Growing up, was there anything worse than being called a rich kid? Granted, it was probably just a case of petty jealousy—I wish I had a power wheel!—but man oh man did the rich kid win no friends. Fast-forward a few years, and the rich kid isn’t just flaunting his new lunchbox and Spider-Man sneakers, no sir: he’s driving a brand new car and checking his Facebook on his shiny, new iPhone 3G S. Or, a long way of say the obvious: Apple products are popular with kids from wealthy parents.
Such is the conclusion of the 18th annual~! Piper Jeffery Teen Survey. The survey asks kids All Sorts of Stuff, but what concerns us right now is the fact that, yeah, Apple products do really well with teens of wealthy parents. That’s not surprising: compare the price of a entry level laptop made by Apple and one made by any other manufacturer. Considering that, at most, the average teen is just using a laptop to browse the Web, write a report or two, and maybe kill a few hours playing The Sims or whatever, then yeah: perhaps $999 is a bit much to spend.
Hard numbers:
• 15 percent of all teens own an iPhone (last year it was 8 percent)
• 22 percent plan to buy an iPhone in the next 22 months
• 87 percent own iPods (at this point, who doesn’t own an iPod of some sort, unless you’re diamtricaly opposed to the device—if you can, give the Zune HD a shot. I cannot say enough nice things about it, other than it totally killed my book-buying budget last month!)
• 40 percent legally buy music online (which means that the other 60 percent are either still buying CDs and ripping them, or they all use BitTorrent to grab entire artist catalogues in seconds), and of those 40 percent 93 percent use iTunes. What, no love for Amazon MP3? (Not that this matters, since Spotify will all but eliminate desktop music piracy unless the record labels kill it with too many ads.)
To paraphrase Grandpa Simpson, I was a lot of things growing up: a nerd, a cry baby, a scardy cat, a halfway decent Little Leaguer (but who wasn’t at age 13?) a Communist for some reason, but I was not a rich kid. The big thing for us (my two younger brothers and I) was the occasional video game, like for a birthday present or for Christmas. Granted, cellphones didn’t really exist in the 1990s, so what do I know? (Nothing, thank you.)