When they cost as much as they do, is it really a surprise that a good portion of people don't want to replace them every other year? I would like to be one of the people replacing theirs every year or every other year and while I could afford it, I can't justify the expenditure. Add to that the fact that most phones purchased within the past couple of years remain performant enough for most people.
So upgrade when/if you drop your old phone in water? That's actually the only time I've upgraded to a newer phone, the two times I ruined my old phone with water. If my next phone is waterproof, it might be 10 years before I upgrade. (Right now I'm on a Galaxy Note 4, which I got after accidentally running my Note 2 through the laundry a few years ago; it's more than adequate for what I use it for.)
In ten years of smartphone ownership, I've never killed a phone with water damage. I've actually never lost one to any damage at all. Waterproofing is a gimmick (to me).
For a while it was alright. I was willing to upgrade every tick of the iPhone cycle and hand down my old iPhones.
I even handed down a couple of iPads.
The last few years has been different though. The devices have been good enough. And the prices on the lastest iPhone has kept going up. Had the prices been cheaper I’d have upgraded. My parents are on 4+ year old phones (I use for 2, then they use for 2 before another hand down) and even older spares that are just used for travel and the get a local sim. The incremental improvement is worth it if I can pass down.
As it is, I think they’ll have to get new phones when they just stop being supported. I’m not upgrading.
Since 28nm, successive nodes cost more per transistor, instead of cheapening exponentially as they had formerly. Strictly speaking, this is one of the Moores-related laws, falling under the "etc" of my comment.
Seems easy to justify to me. You use it constantly, a small increase in joy or functionality multiplied by many hours = worth the cost of a speeding ticket.
An optimistic but realistic scenario is something like 40% faster and $20 a month, where the phone is used a lot and the speed translates into saving multiple hours a month. Definitely worth it there.
If the phone is a flagship or Apple-priced that’s at least $1200. $100 a month if you buy a new one every year.
If the webpages I browse today load fast on my existing phone, network being the speed barrier... will I actually experience a 40% speed-up on a new phone? No way.
The value is just not there. And that’s not my opinion. That’s the market speaking. Figures are down for phones everywhere.
Every other year. $2400. And that's if you throw your old phone in the garbage.
$20-25 a month lets you trade up to a new $700-900 phone every other year.
You won't benefit from that 40% all the time, sure. But if you get 8%, and you use your phone two hours a day, that's almost five hours saved! Processing is not a negligible amount of waiting. Plus new phones tend to have better radios.
There’s a million things I’d rather spend $1000+ on that will get me real joy, rather than incremental improvements to a yet another generic product in an increasingly stale (and increasingly locked down) product-line.
Smartphones is just not a “it thing” anymore. Get over it. The market certainly says. (As in it’s not just my opinion.)
It's not all about you. You can't get any major benefit from a new phone. That's fine. Don't pretend that nobody can so you can lord your better decision making over the world.
The market says that somewhat fewer people are seeing the need to buy new phones. It hasn't dropped to nearly zero.
To be more specific the market says an increasing amount of people (as in a trend) has decided that new phones are not worth it year after year for a good while now.
Project that trend into the future and you’ll see just what happened in the PC market: ever decreasing sales.
What's interesting about these numbers is that few people seem to apply the same analysis to the $50/month or more they are giving to the mobile network provider. I use a prepaid SIM without any data plan and spending about $50/year for phone calls and SMS. I currently pay my home cable-modem ISP about $70/month, and it provides a service that I don't think can be effectively replaced by mobile network plans at this time (perhaps with coming 5G services, that might change).
My smartphone only sees data via wifi, and it is definitely not at the center of my life. I get more than enough internet exposure through my home and office computers and wifi networks. Being disconnected outside is one of my guilty pleasures. My main use of my phone outside work is for offline GPS and casual camera use in the wilderness, where there is no phone service even if I wanted it. As a result, I value a small and light phone since it is mostly a passive burden in my pocket. But, the battery needs to last a whole camping trip away from the electrical grid.
My current phone is an aging Moto G4 Play which can still go 5+ days with many hours per day GPS logging. I am starting to see reduced GPS reliability that I think may be physical antenna damage. So, I may replace it with a fresh mid-range phone, rather than replacing its user-serviceable battery and looking into non-OEM firmware updates to extend its life.
40% faster at what? Games that you aren't going to play? The vast majority of users aren't going to notice a speed increase in their daily tasks. It's like claiming the latest Intel desktop processor is X% faster than last year's when the bottleneck outside of a few applications is not the processor.
You never wait for your phone's processor? I certainly do. It doesn't benefit all the time, but it definitely benefits outside of games.
I regret not elaborating on how X% processor benefit would only be Y% real life benefit, but I thought my point was clear enough. I would have been making a much stronger claim about hours saved if I actually thought the total use of the phone would go 40% faster...
I run a 3 year old phone and no, I have never waited due to the phone's processor. Any lags have typically been the result of memory shuffling or lengthy app bootup times that have noting to do with processor speed. I'm fairly confident saying phone processors haven't been a bottleneck for most people since probably 2015.
Top reason for me to even consider upgrading from my Galaxy S5: Google maps has gotten so overloaded with "features" that opening it takes about a minute and unloads everything else including music player. Similar for Twitter. I don't complain about fb messenger because I took its bloat as a nudge to ditch it years ago already. Luckily, Osmand is getting better and better, and Twitter less and less relevant. \o/
Are consumers rallying against the excess of the smartphone market or is this just a product of the quality of new devices? The yearly improvements feel more incremental than ever, so I'm inclined to think it's a little of both.
The other factor, besides the two that you mentioned, would be that smartphones are a “mature” product category and new models are not introducing significant improvements compared to last year’s. I still remember when I upgraded from an old Symbian-based Nokia to my first “modern” smartphone (an iPhone 3GS): it was a big change! My latest update (from an Android Moto G 3rd gen to an iPhone 7 Plus) was just an incremental improvement.
Still rocking an iPhone 6 here as well. I just can’t lose the jack... :P
My battery life isn’t what it used to be, but I can still make it a full day with slightly less usage (restricted to browser/text based mediums). Should have taken advantage of the battery upgrade. Meanwhile my sibling’s 6S(?) Plus drains charge like someone is bloodletting it.
