It's luxury in the financial sense because it's one of the expensive options compared to the competition.

Someone making 20 dollar can also afford to eat caviar, that doesn't make it mainstream.

Apple just made sure that it's spoons, forks and plates only accept caviar and not cereal or lasagna.

If I walk into a store and buy the average Android phone for $300 on a no interest 24 month installment plan from T-mobile , I will be paying $12/month.

If I buy a midrange iPhone 13, it’s $24.95 a month.

That’s not even mentioning an iPhone SE that is still faster than high end Android phones for $429 or $17.95 a month.

And that “luxury” iPhone 8 (circa 2018) will have a better resale value and will get OS update for years still runs the latest OS and the iPhone 5s (circa 2013) has had a security update in the last year.

These are all perceptions of status created by the marketing of these global companies.

Saying Apple is luxury is kinda like saying an Applebee’s is luxury - only because there is a cheaper McDonald’s across the street. Phones are definitely status symbols but their ceiling is relatively low.

That being said, in my country iPhones are a much more of a status symbol because everyone really is poorer. Scoffing at Apple’s pricing is the norm here.

Globally, an interesting question is what happens if you take a date to McDonald's. Living in America, that's gonna be the end of your date. Meanwhile, it depends on where in the rest of the globe you're talking about. There are plenty of places in the world where that's a decent, if not high status place to take a date. (There are also non-America places where it's not, mind you.) (A McDonald's-date index would be a fascinating bit of sociology research.)

So are people going to AppleBees only for “status” and not because the food is actually better than McDonalds?

Not everyone wants a $60 Blu R1 HD for $70 no more than everyone wants to eat off the $1 menu at McDonalds. Many people find the entire Android ecosystem janky.

Both, I would assume.

I don’t know what a “Blu R1” is so I can’t bother to go off with you on that tangent. But my point was only that all of these products are designed and priced for global-scale mass consumption. Apple isn’t a Michelin-star restaurant. They’re about as much better as that difference in price is.

True, but nevertheless the objective prices are only rising.

The fact is that enough people enjoy those benefits to maintain the trend.

I have no idea what this guy is Tolkien about.

Kinda rings a bell; just don't make it a hobbit.

The execution is really nice!

But,there are already browsers and web guidelines to make this possible without specific single purpose apps.

Why would I use this over for example, Lynx?

I was kinda wondering that myself. There's so many terminal based apps to keep track of, I've gotten into the habit of trying to know a core set fairly well (like bash,awk,sed,grep -P etc). For this sort of thing I have a dozen tabs open in w3m already.

  $ alias wiki='f(){ w3m -F "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=${1}&title=Special:Search&ns0=1"; unset -f f; }; f'
  $ wiki pandas

This seemed to work well for me.

A tab to the wikipedia search page bookmarked would work well too and could be used in existing w3m/lynx session.

Oh, BTW, this sort of thing works well with any sort of site that degrades gracefully/is not pure JS.

  $ alias crate='f(){ w3m -F "https://lib.rs/search?q=${1}"; unset -f f; }; f'
  $ crate rocket

(lib.rs is a crate index using rust as the server instead of javascript, and has advantage of working well with terminal browsers)

This is the Unix way. You already have the tools and utilities you need, just pipeline them together and make an alias if it’s something you need frequently.

hey, off topic but can you explain or link a post which explains what the benefits of the alias -> function definition are over just defining the function directly? Thanks!

I am puzzled as well, why not define the function and call it wiki?

I'm just used to keeping all my aliases together for easy location with alias command and I like having ones with arguments with the others.

Aside from that, no benefit really that I can think of.

So yes, to be clear to anyone else you can just put:

  wiki(){ w3m -F "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=${1}&title=Special:Search&ns0=1"; }

in your .bashrc - and if you're me you just forget how you defined it and you have to cat it every once in a while :)

Oh, and you might be entertained by this silly alias adapted from an IOCC entry...

  $ cstdin
  printf("Hello World\n");
  Hello World

  alias cstdin='gcc -pedantic -ansi -Wall -o ~/.stdin ~/.stdin.c -lm && ~/.stdin'


  $ cat ~/.stdin.cc
  #include <stdio.h>
  <snip many headers>
  int main(int argc, char **argv)
  {
  #include </dev/tty>
  return 0;
  }

I'm sure it would also make way more sense as a dedicated script. I have a C++ one in there too.

ah I see, cool thanks!

I have never used Lynx personally, but just going through the description of it i would say that wik also provide quick introduction lookup to a desired topic. Initially i made this as a personal tool just for this quick introduction lookup feature as i don't wanted to hustle through a browser for a just introduction search on the topic. But when made i made this project public i added full info and search.