ecarlseen

Can everyone quit slagging the guy for not having sufficient backup? Should he have had it? Definitely. But there's absolutely, positively zero excuse for vendors like Adobe (and Microsoft last month with the Windows 10 update) playing so absurdly fast and loose with customer data. These software vendors are forcing their customers into far more expensive subscription pricing models in a vain attempt to maintain revenue growth and correspondingly high stock prices for just a little bit longer, which is sketchy enough, but they're also getting much worse at quality control in the process, which is flat-out evil. Adobe has been one of the worst custodians of IT quality and security in the history of computing with their egregiously and shamelessly poor stewardship of the Flash plugin. Microsoft infamously fired most of their QA personnel a few years ago in order to foist that work onto their "insider" fan base, which has made their extremely poor reputation in that are decline even further. Yes, users do stupid things, but in cases like this we need to focus hard on the deeply evil neglect that certain software vendors have had for our data as well.

Terrible analogies here. 

Apple's software quality has been noticeably on the decline for many years now. They're well still ahead of their main competition (Google and Microsoft), but this may or may not last. It seems to have gotten worse around the time that they started doing public betas - I'm wondering if in-house testing was scaled down in conjunction with that.

Ugh. Insurance addiction is insane.

So, you're willing to bet $199 up-front in order to forgo the possibility of maybe having to pay $279 later - with the $29 service charge that's 82% of the full price. Unless you're 82% sure you're going to break a screen while owning the phone, it's a bad deal.

Even if you are worried about the possibility of breaking your screen twice, insuring against that extremely unlikely occurrence at 46% of the cost is probably a bad bet for most people. 

If you take the money you would ordinarily spend on extended warrantees and put it in a savings account instead, you would have to be spectacularly unlucky not to come out ahead. Heck, I've never even bothered to put cases on the iPhones in our household and we've come out massively ahead on that (if you bought crappy $20 cases we'd still be at a triple-digit-percentage advantage). Your mileage, clumsiness, and bad luck may vary.... but for most people, savings are better than insurance against anything that costs less than a few months salary.

It's worth noting that almost all process geometry labels these days (7nm, 10nm, 14nm, etc.) are pure marketing hype. The "rationale" for this is that they've made other manufacturing improvements (better FinFet, etc.) that give them performance / efficiency increases that would traditionally be associated with a real shrink, but the actual shrinks are much less than what they are telling people. This means that while things are improving, die sizes are not actually getting nearly as much smaller as the process geometry labels suggest, and die size is one of the major driving factors of cost. So while things are clearly getting better, we're also going to pay disproportionally more for each new generation of improvement.