

We’ve seen this happen everywhere. We love free things – but economists will tell you that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’. This dissonance will always occur whenever the value of the service to the business does not correspond to the value of the service to the customer. The business will always respond to its incentives: it needs to make money. The lines they aren’t willing to cross are the ones which will lose them most of their customers. They are more than happy to cross lines which will make them lose a small number of them. It’s been made clear that Twitter owns the dominant mobile clients.

Are developers being shafted? Perhaps they are. Many of them have been building clients for a while now. Twitter’s iOS client was originally a third party client. But times have changed – and if it hasn’t become clear by now, any time you build off someone else’s platform for free, you can certainly expect to run into issues. There will always be the systemic risk that that platform will be yanked from under your feet.

Maybe your client is growing so large, that it is a risk to the platform owner’s business. You may not have thought about this, but if the most popular Twitter client wasn’t controlled by Twitter, that would make Twitter be at risk of the client going rogue. Can you imagine the problems it would cause if the Twitter client used a different link shortener? A different picture service? Twitter also has to sell ads – imagine if this rogue client refused to comply and doesn’t display ads correctly. Heck, this rogue client might even work with app.net and start moving Twitter users there! The horror!

That’s the other thing – always think about what value you are offering the platform owner. If all you are offering is spending their money using their servers to further your own goal, you can expect that one day, that free lunch will be over. Sometimes, the incentives might align. The iOS App Store, for example, really has no obligation to developers. Their obligation is to their customers, the people who buy apps. However, their incentives align with developers. Why? The App Store takes a cut. You sell more apps, both you and Apple make more money.

Is that going to last forever? Probably not. Things change – and one day, the incentives you took for granted to be everlasting and unchanging are going to mutate, and when it does, it might stab you in the face.

Edit: Here's a fun analogy that I think is worth a read: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let’s Grab a Bite

New Theme, New Host

I've decided to switch to a new theme again. The last switch was around 3.5 years ago, in October 2008. That was the first switch to a simpler design. The one I used up until September 2008 was a more complicated theme, customized to my liking, and even had an AJAX search box. What's the difference between this theme and the old one? The top bar has been simplified and streamlined - I've kept only the newer categories, and removed all the smaller, less important ones. It no longer has a hover dropdown. The theme is also responsive - which means it'll work on smaller screens as well as larger ones. As a consequence of this change, I've shrunk the Google Adsense ads again. Why would I do this? So the theme will work perfectly on an iPhone screen. I have no idea what it looks like on an Android screen at the moment, but it should work on a 320 by 480 screen, so I don't think it'll break anywhere else.  (If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll notice every time I switch themes my ads seem to grow smaller).

I've switched to a new host: WebFaction. Why? I was outgrowing my old host in terms of what I needed. I was with the previous host for a total of nearly 8 years. (It is, in fact, paid for until the end of this year.) I needed space for my other websites as well, so WebFaction, which I have grown familiar with because of Pressyo and its projects, seemed like the perfect fit. I have a few projects of my own, and this was really outgrowing what Cpanel hosts were capable of. What projects are these? You might or might not have seen ManaHelix or MagicCardRank. I started those projects some time last year, while I haven't updated them in a while, I will. They are just simple hobbies for now, but I hope that they'll grow into more interesting projects as time passes.

Update: Tested on Android, both on Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich default browsers - the search field fails to display (not sure why), but otherwise everything works - YAY! Also - higher resolution images for higher PPI screens browsing in webkit (also known as retina displays...).

Switching to iOS

In October 2011, I bought an iPhone 4S and left the Android camp (for the moment, anyway). The first thing one would think about is — why?

The iPad

To understand why, one needs to know the chronology of events. I hadn’t lived with either an Android device or an iOS device at the time. In July 2010, I bought a Samsung Galaxy S, easily the best Android device at the time. In October 2010, I made a far more important acquisition. I bought an iPad.

Somewhere in the second half of 2010, I was offered a job on the Gold Coast. I decided to take it. Needless to say, there was a lot of packing involved — and I needed a very important device. I needed something for small amounts of personal computing, be it surfing the web or simply playing a few games. Now that the iPad was out, it was a no brainer. Netbooks were simply inferior to the convenience that was the iPad.

I bought an iPad and never looked back.

Using an iOS Device

I was no stranger to the wonderful way Apple devices just worked. You rarely needed to know all the quirks and steps usually needed to get things running. All you needed was to follow your instincts and the device would get you up and running within moments. Back when people were busy trying to get projectors to work correctly with their laptops, Apple had long gotten it right. Plug in the cable and all would be well (for 95% of people anyway).

The iPad setup process, however, was less than straightforward. You needed to connect it to a computer for set up and other things. Fortunately, I could activate it at home. Unfortunately, I would be without a computer to sync it to until much later.