I have a 6s plus, and had the battery replaced, and still drains the battery like that. I’ve tried all the obvious tricks. I’m befuddled by this, it’s the worst battery life of any phone I’ve had. I thought the bigger case would have helped, but maybe the bigger screen out weighs it.
What I find mystifying is why as an average user it’s impossible to figure out why it happens, is it normal, is your phone broken?
Apple docs and support provide no insight into one of the primary usability issues.
Other than that, it’s quite a nice phone. I picked it up cheap on Craigslist and it’s going strong for two years.
You should have availed of the $29 battery replacement which was available until the end of 2018. My 7 is like new and I’ll keep it for two more years.
Gotta say, I could afford to upgrade my iPhone X to the shiny new version. And I usually do. But each time I'm stopping in the middle of the process because I just can't find the justification, and at that price too...
I think at this point the only real reason to upgrade is the camera. I have a iPhone 6S and couldn't see any reason to upgrade especially given that I prefer smaller phones. My wife's Nexus broke and we bought her the iPhone XR Max shortly before a trip to Iceland. I frequently going myself borrowing her phone whenever I had a shot I really wanted to take because it looked so much better with her camera(s). And that was before I discovered the phones incredible portrait mode.
That said, how much longer can they do big leaps on the camera without the price going completely bonkers? The iPhone XR Max with Apple Care already clocked in at $1500!
To me the real innovation in looking for with phones is that they can connect to an external screen and keyboard and in that case just give me something very close to regular macOS. To me that will lock off another wave of valuable phone upgrades for a few years because we again need more computation power to drive that setup. Maybe we could do something where the screen includes the GPU...?
I have wireless headphones and a Pixel 2 and still wish I had a jack. Sometimes you just want to get in a friend's car and be able to play music or use a nice pair of open-backed headphones when you won't bother someone. I'd still have the choice of whether or not to say good riddance to tangled wires if my phone had a headphone jack.
I just keep mine attached to my keys with a “dongle dangler” and this has never been a problem.
People love to complain about how inconvenient losing the headphone jack is (especially people with phones that still have it!) but that’s just because this is the internet, where everybody complains about everything.
Between constantly needing to plug in to power and plug in to use headphones, the USB-C port on my Pixel 2 wore out in less than one year. I'd constantly lose audio as the cord jostled around, and the power cord would just slip out enough to stop charging in the middle of the night. Google recognized that as a hardware flaw and replaced it with a refurbished phone under warranty, but I don't know what the future repair cost will be outside of warranty.
Agreed as for the tangled wires, but the AirPods surface is too smooth to keep them well in place, so the sound is just never up to par with good in-ear buds.
I've got a dollar that says the new wave of innovation largely involves just making everything slower so you need faster hardware to do the same things.
Or perhaps removable and replaceable batteries. Maybe if the boom is ending despite all the planned obsolescence we can get a break from the planned obsolescence. Though I won't be surprised if the major companies just double down and make things even worse. Whatever, I'm hoping the Purism phone is good, my old Note 3 has been showing its age...
I am conflicted on what phone to buy next. The Purism is really appealing for privacy and Linux support, and Fairphone for repairability, sustainability and ethical production. And on the latter I can install /e/ OS.
I am happy to say that my desktop from 2004 is still alive and kicking. Some websites are a drag, but some on-board replacements have kept the old warrior running. I hope one day we can keep our smartphones on life support for a long time.
There's nothing that precludes you from having both. My computing needs are adequately met by my laptop, desktop, and personal server at work. Without the laptop, I definitely wouldn't be anywhere near as productive but the same goes for the desktop.
My laptop is always ssh-ed (mosh provides the "always" aspect) into one of the others anyway. It's stuck with 8GB of RAM which is often a bottleneck, especially since Docker holds onto a couple gigs and Chrome tries its hardest to get the rest. Portability is necessary but not sufficient to addrrss my computing needs.
Depending on your requirements you could make it work with a powerful desktop and small and lightweight (but obviously not powerful) laptop, at least I found that’s what works for me rather than those giant and heavy “desktop-replacement” laptops. It gives me the best of both worlds.
I'm running that configuration with a somewhat powerful desktop and an el-cheapo 10.1″ 2-in-1 (worth ~$200, I bought an used one for ~$120). I was initially saving up to replace the latter with a powerful small laptop, but over the past couple of months necessity made me learn to work more over SSH. So today, I can do 90% of my work somewhat comfortably on that small 2-in-1 via SSH-ing to my desktop and running an extra Emacs frame in terminal. Since that's just a "view" of the same instance I have running in GUI mode on my desktop, I can switch between the two machines almost completely seamlessly. This fits my current needs so well that I actually refrained from buying new hardware right now, and will just keep the money in a "hardware fund" until the poor little 2-in-1 dies.
Yes this is very similar to my workflow. I have pretty much given up on finding a "powerful but small" laptop because I realised that this type of machine is also guaranteed to suffer from thermal throttling
I have 1 desktop and 3 laptops. Sometimes it's good to have a large screen and a comfortable (ergonomic) keyboard. Rigging these to a MacBook with a USB-C can be done, but sometimes it's better to use a desktop.
It's impossible for me to write code on the weenie screen of a laptop. Plus I hate the laptop chicklet keyboards and the touchpad that my palm is always accidentally brushing against.
If I could, I'd have a 4x8 foot display with no decrease in pixel density. I.e. an incredible number of pixels.
Heck, why stop there. Give me a wall sized display! Phooey on laptops.
> If I could, I'd have a 4x8 foot display with no decrease in pixel density. I.e. an incredible number of pixels.
i think you would find this setup to be really poor.
you need be within ~2ft viewing to appreciate the difference between 1080p and 4k at 24" diagonal display size.
sitting 2ft from an 8ft wide display will give you very poor viewing angles for the majority of the content. at greater distances than 2ft, the pixel density of a 4k 24" display become nothing more than waste of gpu, cpu and electricity.
I have a 5x1 monitor wall and it's great for coding, but it curves around through 90° so all the screens are equidistant. Portrait mode is so much better for coding (for me) and I can see multiple source files, application, documentation and reference material all at once. It's great!
Maybe. I know I could easily make use of one double (in both x and y) the size I currently have.
As for discerning pixels, I know that the retina display is distinctly easier to read than non-retina (both from Apple) even though I could not see the pixelation on the latter. Watching video does not make much difference, but reading text sure does.
