September 14, 2022

Enthusiasts Against Enthusiasts

It would be fair to say that a lot of us are “smartphone enthusiasts”, but a weird thing I’m noticing more and more is that many of us don’t act like enthusiasts.

We buy the iPhone, the most mainstream phone you could possible own, and we mock any phone that doesn’t sell remotely close to iPhone numbers. For example, this story about the Nothing Phone 1 selling “6-figures” in India has already resulted in snarky tweets in my feed about how niche this thing is and how terribly it’s selling.

But this isn’t specific to the Nothing Phone, it’s the same thing I see with Pixels and people asking why tech press even spends time talking about a phone with such low market share, or with foldables. Hell, I even find myself getting a bit like this too when I snark about how low sales of the mini iPhones have been!

There’s a category of smartphone enthusiast who doesn’t like phones made for enthusiasts, and that’s weird to me. It’s like being a coffee enthusiast and arguing that the Pumpkin Spice Latte is the best coffee in the world, and you can prove that by it outselling everything else by a mile.

I’m not saying that the Nothing Phone 1 is better than the iPhone 14 Pro, but I am saying that being an enthusiast of anything usually means appreciating things that are new and novel.