Are tech prices exceeding what the typical family can afford?

General Discussion
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As I listen to the various shows, I noticed that many of the hosts and guests have multiple subscriptions to various AI companies, they have pricier and pricier hardware (phones as well as the laptop of choice), and so forth.

I’m married with two kids (one in college and one approaching) and we make decent income for the area. I’m a tech professional, albeit in the US state government sector, and my salary doesn’t come close to being able to afford the kind of upgrade paths I seem to hear about others having. We now have the component shortages going (and will for the foreseeable future) and companies are still pumping out ever-more expensive products. The most recent number for US median household income is $83,730 (household defined as two people), and with the trends as they are today - I have a real concern that technology is increasingly being priced for those with an income substantially above that bracket. More directly - I think companies are pricing out of range for the typical household.

Look at subscription costs for the steaming services. Generally speaking, those have increased between 50%-125% in the last 6 years.

I don’t have an answer, but this sure seems like a real problem.

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Yes, the prices are going crazy. I broke my iPhone 16, the case is broken and the battery is capacity is dropping off, and am holding out for the 18, but with rumours of reduced specs and higher prices, I am seriously thinking of not waiting and getting a 17 Pro.

I earn a decent wage, but I am still thinking three or four times, before I buy something new. I was going to buy a new iPad, possibly going for the Pro this time, now I think the current one will last another 2 to 3 years. The same with my laptop.

At work, we were going to a3 year programme on replacements, now we are holding on to them, until they no longer work.

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If enshittification can be a word, I feel like amazonification or maybe walmartification should also be a word. What I mean is when one major company comes in, artificially lowers their prices in the short term until they kill off a majority of their competition, and also consolidate the infrastructure (things like integrating their IT with their suppliers and build distribution warehouses) so that a new startup would be hard pressed to compete with them. They stay in this state until any threat is gone, and now they start to ratchet up prices and there is little that can be done, you have no other choice for a supplier of the goods you want (let alone goods that are necessities) and they can cut back their costs of customer satisfaction because they know you’re doomed to keep coming back to them no matter how poorly they treat you.

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This relates to a previous post I made about tech reviewers seemingly reviewing the highest (or higher) end devices rather than the baseline device. Median income people can’t afford those products unless they have virtually no other expenses besides the necessities.

I think some of this galvanized for me listening to Leo (and others) who pay for multiple AI services, and are doing incredible things when them - meanwhile some of us are working on 6+ year old PCs, trying to figure out how we can afford to get our nearly grown kid’s new phones because their devices no longer receive updates or patches, or newer computers so they can do what they need to do for their classes.

I don’t begrudge Leo or anyone what they can afford. I’d be doing the same thing if I were them. But it really does showcase the widening gap between those that have the means and those that don’t.

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Prices are high and only going up, that’s for sure. No arguments there.

But when I’m thinking about what a typical family needs in terms of tech, it doesn’t remotely compare to what Leo, the hosts, or really any tech journalist or enthusiast has. You’re talking about multiple ML service subscriptions, multiple entertainment subscriptions, high-end phones and traditional computers; I would argue the average person needs none of that. I would consider those things to be aspirational luxury items/services. Not everybody is supposed to be able to afford everything.

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I agree. Paul is not wrong about the price dumping, then putting prices up when the competition has collapsed, and this is partially what is happening in the memory and storage industries, they have consolidated over the last decade or so, now there is astronomical demand and they can charge what they want, because nobody will be able to build more capacity and have it online, before the bubble bursts.

I have some streaming services, mainly for the grandkids. I have Netflix with ads, to be honest, I hardly watch it, we have Prime Video, because we have Prime and Apple TV, because we have Apple One Family, I do have YouTube Premium Lite and I got a Nebula Livetime package a while back, because I wanted to support the some of my favourite creators, who are on YT and Nebula.

But I don’t have any AI subs, rather, I got a year of Perplexity for free (PayPal offer) and I think I have used it half a dozen times, but I don’t really have anything that I would use it for. I have Proton Lumo and Claude free, and Copilot 365 free tier at work, and I use them maybe two or three times a month on average, certainly not enough to bother paying for a subscription. I still haven’t found a use for them. Unlike Leo, I don’t have a marketing system to re-write. My new company car does have an integrated ChatGPT assistant, but apart from a couple of test questions, I haven’t really used it, yet.

I find Copilot at work useful for the odd question about Microsoft services, but I would say it is 50/50, whether the answer Microsoft Copilot is even half way correct. To be fair, traditional search isn’t much better, I probably have to go through half a dozen different results, before I find one that is actually relevant, so it probably isn’t a surprise that the AIs get everything wrong as well.

The worst used to be Proton Lumo, ask it about how to configure their own products and it tells you to use menu options that don’t exist, to enable features that don’t exist…

I probably use search about 4-5 times a day, at work, at home probably 4-5 times a week, unless I am researching some new area that I don’t know about. I do use the AI summaries that the search engines give (DDG and Leo, mainly).

In my life, at the moment, I just don’t have a need for anything AI can give me, it isn’t that I am anti-AI, I like the idea, although I hate the slop that it is being used to generate at the moment. If we took away the slop, we’d not have the datacenter, memory and storage problems that we have at the moment, at least not to the level we currently have it.

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I couldn’t agree more. Whenever some hosts talk about purchasing habits, all I can think about is I hope they have a well diversified retirement funded. I’m glad they’ve done well for themselves, it’s just not very becoming.

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I’m using second-hand more and more now.

Exchanged a Samsung tablet that was no longer getting updates for one a year younger that gave me updates for 2 more years.

The battery went on my S22 Ultra - swapped that for a nearly new Pixel 10.

Sold some of my cameras and lenses I didn’t use and bought a couple of second-hand Fujifilm cameras with the money.

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Interestingly, we dropped our cable TV service and just kept the internet because it was getting expensive for what we were getting from it!! :rofl: So now we have: YouTube TV (Great BTW), ESPN, Disney+, Apple TV, Netflix, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Hulu :flushed_face::rofl::rofl::rofl: Yeah, saving a ton!!! But, my wife and I are both retired so that stuff gets lots of use!

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to be fair, YouTube TV is just cable delivered in a different way. They make same deals as your local cable company and sell it to the users. Literally no difference! The increases in prices had made my spectrum cable, which I get more channels on, cheaper which is wild.

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I purchased YouTube music premium family, and happily discovered it gets rid of ads on YouTube videos for 5 people. I have found a lot of great long-form videos on YouTube lately, so that’s been most of my viewing. I think you can search for long form videos now specifically.

Hopefully this information helps someone here. For less than $30/month, me and the kids have ad-free music and videos.

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Paul is not wrong about the price dumping, then putting prices up when the competition has collapsed

That’s exactly what happened here in New York City with ride sharing. We used to have at least half a dozen different competitors to Uber. Uber then priced them all out and then raised their rates considerably.

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YouTube premium is probably the very last subscription I would cancel at this point. It probably accounts for 50-60% of all my entertainment intake. I know they’ve raised the price but I still think it’s a good deal.

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