My wall of pixels is a 42" 60hz 4k display I bought on Amazon for $200 3 years ago. Best purchase ever, it's basically like having four 21" 1080p monitors stuck together with no gap.
Really hard to get myself to code on my laptop now.
I am completely in favor of having a work station (better performance per Euro than a laptop). However, nothing holds you from using a nice screen and keyboard with a laptop.
I have my MacBook Pro hooked up to a 4k external display, Microsoft Natural Keyboard (or whatever they are called today), and a nice big Magic Trackpad 2. I can undock it and have exactly the same system on the go. the MacBook Pro can drive multiple screens (2x4k on 13", 4x4k on 15"). You also use an external GPU over Thunderbolt 3.
> nothing holds you from using a nice screen and keyboard with a laptop.
What's the point of having a laptop if you can only use it with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse? A powerful desktop is much cheaper, and you can stuff huge disk drives in it.
When I'm on the go, I bring a cheap laptop (in case of loss, theft, or damage) that doesn't have my whole life on it and mainly take a vacation from working. (And I'll use the time to catch up on my professional reading.)
A lesson for my next mothership is to not skimp on the case, it's the single factor that keeps my current 2009-era desktop from being a real ship of Theseus. Over the decade I've upgraded RAM, GPUs, added a network card (mobo's jack died), more storage... but I can't get a pair of the beefy GPUs I want for lack of space for the cards themselves and a beefier power supply, plus I'd need to upgrade the mobo. Might as well do it all at once for a new rig and start fresh.
I am actually going the other direction, I used to build my own, went to laptops-only for a while but then got a mini-tower prebuilt. That one died after about 18 months so I recently ordered an even smaller Gigabyte Brix, with a 10W CPU (Celeron J4105) instead of 65W, but better I/O, and compatible with my existing RAM and storage options. Small enough to mount on the back of the new monitor I'm also getting. I have gone smaller with every desktop I built.
Basically, I now use laptops for games and the desktop for storage/office tasks. The single board desktops are quickly growing out of the RPi-type niche and look increasingly competitive with the traditional ATX platform for this role, and opting for them means that I define my system around the storage and RAM, rather than the multitude of PSU/motherboard/CPU/GPU/case combinations, which is both easier for me and eliminates most instances where components push each other out of their tolerance range. So long as I'm on the same memory and storage, I can replace everything else in the case for <$200. This is really what sold me on the idea; since my existing system fell out of warranty after one year, repair would be the cost of a new board. But if the whole system is the board, then a failure is a forced upgrade.
It means a larger installed base for the delivery of software, services, and adjunct devices which otherwise wouldn’t be possible when competing against cheap android devices.
A lower TCO is a selling point. Analysts are just failing to understand the evolution of the business model.
Agreed. I picked up a X because I just couldn't help myself, even though I tend to think the 's' updates are the ones to get.
Barring calamity, I should have no problem holding onto it until the XIs (or whatever they end up calling it). Might need a new battery at the halfway point, but performance is pretty clearly leveling off, the camera is quite nice, and it's hard to imagine what new shiny tech they could add that would get me to buy a new phone in the next three years.
This doesn't make any sense and isn't backed by any evidence. Software purchased for either phone platform is entirely device independent. Why would longer hardware purchase cycles impact software sales either way? I don't think there is any correlation here at all.
Analysts aren't making this up. Apple's financials have been stagnant because they can't get people excited about new devices. It's not unique to Apple either, new smartphones just aren't that interesting anymore.
A lot of the apple services are iOS only or better integrated on iOS, like iCloud, Apple Music, app subscriptions, etc. That said apple's service revenue is minuscule compared to device sale revenue.
Apple devices do have relatively long useful life. My main workstation is a 2009 Mac Pro that I’ve maxed out, and it remains a highly performant machine.
Our household has a long tail of Apple products, that get passed down, or put to different uses.
This is hugely important for Apple business strategy. Not only does it please the customer to have well made, long lasting hardware, it cements the “ecosystem” into a much more embedded place in the lives of users.
Apple has competive advantages and disadvantages, but it absolutely must maintain customer loyalty. To even break out service revenue is a little uniformative, because the feedback loops they get from having a tightly integrated system are huge.
Apple has struggled with the online platform aspect of its business, compared to Google, Amazon, etc...but even if it’s not a market leader, if they can get a “good enough “ product that prevents users from leaving the ecosystem that is huge.
A paradigm example is Apple Maps which was a source of embarrassment for a while. Going up against Google in this space seems insane.
But they finally got it good enough that my guess is vast majority of iPhone users use Apple Maps, not Google. Ideally, Apple wants to prevent as many people as possible from having to get a google account as they can!
Now is the time for the cloud I think. Phones are pretty much laptops and laptops have replaced desktops, heavy tasks are more often outsourced. When the hardware is interchangeable (and that includes the next version of the iPhone) that's when the demand for the cloud will be heard. Before it was a convenience, now it's an exigent matter of not being able to keep things apart.
Up until now, devices have been objects of treasure and identification. When what your machine does is taken for granted, something else will have to replace it as your personal hearth keeping you warm at night.
I agree that there is no next big thing. But there is a next big "thing".
Umm, huh? No offense but this looks like a game of buzzword bingo. "Now is the time for the cloud I think." How does "the cloud" have anything to do with the rest of what you've written?
As a software developer, people tend to assume that I’m really into hardware as well. They’re usually surprised when I tell them that I prefer to buy older hardware and keep it running for longer. I often skip multiple generations of devices.
I just bought a new TV with Roku built in. My last TV was a tube TV.
I’m writing this on a iPhone SE, which I upgraded to for $100 when my 5S stopped working. I kept the same phone case. I’ll probably buy another iPhone when they release a new one with the same size screen. I might get a new phone case then, too.
I was playing Zelda on the original Wii earlier. It’s the newest game console that I own.
Don’t get me wrong, I think new stuff is cool, too. I’d just rather go on a trip than have the newest cool thing.
I use a separate Roku box from the TV so the TV can't spy on me with their frackin' microphone. I don't plug the TV into the internet. Haha, take that, N SA!
At least in the case of a Roku TV, it's the exact same Roku hardware just strapped onto the board of an off-the-shelf flat panel display. The only real difference is that the UI has selections for the TV's inputs. There's no microphone unless you use the phone app to yell at the TV or buy a different remote than the one supplied.
