If you substitute sushi for coffee or microbrews, I think his dismissal will sound much more reasonable. A fluff article deifying a hipster barista or brewer is met with rolled eye, but write about the same concept in a different culture and the mystique seems genuine.
Coffee is one specific species of a bean, roasted, and brewed with varying amounts of hot water, milk, chocolate, and maybe a few other ingredients.
There are endless species of fish, with wildly different tastes (salmon, vs tuna, vs tuna belly, vs monkfish liver, vs catfish, don't tell me you can't taste a difference). In addition to fish, there are crustaceans (crab, shrimp, lobster, etc), mollusks (oyster, clam, squid, octopus, cuttlefish), and probably other major animal types I'm omitting.
The comparison is not adequate, sushi is inherently more diverse than coffee.
>Cars require maintenance the expectation of which greatly influences our purchasing decisions (e.g. "Toyota tax").
There is a thriving phone repair industry patronized by people that can't afford to throw away expensive electronics every few years. When the most common "failures" are cracked screens and dead batteries, both of which are fairly easily replaced, it makes sense if you don't "need" the absolute latest and greatest to signal.
>People generally don't buy used phones.
Used iPhones retain their value pretty well.
>Phones don't come in mutually exclusive form factors (2dr coupe, airport van, cab and chassis, everything in-between). They're all touchscreen slabs with one or more buttons at the bottom.
I dunno, the difference between a regular smartphone and a "phablet" is pretty striking to me.
>You also won't get fired from your job if you break your phone and your bosses call goes to voicemail. If you don't show up for work because your car is broken you'll probably be fired.
The mechanisms necessary for a removable battery that doesn't fall out accidentally cost extra weight and bulk. It's an engineering tradeoff, and swappable batteries aren't worth it for many users. This is also why many laptops have fewer interchangeable parts- for many people, being lighter and thinner is better, and a 3-5 year lifespan is plenty.
As a user of a second-hand iPhone 5c, I can say that I was quite impressed and am now fully converted from Android. As well, I'm tempted to just buy second-hand phones for the rest of my life now.
I think that the state of the hardware is pretty good now that we can consider second hand rather than brand new items. The only concern is whether the software landscape will move slow enough so that the phone/table/TV or other smart device is usable for at least 2-3 years.
In older times, when the software was not able to be upgraded so easily, this time period is much, much longer.
CRT TVs were designed around interlaced broadcast signals, but CRT monitors most certainly supported high resolution progressive scan video. The much vaunted Sony GDM-FW900, for instance, one of the last great CRTs before LCD monitors took over, supported progressive scan resolutions of 1920x1200 at 85hz.
And the NES and most early game consoles really did output a progressive scan signal that CRT TVs could display, through a hack known as "240p". Basically, the device only ever outputs odd fields in an out-of-spec NTSC signal, giving the effect of a progressive scan image with half of the vertical resolution. CRT TVs, being "dumb" analog devices, would just keep redrawing over the odd lines every time, and never ever touch the even lines.
This is the source of the "scanlines" effect of darkened horizontal lines spanning the screen, as these lines were never directly hit by the beam while a 240p game was running. It's also part of why these old games look like crap on modern LCD TVs, as almost all of them have scaling hardware that is ignorant of the 240p hack and incorrectly treats the signal as if it were interlaced, producing tremendously ugly results.
