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The story
A post about a son who wants the latest iPhone 18 Pro (from ¥219,800) went viral on 5ch, with the parent agonizing over the roughly ¥95,000 gap versus the ¥124,800 iPhone 17e. Opinions split on whether to buy kids the latest model — some argued “kids won’t cherish something bought as a compromise,” while others countered “he should get a part-time job and buy it himself.” The debate also touched on how not having an iPhone can cut kids out of conversations at school, plus comparisons of performance and security versus Android.
The “iPhone 18 Pro,” announced in September 2026, is sold from ¥219,800 on Apple’s official website. Meanwhile, the “iPhone 17e,” released in March 2026, starts at ¥124,800. In this case, the son wants the latest iPhone 18 Pro.
However, comparing the same 256GB storage tier, the price gap with the iPhone 17e comes to ¥95,000. That’s no small difference for a family budget, so it’s only natural to wonder, “Does it really have to be the latest iPhone?”
This article compares the pricing and specs of the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 17e to explain exactly what that extra ¥95,000 gets you.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
"Put legs on the Zeong."
"Legs? Those are just decoration." (riffing on Gundam's famous "legs are just for show" line)
I'm the one who can handle the iPhone 18 Pro best! (parodying Amuro's famous Gundam line, "I'm the one who can use the Gundam best!")
Something like turning into a Jin
and
getting handed a Bigro — that kind of level. (Bigro: a mobile armor from the original Gundam anime)
It'll wreck your parent-child relationship too — no grandkids to see, no one to take care of you in old age.
And if you don't buy it, the kid's mental health collapses, he never gets married, never lives a normal life, and you're stuck caring for him till you die — or he ends up killing you somewhere down the line.
¥200,000 is cheap for that kind of insurance.
Being serious for a sec — normal middle/high schoolers don't care about the exact iPhone model number. There's no functional gap so huge that you literally can't get by without the latest one.
Being serious — with something as old as the iPhone 8, is the OS so outdated there are even apps that still run on it???
Yeah, that's probably too old at this point. If there's something it flat-out can't run, then it's time to upgrade.
Funny enough, the opposite problem — the Tamagotchi app on my iPod Touch only runs on the old OS lol
(a joke mock-up, not an actual Apple product)
Something about that seems off, no?
Honestly that'd be fine — at least you don't have to worry about cracking a folding screen.
People don't cherish stuff they just settled for.
Boxing in a kid's potential is never good, right?
If a parent secretly thinks "no way, not for my kid," that attitude gets through to them regardless.
When they say they want to do something, really listen to their reasons and let them try it first.
Even if it doesn't work out, let them take it as a lesson — that's really all there is to it ☺
I've been using the iPhone 12 I bought about 5 years ago, and the battery's degraded fast — it's down to only 79% of what it was when new.
I think it cost around ¥120,000 back then, but honestly I don't remember.
Get the battery replaced and it'll feel brand new again.
Just get the battery swapped at the Apple Store —
I had my iPhone 13's replaced just this year for ¥14,500.
DIY replacement has a pretty high bar though — I tried it on an iPhone 11 and ended up breaking the Face ID sensor while prying it open lol
It's not that you get bullied — you just get left out.
It's one less shared topic of conversation.
Getting frozen out of a dumb group like that sounds like a plus, honestly.
The iPhone is basically today's version of the Super Famicom or PlayStation back in the day —
for kids, whether you have one or not really matters.
Because Japan's broke, that's why.
Just look at how fast this thread's moving — clearly people here find it both interesting and worth talking about.
Every single one.
Even Ken Griffin, who built a ¥500 billion fortune purely through trading, rigged up a satellite dish in his Harvard dorm just to keep trading nonstop.
Someday, if some woman who looks like Yoko Minamino in her prime (a Japanese idol/actress from the 1980s) shows up and insists on marrying me or wanting kids, fine, I'll have one — but I'll teach him everything about making money starting at age 3.
I'm not raising some dumb son who just whines about wanting stuff. Not raising a dumb woman either.
I'm raising a son who says, "Dad, I made ¥100 million, here's ¥30 million for you."
How old even is this reporter???
"Pop, I went and bought a brand-new Porsche!"
Even something in the ¥20,000s has plenty of power. Isn't this iPhone worship just idiotic?
Android pops up with "not enough memory" all the time and apps just won't launch.
Basically never happens on iPhone.
Performance-wise Android's plenty, sure, but its security is sketchy as hell.
I picked up a 4-year-old discontinued AQUOS sense4 plus in good condition for ¥27,000, and it's been running fine for almost 2 years now ☺
Planning to swap the battery soon and squeeze another 2 years out of it.
It's got a red/green LED that lights up while charging, which is actually handy — newer phones don't have that LED anymore, so at night or from across the room you can't tell if it's actually charging.
Kids whose parents bought them everything → "just get it for him, it's nothing."
Kids from a normal household → "get a part-time job and buy it yourself."
I worked part-time from my first year of high school, 5pm to 10pm, pulling in ¥80,000 a month —
used that money to get my driver's license and even buy a used car.
Even so, I think parents should be the ones buying it for their kids.
You know firsthand how hard it is to earn money, and you still say that? That's messed up.
If we were talking one digit less, sure, fine — but telling parents to casually drop over ¥200,000? No way.
Honestly, companies don't actually think that highly of students who spent all their high school and college years buried in part-time jobs.
Background and Key Points of Debate
The iPhone 17e, a budget-line model, launched in March 2026, while the 18 Pro, the flagship, was announced that September — comparing equal storage tiers, the price gap comes to roughly ¥95,000. The thread saw personal anecdotes about being “left out without a shared topic of conversation,” countered by plenty of level-headed pushback that “middle and high schoolers don’t actually care about the exact model number” — how much a phone model affects friendships clearly splits along generational and environmental lines. Posters also floated concrete alternatives, like extending an old phone’s life with a battery swap or getting by just fine on an older Android device, with a notable number of comments pushing back on the very premise that it “has to be the latest model.”
*This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “My son says he wants the iPhone 18 Pro, which costs over ¥200,000 — I’m at a loss. The 17e runs about ¥120,000, so is there really a benefit to picking the latest model?.”
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