That's why I have a Roku TV (well that, and I like the Roku software better) versus one of the other smart TVs. I'd have a Roku anyway so this just frees up an HDMI port.
I'm a little different, but same result. I buy the best thing out at the time, then use it till it dies. It's because it's a tool, and these modern tools take a while to set up, and that's a task. Had a nexus 6, rooted, custom rom with unneeded crap disabled. It died last year when I finally broke the screen. It was running fine, and the battery got me through the day w/o a top-off.
I picked the max config pixel2xl for over thousand bucks, put a custom rom on it w/o google crap, and that's going to last me till it physically dies.
My boss on the other hand, gets both the pixel and the iphone refresh every year, and fiddles with each for an hour each day for weeks. Screw that. End result though - both you and me aren't as good a customer as companies want - they want my boss.
To address your point, which I cannot relate to. If money is the limiting factor and you still think the new stuff is cool - why not just buy a $200 phone every 3 years? the top of the line stuff is overpriced, but the margins are close to zero on everything else, and specs and features, at least for android, are pretty much the same.
I've been where you are... I hope you get more than a salary.
"Time-for-money" only scales for the very top ! (Beyonce, Brad Pitt and some NetFlix engineers). Takes this time to skill up in everything! (full stack and the business) so when you get out you can build a business.
Well, you are into hardware, so you only use stable products :-D
As industrial engineer I know what it takes to develop any new product. The real world is enormous and you will always face the unexpected when releasing something new. People is going to buy your product and travel to Siberia or the Sahara desert, or to the beach, and discover things about your product you could not plan.
The fact is that early adopters usually are "long tail beta testers".
So when I buy a product is 2 years or so after it was first released and never have the problems that my friends that are early adopters have.
Honestly people who buy new hardware every year are not "into hardware", they are into wasting their money and finding a pretense to justifying it. Most of them are probably just bored or treat it like fashion.
This is roughly what I observe. With the exception of a subset of techies, the people I know who always have the latest and greatest also tend to make very minimal use of the latest and greatest features. I'm not convinced many of them are upgrading for any purpose other than retail therapy.
A secondary hypothesis is that there is a contingent of people who buy and install smart home devices just to annoy their non-tech-inclined spouses. That one's not mine, though, I got it from one such spouse.
I think I can agree with this with regard to modern phones, but not universally.
For instance, in the early days on the iPhone, anyone who upgraded every year was getting a huge improvement each time. The iPhone 3G brought 3G support, so you could actually download things at a reasonable speed. The 3G S had a huge and very noticeable performance increase across the board, and the 4 was the first with a Retina screen.
Another example... for PC games, I really wish I could upgrade my GPU each gen. Especially when you're in charge of adjusting your own performance settings, the extra headroom you get from a new card always feels super nice. (Whether the increase is really all that noticeable is perhaps debatable, which I suppose would go to your point...)
I was in this camp too, but bought iPhone X and very satisfied. Bigger screen and easier to read. It’s interesting that iPhone XR has some other virtual resolution, so text on the default settings is actually smaller than on iPhone SE. Don’t tell me about font settings and accessibility controls, it looks awful. :(
Same. For me I think part of the reason is that the more I get to know the intimate inner-workings of technology, the more I realize how incredibly brittle and unreliable new technologies can be. So if I have something that is reliable and working great after a year or two, I'm very hesitant to part with it. Plus these days what's passing for 'cool new features' is pretty underwhelming. I'll keep my stuff that works for now, thanks.
It’s about efficiency too - I love skipping generations but usually I go for the max every time I skip, so that I have peak performance for a couple of years. How does an iPhone se even work efficiently? I could not stand my 6+ because it has become too slow to do anything, and just got rid of it this month for an xs.
Same thing happened with desktop PC's around when the Core 2 Duo came out and 1080p lcd displays became standard. The machines can do most of the stuff we want them to do.
Oh no! Now you're giving companies the green light to produce shittier products so they need to be replaced sooner!
I hope this marks the end of an era where people feel compelled to buy the 'latest and greatest' just because it's going to make them stand out in front of their friends.
Cellphones have reached the state of performance surplus that desktops have reached years ago. There's simply no reason to upgrade. I'm still using the desktop I built in 2013 w i7-3770 & 32GB RAM for $600. There's been no reason to get a new one.
As phones are becoming commodities like computers, I wonder if Apple will meet the same fate in mobile as it did in computers: being marginalized as a niche player in the market it pioneered as most people flock to the mainstream choice (Windows for computer, Android for phone)
Apple is already in this position globally and has never been a majority even in the US. I think the difference is that the phone market is MUCH bigger, and combined with fragmentation issues across Android, that makes iPhone still a really attractive developer target.
But also remember that Apple has never cared about dominating market share. They think of themselves like BMW or similar, they don’t care that not everyone buys Apple, they just want to make the “best” devices and to have happy customers.
Apple has always cared about dominating market share. It gives them extreme negotiation power when dealing with suppliers, giving them a good price and quality. Apple usually is the first to choose the best quality components from dealers and the rest of manufacturers have to live with the left overs.
In fact, Apple has dominated the portable music player for a long time.
They also dominate the laptops market, making the biggest seller models of all the world. They make them in Aluminum(extremely expensive to make for small productions) and the big quantity they sell make extremely hard for others to compete.
They dominate the smartphones also. Other manufacturers have more market share but divided in lots of models, and several manufacturers.
The Ipads had been selling fro hundreds of millions per year. There is no sophisticated product in the world that have been sold at those massive numbers in the entire history of mankind.
This is something that Steve Jobs understood very well. The current CEO was the boss of manufacturing for a long time, so he knows it.
But if they continue raising prices, they will lose the mass production.
From what I found around 160 mln laptops were sold last year. Apple sold around 18 mln, in other words around 11%. HP, Lenovo and Dell sold each around 2 to 3.5 times that. Can you say then that Apple dominates laptop market? Rather that they are a big player.
I understand that you said that they sold the most per a model. But does it count all that much when others sell PC hardware in such a big quantities? They sell more models, but they likely share many many parts.
The argument, which you may be able to but have not refuted, is that “PC sales” is not a singular product or even a singular form factor like the iPad.
> Apple has always cared about dominating market share.