Compared to my Galaxy S, getting it to work was painless. (This was however, more Samsung’s fault than Google’s.) The GPS locked within seconds. The iPad, running with less RAM and graphics power than my Galaxy S, made my Galaxy S look and feel positively sluggish. The prevalent ‘Android lag’ I had been reading about suddenly made sense.

Regret

At that point, I had realized why people were in the Apple camp. It wasn’t just an OS thing. It was that Apple were indeed making the better smartphones. I was now in that camp as well.

As time passed, the gap between Android and iOS closed. FroYo and Gingerbread Android updates made my Galaxy S better, while iOS 4 fell further and further behind. It didn’t have notifications and still didn’t have the calendar features I wanted. At this point (somewhere in early 2011), I was still saying I would probably buy the next iPhone. I had someone who would be willing to inherit my current phone, so switching would have been beneficial to both of us.

iOS 5

Eventually, Apple announced iOS 5. This version of iOS finally came with notifications and with those notifications, quick access to my calendar items. I was sold. At that point, we were still waiting on Apple’s new iPhone announcement. (This was somewhere in June by the way.)

In October, Apple finally announced the next generation iPhone: the iPhone 4S — and so I switched to an iPhone.

(Of course, now that this is many months ago, the Galaxy Nexus has been announced. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t hear about any other new Ice Cream Sandwich running Androids until recently. Or maybe I'm just rambling and trying to JUSTIFY ALL THE THINGS!)

Why I Chose Android

Somewhere in 2009 or 2010, I decided to buy a new phone — at that point, I had narrowed it down to either a top of the line Android model or an iPhone. In July 2010, I finally took the plunge and bought a Samsung Galaxy S. This model would later become among the most popular models ever sold, but it was plagued with its own issues.

So, why did I choose Android over iOS?

Fear

I was coming from Windows Mobile at the time. I was used to being able to tweak everything from my Today screen, all the way down to actually having a Today screen. iOS would have taken all of that away. All I’d have is a list of apps. At the time, it would have been workflow breaking. I was used to having my appointments, tasks and other things the moment I unlocked my phone.

However, at that point in time, the trend had changed. Even Android, which had the customizable home screens, was still vastly different from what I was used to. However, iOS would’ve required me to lose it entirely. Having to open apps just to look at my calendar and tasks would have been terrible, so I chose the safer path and went with Android.

Price

Maxis, my provider of choice at the time was subsidizing RM1000 off a new Samsung Galaxy S handset. This was a massive amount in Malaysia, besides the iPhone, subsidies of this size off the RRP of a phone were rare. Needless to say, I took it.

Given the history of iPhone plans in Malaysia, the iPhone 4 (which would not be available for another 2 months after I made my decision), would’ve cost me more, for a phone that I would probably not like.

The Galaxy S on the other hand, would be cheaper, cost me the same amount per month on a shorter contract. It also came with 16GB of internal storage space, which was unprecedented among Android phones, and changed how Android phones worked from then on. The much anticipated FroYo update which would have made applications movable to the SD card was no longer needed — the Galaxy S would be able to handle many more apps before succumbing to the limits of data storage.

Specifications wise, the Galaxy S was slightly superior in the graphics department. I would be getting a slightly better graphics chip for my money (this would sadly, not see much use), the phone would take a normal sized SIM card and it would serve me well for my day-to-day use.

Availability

The biggest factor for me choosing to go with the Galaxy S over the iPhone 4 (which was announced in June that year) was availability. I was patiently awaiting for it to arrive in Malaysia before the Galaxy S even came over. To be honest, I didn’t even think of the Galaxy S as an option until soon after release. At the time, I was busy browsing through listings on the LowYat.Net forums, looking for either a new or preowned HTC Desire or Google Nexus One at the time.

The Galaxy S was available in July. I was also patiently waiting for the iPhone 4 to see if Malaysian carriers would be offering it with a more competitive contract. (For the record, they did — although not that much at the price ranges I was looking to spend a month.)

Merely several days after it was available in Malaysia and I was informed by my friend, @zybler about it being available in Malaysia, I went down to ‘e @ the curve’ and grabbed one of the last few units available at the Maxis store there.

Epilogue

In retrospect, I should’ve gone for the iPhone 4. However, I do not regret my decision to purchase the Samsung Galaxy S at the time. My basis for the decision was good, and my main gripes with it were the battery life and GPS reception. These two problems were mostly fixed in the next iteration, being the Samsung Galaxy S 2.

Later on, the Galaxy S also gained a powerful boon in the release of the very similar Google Nexus S. The release of the Nexus S meant that the Galaxy S would rarely be left behind in the unofficial ROM arena. This benefit is particularly clear today — Samsung decided against releasing an Ice Cream Sandwich ROM for the Samsung Galaxy S, and there are tons of custom ROMs for Ice Cream Sandwich which functioned very well very quickly thanks to the existence of the Nexus S.

And to say that the correct decision was the iPhone 4 isn’t entirely correct either. It would’ve been the correct decision because it would have been the better phone. Nothing more than that.