James' World 2

Anecdotes aside, this form of supposed cyberdiscrimination has even gotten the attention of the federal government. In its antitrust lawsuit against Apple alleging the tech giant has unfairly cornered the smartphone market, the Justice Department explicitly calls out the green-bubble issue. In the filing, it says people without Apple devices often feel a “social stigma, exclusion, and blame for ‘breaking’ chats where other participants own iPhones.” The department claims that’s on purpose — it alleges Apple takes all sorts of measures to maintain a monopoly on smartphones and keep developers and consumers within its grip, including making the messaging experience when communicating with non-iPhone users different and weird.

The ultimate reason that Apple causes friction with products it doesn’t make is clear: to make money. What drives consumers, however, is worth pausing on. Sure, Apple has positioned the iPhone as the “cool” phone, but why do we care? What makes the blue iMessage bubbles the preferable color? Why do so many consumers see their buying habits as a sign of something bigger?

“Consumers really care about using products and brands to express who they are to themselves and the world around them,” Nailya Ordabayeva, an associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, said. “Brands that have a really well-established image, Apple’s cool image, for instance, that they worked on to establish over the years — consumers really see that as a legitimate signal of their own coolness to themselves and other people.”

Apple has spent more than 15 years fostering an in-crowd/out-crowd scenario with the iPhone. The Cupertino, California, company has long cast itself as hyperinnovative and alluring, and the iPhone is the pinnacle of those efforts. Steve Jobs called the device a “revolutionary and magical” product when he introduced it in 2007, setting the tone for an aura that has persisted even as many other trendy products have cycled through. The iPhone keeps with Apple’s minimalistic, sleek design philosophy and stays within a production process the company has tight control over. An Android device can look like anything and be from anyone — Samsung, Google, Motorola. There’s only one iPhone, and there’s no real cheaper version of it, either.