Apple dominates profits, but not market share. Occasionally, this happens to drive their competitors out of the market, as is what happened with iPod, iPad, and Apple Watch; however, Mac and iPhone, while quite profitable, are not even close to "dominating" the market.
> The Ipads had been selling fro hundreds of millions per year.
This is not true at all. Apple sells significantly fewer than a hundred million iPads each year.
> I'm still using the desktop I built in 2013 w i7-3770 & 32GB RAM for $600
Did you steal half the hardware? I'm trying to do the math in my head and I'm pretty sure the RAM alone cost at least $600. I know I paid significantly more for my i7-2600k w/ 16GB in 2012.
My company pays for my phone. I can upgrade every 18 months. My latest upgrade date has come and gone, but I haven't bothered to do it since my current phone (iPhone 7 plus) still works as well as it did the first day I got it. The only reason I can foresee getting a new phone is if next year's iPhone includes a headphone jack. Now that would be an improvement worth getting.
Anecdotal, but I'm in the same position when it comes to my laptop update. I'm eligible to update my corporate MacBook every two years, but so far I'm still sticking with my 5-year-old MacBook Pro Retina (13") because none of the current options provide a clear benefit for me and the downside is potentially huge (no native Linux, unreliable keyboard, dongle-life). As long as the battery doesn't die on me I'll keep using this thing.
Similar anecdote: still sticking to my 3 year old MacBook Pro despite being offered the new one because newer "innovations" actually subtract from my experience: no physical function keys or escape key, no regular USB or HDMI, insufficient haptic feedback from keyboard etc.
why not upgrade and sell the phone? economically it doesn't make sense keeping the same phone if you can have free upgrade and stay with carrier anyway
I can barely get full speed 4G as I travel around the UK. Unless 5G is full-speed everywhere out of the gate, I can't see the point in upgrading just yet.
I'm looking for a new phone, since I still use 5s, and I'm thinking of switching to Android. Xiaomi really caught my eye, good specs for great price. What's your experience been with it so far?
Not the op I but got a Xiaomi Mi A2 Lite for ~180€ (64GB/4GB RAM) after my 4 years old Moto G had strange issues with the battery that even replacing the battery didn't solve:
Could not be happier. Android One get's monthly updates from Google for the next 3 years, Feature Updates for 2 years. Clean and stable experience. I've read there are better cameras out there, however it's way better than the Moto G. Build quality is fine for me. I hope it will last 5 years.
Well im coming from an Android flagship(back in the day s5) and the xiaomi is brilliant ! Big screen super fast and well built. But the price is of course the best :)
The rate of perceivable changes has decreased over recent years while the price of flagships has increased substantially. I have a Galaxy S7 and it still works perfectly well for everything I need. The only issue with it is that I know Samsung won't be releasing Android Pie for this model, so I'll be forced into an upgrade if I want to stay on a current version.
The vendors have thrived for a decade just by improving specs. We went from NTSC to 1080p to 4K and TV sizes from 27 inches to 55 inches. But now peoples eyes aren’t good enough and their houses aren’t big enough to need anymore. Same thing with phones. It used to be that an old phone felt slow compared to a new one. But now they’re fine for most uses.
If companies want to sell devices they need new shit to sell. VR, AR is one possible avenue. Smart Home is another. But don’t expect me to just volunteer $1K for a slightly better version of what I already have.
In the 90's phone manufacturers tried doubling down on one of the main selling features: size. I saw phones almost as small as a Zippo lighter on the market before the industry regained its sanity. Today we're similarly going to the extremes of screen size + thinness.
I believe once the industry once again regains its sanity, we might see a new form factor:
2. Thicker, but less dense and more durable (think Nokia 3310)
3. Some form of innovative physical scroll/click control on the edges of the device to alleviate thumb-scrolling (perhaps a pressure sensor with no moving parts)
4. Perhaps even a control on the rear side of the device, that can be activated with the index finger (for single handed operation)
I'm considering a 3310 class device plus a high end pad with a pen (one in the same price range as a reasonable phone) for when my current phone breaks.
(Currently I'm on a Nokia 6.1 AndroidOne and except the camera it is really good and costed literally a fraction of other new phones. Considering the fact that my job pays my phone and it tells something about what I think about current flagship phones and prices.)
Smartphones are so refined these days that upgrading yearly or even every two years just doesn’t seem worth it to me if I’m paying full retail price for it.
However, if the carrier companies still offered subsidized phones I’d be more than happy to upgrade for the subsidized price. It wasn’t until NEXT and all the similar “pay the full price over N months” plans came along that I stopped upgrading regularly.
Seems like the burden of not upgrading has fallen back on the smartphone manufacturer, no? If I’m paying full price I’m either going to buy less often or look for a cheaper option.
This was also one of the major reasons for apple getting such a large market share in the US. As people were not required to pay full price for the phones buying a $100 iphone or $50 android phone with contract didn't affect many people but paying $1000 or $500 will.
A nexus 5x is a worse phone in every way than a modern flagship. I don’t understand the point of these comments as anything more than a dick-waving contest about who’s using the worse hardware on a daily basis.
Maybe they should offer more variety in design, usability, features and colours?
There are no small new smartphones, there are no QWERTY phones, soon there will be no phones with headphone jacks...I'd love to have a QWERTY for business + small phone with nice camera and durable battery for travel combo.
There’s no point in upgrading anymore aside from ditching the feeling that your phone is slow (which is likely fixed with a factory reset).
Camera is infinitesimally better. Processor is better in a way you can’t measure. Oh now you can push anywhere to use your fingerprint!
There’s no more cash cow cuz phones aren’t getting noticeably better. Get back to me when I can stop using my thumbs to type or when the world becomes my monitor. Maybe I sound entitled but some day the bullions these companies keep expecting has to be justified.
The thing that would get me excited about mobile devices is the ability to run my own programs and access a real file system like a general purpose computer. That would be a real improvement in capability along the lines of the first true smartphone with a touchscreen, browser, and GPS for turn-by-turn navigation.
Running programs inside a sandbox is not what the OP is talking about. If you can't reinstall your own OS and get root permission* to talk to the hardware, you're not really in control of whats going on.
*Im of course aware you can root Android phones and jailbreak iPhones, again this isnt what OP is talking about - they void warranties and are challenging/time consuming even for tech people.
Back when I first installed Linux on a PC it was much more challenging than putting LineageOS on a phone. Especially getting full hardware support on a laptop took a lot of fiddling.
