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Scott Galloway, the self-styled oracle of modern masculinity, has spent a staggering $26,000 chasing every new iPhone since its debut—a sum that, if invested in Apple stock, would be worth $2 million today. Why the obsession? Galloway claims it’s about signaling to women that he’s a prime catch, a provider whose offspring are destined to thrive. An Android in his pocket, he says, would scream, “Life didn’t quite work out.” Green bubbles? A death knell for social cred.
Galloway’s mindset isn’t unique—it’s pervasive on college campuses, where iPhones reign supreme, their blue iMessage bubbles a badge of belonging. A new study by Leonardo Bursztyn and colleagues at the University of Chicago, reported by the Economist, quantifies the cost of going green: Students require $31 per month to let their messages appear as Android’s green bubbles instead of iMessage’s coveted blue.
While most analyses use such data to lament Apple’s market dominance, I’m more interested in what this reveals about campus culture.
Students crave blue bubbles because they scream “iPhone”—a golden ticket to social clout. For college men, the stakes are especially high: without those blue bubbles, dating prospects can crater. I lived this struggle as an Android holdout. I eventually switched to escape the green-bubble stigma, drawn partly by iMessage’s Game Pigeon—digital games like checkers or billiards with friends—and FaceTime’s video calls. But the real motivator was avoiding social exile. Exes had clear expectations: blue bubbles.
My experience isn’t isolated. On a Reddit thread titled “How many of you have been ghosted for not having an iPhone?” user bucks195 shared, “Met an American girl in a bar in London and when she texted me after, she was in disbelief I had a Samsung.” Another user vented, “Apple has … indoctrinated young teens into thinking ‘blue = better’ & that sticks with them going further into their young adult lives.”
But this phone-based judgment is emblamtic of a broader campus culture steeped in superficiality.
Shelby Kearns, a development coordinator and freelance writer, isn’t surprised by the iPhone-Android divide as a dating metric. “Owning a luxury brand is a status marker in a culture of instrumental reason where love is optimized, whether for earning potential or, for those with eugenicist leanings, ‘fitness,’” she told me. An article titled “Why Some Women Think Android Users Are Not Relationship Material” echoes this: iPhones flash wealth and coolness, while Androids spark doubts about financial stability. (I know some Android users who are multimillionaires and some iPhone users who are dead broke.)
[RELATED: College Don’t Hurt Me]
Colleges and universities, meant to foster higher values, instead amplify this shallowness, prioritizing market-driven goals over moral education.
As I argued in “College Don’t Hurt Me,” campuses fuel hookup culture with initiatives like abortion pill vending machines and, at Georgia Tech, ventures like Slutty Vegan. Kearns notes, “A liberal education once freed learners for the common good, but now degrees are sold for ROI.” An anonymous North Carolina local, dubbed Philosophy Man, adds, “People tend to desire and value the wrong things in the absence of a strong moral education … Since we live in a materialistic culture that has systematically undermined ways of life and institutions that foster an education in the virtues and rootedness in something greater, it’s no surprise something as laughably trivial as the color of a text box is viewed, by adults no less, as important.”
Older generations might scoff at today’s college students for judging potential partners by his or her phone brands, but using superficial gauges isn’t new.
My childhood bowling coach’s wife picked him because his car outshone his rival’s. (Pro tip: Bowling skills won’t woo a college crush.) Teresa Manning, Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, sees continuity: “Past generations had watches and cars for men, shoes and purses for women … The disappointment here is that [the Bursztyn study] concerns college students who are supposedly more reflective and thoughtful and therefore less susceptible to trendy fashions. But college is no longer just a place for serious students. It’s more like the watch or the iPhone—just a status symbol!” She laments that many students may never mature beyond this.
Why the shift from cars to blue bubbles as a status marker? I suspect it’s because cars are outrageously expensive for most students today, making cell-phones the only status symbols young people can afford to maintain. And with most relationships now sparked online, tech choices face intense scrutiny from potential partners.
Gabrielle, a journalist in her mid-twenties, calls the blue-versus-green drama petty, but a symptom of Gen Z and millennials over-relying on texting to build connections. She met her husband on Hinge—an online dating app—and could have dismissed him for his infrequent texting, but his warmth in person won her over. “He’s a rare Gen Z gem,” she says. “The iPhone versus Android chasm is a symptom of a much more insidious problem of younger generations losing the art of conversation.” A romantic partner’s phone “has a heightened sense of importance if that’s the only way you are going to communicate.” As apps replace meet-cutes, phones carry the weight cars did for Boomers.
Will today’s college students find lasting love if dating hinges on being part of the blue bubble elite? I’m skeptical. But there is hope: Gabrielle, Kearns, and Philosophy Man—all Android users—found happy marriages beyond the blue bubble divide. As an iPhone user, I’m chained to my blue bubbles—guilty as charged—but I’m rooting for the green rebels.
In a world drunk on digital clout, it’s the green bubble busters who might be the only ones to pop their way to real love.
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Image by Cee Ayes on Unsplash
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby