An easy and plausible interpretation of my post is that I was concerned for the psyche of my fellow human being, and for the people he might be around. In the future please respond more civilly and substantively instead of dismissively.
> the battery life is definitely comparable to the bigger brands
Sure, but the budget phone also isn't pushing a quad HD screen and a beefy processor. The runtime may be similar, but that doesn't mean the capacity is.
I did a quick straw poll by looking at some budget Android phones against some flagships and it seems like the budget batteries are about 1000mAh less than the flagships. In a bigger case. So, bulky and low capacity.
> This might be a huge opportunity for Microsoft and WP
On the contrary, they've been trying to penetrate the developing market for some time. In fact, the low-end Lumias are almost uniformly better than Android devices in the same price range.
Apps are an issue, but that brings us to the chicken-egg problem of customers and apps.
Probably not even new old-stock iPhones, but actually used ones.
I wonder if e-cycling old high-end devices by refurbishing them and selling them to low-income markets isn't a better choice than ramping up manufacturing on necessarily crappy phones.
Margins in consumer electronics are typically razor thin, particularly when the device in question is a commodity (mid-tier Android phones, for example).
1.2c is obviously unsustainable, as you mention. I wonder if they got blindsided by a price increase on some part.
Sure, but the article says "turn the music down," not "turn the music off." I think it's entirely possible for certain types of music at certain volumes to be conducive to concentration, and vice-versa.
> Failure to use the metric system everywhere cost NASA a $125 million Mars orbiter
No, bureaucratic failure to address the concerns of people who spotted the error well in advance of the launch cost NASA $125M. The investigation report makes that clear, especially when it goes on to make recommendations for avoiding future mishap; nobody recommended that the engineers needed to brush up on their units.
And yet here you are, insisting that the issue was that we didn't switch over to the metric system, and throwing in some unsupported claims to justify the position.