Nowadays, Lineage will work perfectly OOTB 99% of the time. And 100% of the time if you buy a phone which is already compatible.
Why do you need root access to the hardware for it to be considered a general purpose computing device? If someone provides you an account on a server where you don't have root access, would you not describe that a general purpose computer device with a real filesystem where you can run your own programs?
Isn't your software the thing that's really "going on"? Who cares about the intricacies of how the hardware works? I understand being interested for hobbyist reasons, but is there a practical reason?
EDIT: Here's another example. Let's say you have a VPS on which you have root, but you don't have ring 0 access on the machine where it's running. Are you in control then?
if the remote server has better IO and net access, but if you chose to use your own software, the vendor decides to cap you access (or force an inferior api on to you), then you have an equivalent analogy.
So if a general purpose computing device comes with a camera, but the camera is restricted, then it's not a general purpose computing device anymore? What if it didn't come with a camera in the first place? Plus, there is no restriction against connecting your own camera peripheral which you do control.
The manufacturer gets to decide if they're manufacturing a general purpose computing device or not, but they don't get to define what general purpose is. Either it executes arbitrary code or it doesn't, which my Android device does just fine without root access. So I would call it a general purpose computing device.
Root access is just a platform specific construct, and it doesn't necessarily have an important purpose on every platform. Furthermore there are lots of ways that a platform could take away your control even if you had root access, such as through binary firmware blobs (which I'm sure you're running dozens right now, as am I probably).
But there are lots of situations where you can't do things even with root access on a unix-like machine. I gave one example already -- root access doesn't give you control over the operation of system firmware. But there are others, too. For example, root access doesn't let you write to kernel memory, it doesn't let you bypass SELinux policies, etc. The way you are defining root access here essentially doesn't apply to any modern computing system.
The first time I rooted a phone and installed a custom ROM completely over the air while riding a bus I felt like a hacker god, but that was like 2012 or something. I'm honestly surprised everyone doesn't root their phone because at least on Android it really is trivial these days and fixes so many problems with the phone ecosystem. There's no excuse at all for someone honestly interested in running their own programs not bothering to figure this out.
It’s probably not something that will happen. Computers got commoditized. Just how these things goes I guess.
But I do agree. It’s sad to see the PC-era, and the free software ideals, die-off. Slowly the idea of running your own software on your own devices is becoing arcane.
>Slowly the idea of running your own software on your own devices is becoing arcane.
Ever since I've been using computers (late 90's onward), my experience has been that running your own software has always been arcane. I can count on one hand people I've known in the flesh who've done this. Peoples' eyes get wide as if you're about to empty their bank account with your mind if you tell them you wrote a script or a program to do even the simplest of things.
Joe and Jane Phonetypical of today wouldn't have been the proprietary software-creating types of yesterday, they would've been the AOL, Microsoft Word and solitaire-using types.
In my mind I included software of your own free choosing. As in, not only what’s in the app-store of your device, but that software the kid down the street hacked together for you.
But yeah, I see your point. Of course my memory is somewhat clouded by the circle of people I choose to surround me with.
(Edit: But even the 90s has started the downward slope. There was a time before that, and in first half when systems booted into a BASIC-interpreter)
An interesting case to exemplify: Minecraft started out as java application. You downloaded a set of jar-files an ran. The software was proprietary, but it was yours to run, and java being what it is, was fairly simple to modify and extend. A large community of tinkeres and hackers grew up around this capability of modding the software in various ways.
Then commoditization happens, Microsoft bought it, rewrite it in c++ and started selling it as a service with an app-store. Modding is still part of the echosystem, but the barrier to entry is sufficiently high that I have hard time imagine any new generations of hackers growing up as Minecraft modders.
Ah I was wondering how Minecraft got so big (I also always thought it was just an open-source thing). Microsoft seems to be really good at hand-holding the masses and sitting them in front of things they didn't know they would've liked.
Unfortunately, it seems like Android is moving in the direction of restricting access to these very things, either through preventing access to the bootloader or by preventing "rooting" :(
If I buy a 100 dollar phone new each year I save 900 dollars and get 80% of the features of that 1000 dollar phone. Each year my new phone starts to get as good, or better than the phone I was getting 80% of a few years back.
This also works for cars.
The camera difference is actually huge compared to 2-3 year older top models, if you experience it first hand. I posted my experience in another comment here [1].
I suspect that this trend might be slowing down. Starting with the Pixel 2, Google started really pushing the idea that image processing in your camera can make up for a lack of better hardware, using it as an excuse not to improve the camera that much from the original Pixel. Anecdotally, I even think my friend's original Pixel takes much better photos than my Pixel 2. (but maybe he's just a better photographer!)
Apple probably has a similar block built into their SoCs directly. Computational photography will require more and better HW to handle the compute, so I wouldn't bank on camera improvements stalling out for some time.
As an example of runway, look at the Light L16 (which the Nokia 9 Pureview is rumored to use their tech). It takes medium format DSLR quality photos that you can adjust depth of view in post processing. That will filter out to Android & Apple phones eventually.
i m entitled too. for the amounts of golden eggs they make, where is the novelty? At least add some new sensors, or some weird new radio tricks, i mean, i know shiny things sell, but they have tons of cash to invest under the hood.
The Jobs-era strategy at Apple was pretty straightforward. From what I recall around 2000-2010 the Apple strategy was:
1) Decided on a minimum acceptable functionality for a device
2) Set up uncompromising logistics chains to support creating a device (eg, famously, touchscreens)
3) Price at a rate that was extremely competitive when considering the device components
4) Crush competitors who could only offer cheap goods that didn't really do what Apple's could, or expensive goods that could match functionality but not price - recall the iPad's original differentiation was it was cheaper than expected, given what it did. It looked very cheap compared to the preemptive tablet releases of the time trying to head its success off at the pass.
They've made a lot of money over the last few years, but that strategy doesn't seem to match the modern Apple's approach. The price gap between an iPod Touch and the cheapest iPhone is not something I'd have expected of 2010 Apple.
The original iPad was a potato. Came out with 256MB RAM in 2010 and could only run one app at a time. Sure, everything else about it was very good, but it was not cheap for what it could do. Like the iPod with "less space than a Nomad", haha.
> The price gap between an iPod Touch and the cheapest iPhone is not something I'd have expected of 2010 Apple.
Just to confirm, up until a couple of months ago, the difference between the low-end iPod Touch and the cheapest iPhone was $150, and today this is $250. I don't recall there ever being a time that this was significantly lower.
The iPhone X was released one year after the iPhone 7. Your anecdote is really not apropos as the manufacturers have never expected that users would upgrade every year.
Very true, I'd say a downgrade is the trend. I saw like 10+ people deciding to switch from "superphones" down to mid-range models, and even dumbphones for their new phones.
People who had ultrabooks, often try Atom based notebooks and sufraces. The key deciding factor for such people, I think, is having a good screen and bearable ergonomics (no microscopic keyboards, or batteries.) The data I have access to tell that the "big screen, small CPU," is the category with the biggest year on year growth. Atom based 14 and 15 inchers are selling like hot cookies.
As a person working in the industry, I can say that's a very visible trend. People switch their devices more due to battery and physical wear than actual need for more features.
In that respect, things got very "Japanised" in respect that Japanese cellphone makers are often making new models every season with no real changes other than cosmetic.
Japan is also the only developed market where "dumbphones" ever saw few upwards trends in last 5 years.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadat this point phones cost about the same as laptops and laptops have a ~3-4 year replacement cycle.
I won't be surprised if the same starts applying to phones, now that the improvements between generations are mainly cosmetic.
I even handed down a couple of iPads.
The last few years has been different though. The devices have been good enough. And the prices on the lastest iPhone has kept going up. Had the prices been cheaper I’d have upgraded. My parents are on 4+ year old phones (I use for 2, then they use for 2 before another hand down) and even older spares that are just used for travel and the get a local sim. The incremental improvement is worth it if I can pass down.
As it is, I think they’ll have to get new phones when they just stop being supported. I’m not upgrading.
tl;dr the performance bumps cost more.
Having to pay $100 a month for a difference barely measurable in real world performance however... That will cause me real-world dissatisfaction.
An optimistic but realistic scenario is something like 40% faster and $20 a month, where the phone is used a lot and the speed translates into saving multiple hours a month. Definitely worth it there.
If the webpages I browse today load fast on my existing phone, network being the speed barrier... will I actually experience a 40% speed-up on a new phone? No way.
The value is just not there. And that’s not my opinion. That’s the market speaking. Figures are down for phones everywhere.
$20-25 a month lets you trade up to a new $700-900 phone every other year.
You won't benefit from that 40% all the time, sure. But if you get 8%, and you use your phone two hours a day, that's almost five hours saved! Processing is not a negligible amount of waiting. Plus new phones tend to have better radios.
There’s a million things I’d rather spend $1000+ on that will get me real joy, rather than incremental improvements to a yet another generic product in an increasingly stale (and increasingly locked down) product-line.
Smartphones is just not a “it thing” anymore. Get over it. The market certainly says. (As in it’s not just my opinion.)
The market says that somewhat fewer people are seeing the need to buy new phones. It hasn't dropped to nearly zero.
Project that trend into the future and you’ll see just what happened in the PC market: ever decreasing sales.
Unless you’re prepared, that’s going to get ugly.
My smartphone only sees data via wifi, and it is definitely not at the center of my life. I get more than enough internet exposure through my home and office computers and wifi networks. Being disconnected outside is one of my guilty pleasures. My main use of my phone outside work is for offline GPS and casual camera use in the wilderness, where there is no phone service even if I wanted it. As a result, I value a small and light phone since it is mostly a passive burden in my pocket. But, the battery needs to last a whole camping trip away from the electrical grid.
My current phone is an aging Moto G4 Play which can still go 5+ days with many hours per day GPS logging. I am starting to see reduced GPS reliability that I think may be physical antenna damage. So, I may replace it with a fresh mid-range phone, rather than replacing its user-serviceable battery and looking into non-OEM firmware updates to extend its life.
I regret not elaborating on how X% processor benefit would only be Y% real life benefit, but I thought my point was clear enough. I would have been making a much stronger claim about hours saved if I actually thought the total use of the phone would go 40% faster...
My battery life isn’t what it used to be, but I can still make it a full day with slightly less usage (restricted to browser/text based mediums). Should have taken advantage of the battery upgrade. Meanwhile my sibling’s 6S(?) Plus drains charge like someone is bloodletting it.
What I find mystifying is why as an average user it’s impossible to figure out why it happens, is it normal, is your phone broken?
Apple docs and support provide no insight into one of the primary usability issues.
Other than that, it’s quite a nice phone. I picked it up cheap on Craigslist and it’s going strong for two years.
To me the real innovation in looking for with phones is that they can connect to an external screen and keyboard and in that case just give me something very close to regular macOS. To me that will lock off another wave of valuable phone upgrades for a few years because we again need more computation power to drive that setup. Maybe we could do something where the screen includes the GPU...?
Hopefully that innovation is the return of the headphone jack :P
People love to complain about how inconvenient losing the headphone jack is (especially people with phones that still have it!) but that’s just because this is the internet, where everybody complains about everything.
Why is it that people keep complaining a sedan can't transport their piano? Yes sir, every product made by everyone should fit your exact use case.
My laptop is always ssh-ed (mosh provides the "always" aspect) into one of the others anyway. It's stuck with 8GB of RAM which is often a bottleneck, especially since Docker holds onto a couple gigs and Chrome tries its hardest to get the rest. Portability is necessary but not sufficient to addrrss my computing needs.
If I could, I'd have a 4x8 foot display with no decrease in pixel density. I.e. an incredible number of pixels.
Heck, why stop there. Give me a wall sized display! Phooey on laptops.
i think you would find this setup to be really poor.
you need be within ~2ft viewing to appreciate the difference between 1080p and 4k at 24" diagonal display size.
sitting 2ft from an 8ft wide display will give you very poor viewing angles for the majority of the content. at greater distances than 2ft, the pixel density of a 4k 24" display become nothing more than waste of gpu, cpu and electricity.
As for discerning pixels, I know that the retina display is distinctly easier to read than non-retina (both from Apple) even though I could not see the pixelation on the latter. Watching video does not make much difference, but reading text sure does.
Really hard to get myself to code on my laptop now.
I have my MacBook Pro hooked up to a 4k external display, Microsoft Natural Keyboard (or whatever they are called today), and a nice big Magic Trackpad 2. I can undock it and have exactly the same system on the go. the MacBook Pro can drive multiple screens (2x4k on 13", 4x4k on 15"). You also use an external GPU over Thunderbolt 3.
What's the point of having a laptop if you can only use it with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse? A powerful desktop is much cheaper, and you can stuff huge disk drives in it.
When I'm on the go, I bring a cheap laptop (in case of loss, theft, or damage) that doesn't have my whole life on it and mainly take a vacation from working. (And I'll use the time to catch up on my professional reading.)
Basically, I now use laptops for games and the desktop for storage/office tasks. The single board desktops are quickly growing out of the RPi-type niche and look increasingly competitive with the traditional ATX platform for this role, and opting for them means that I define my system around the storage and RAM, rather than the multitude of PSU/motherboard/CPU/GPU/case combinations, which is both easier for me and eliminates most instances where components push each other out of their tolerance range. So long as I'm on the same memory and storage, I can replace everything else in the case for <$200. This is really what sold me on the idea; since my existing system fell out of warranty after one year, repair would be the cost of a new board. But if the whole system is the board, then a failure is a forced upgrade.
It means a larger installed base for the delivery of software, services, and adjunct devices which otherwise wouldn’t be possible when competing against cheap android devices.
A lower TCO is a selling point. Analysts are just failing to understand the evolution of the business model.
Barring calamity, I should have no problem holding onto it until the XIs (or whatever they end up calling it). Might need a new battery at the halfway point, but performance is pretty clearly leveling off, the camera is quite nice, and it's hard to imagine what new shiny tech they could add that would get me to buy a new phone in the next three years.
Analysts aren't making this up. Apple's financials have been stagnant because they can't get people excited about new devices. It's not unique to Apple either, new smartphones just aren't that interesting anymore.
It may be peak iPhone nonetheless, which is why extending device life is strategic.
Their services income is growing year over year.
They have multiple line of adjunct devices that are growing year over year.
I said nothing about software sales. New services mean delivering software. The more clients you can address, the better.
Do a few google searches to confirm these statements. Everything I’ve said here is fact.
I’m sorry this doesn’t make sense to you.
Our household has a long tail of Apple products, that get passed down, or put to different uses.
This is hugely important for Apple business strategy. Not only does it please the customer to have well made, long lasting hardware, it cements the “ecosystem” into a much more embedded place in the lives of users.
Apple has competive advantages and disadvantages, but it absolutely must maintain customer loyalty. To even break out service revenue is a little uniformative, because the feedback loops they get from having a tightly integrated system are huge.
Apple has struggled with the online platform aspect of its business, compared to Google, Amazon, etc...but even if it’s not a market leader, if they can get a “good enough “ product that prevents users from leaving the ecosystem that is huge.
A paradigm example is Apple Maps which was a source of embarrassment for a while. Going up against Google in this space seems insane.
But they finally got it good enough that my guess is vast majority of iPhone users use Apple Maps, not Google. Ideally, Apple wants to prevent as many people as possible from having to get a google account as they can!
Sales of adjunct devices and services are up.
They have said that is where there is room for growth, and it is growing.
Up until now, devices have been objects of treasure and identification. When what your machine does is taken for granted, something else will have to replace it as your personal hearth keeping you warm at night.
I agree that there is no next big thing. But there is a next big "thing".
I just bought a new TV with Roku built in. My last TV was a tube TV.
I’m writing this on a iPhone SE, which I upgraded to for $100 when my 5S stopped working. I kept the same phone case. I’ll probably buy another iPhone when they release a new one with the same size screen. I might get a new phone case then, too.
I was playing Zelda on the original Wii earlier. It’s the newest game console that I own.
Don’t get me wrong, I think new stuff is cool, too. I’d just rather go on a trip than have the newest cool thing.
That's why I have a Roku TV (well that, and I like the Roku software better) versus one of the other smart TVs. I'd have a Roku anyway so this just frees up an HDMI port.
I picked the max config pixel2xl for over thousand bucks, put a custom rom on it w/o google crap, and that's going to last me till it physically dies.
My boss on the other hand, gets both the pixel and the iphone refresh every year, and fiddles with each for an hour each day for weeks. Screw that. End result though - both you and me aren't as good a customer as companies want - they want my boss.
To address your point, which I cannot relate to. If money is the limiting factor and you still think the new stuff is cool - why not just buy a $200 phone every 3 years? the top of the line stuff is overpriced, but the margins are close to zero on everything else, and specs and features, at least for android, are pretty much the same.
As industrial engineer I know what it takes to develop any new product. The real world is enormous and you will always face the unexpected when releasing something new. People is going to buy your product and travel to Siberia or the Sahara desert, or to the beach, and discover things about your product you could not plan.
The fact is that early adopters usually are "long tail beta testers".
So when I buy a product is 2 years or so after it was first released and never have the problems that my friends that are early adopters have.
A secondary hypothesis is that there is a contingent of people who buy and install smart home devices just to annoy their non-tech-inclined spouses. That one's not mine, though, I got it from one such spouse.
For instance, in the early days on the iPhone, anyone who upgraded every year was getting a huge improvement each time. The iPhone 3G brought 3G support, so you could actually download things at a reasonable speed. The 3G S had a huge and very noticeable performance increase across the board, and the 4 was the first with a Retina screen.
Another example... for PC games, I really wish I could upgrade my GPU each gen. Especially when you're in charge of adjusting your own performance settings, the extra headroom you get from a new card always feels super nice. (Whether the increase is really all that noticeable is perhaps debatable, which I suppose would go to your point...)
Maybe if they made an SE-like phone with a better camera, I would buy it: but instead they discontinued the SE.
The people who own SE's all seem to love owning an SE.
I hope this marks the end of an era where people feel compelled to buy the 'latest and greatest' just because it's going to make them stand out in front of their friends.
As phones are becoming commodities like computers, I wonder if Apple will meet the same fate in mobile as it did in computers: being marginalized as a niche player in the market it pioneered as most people flock to the mainstream choice (Windows for computer, Android for phone)
But also remember that Apple has never cared about dominating market share. They think of themselves like BMW or similar, they don’t care that not everyone buys Apple, they just want to make the “best” devices and to have happy customers.
In fact, Apple has dominated the portable music player for a long time.
They also dominate the laptops market, making the biggest seller models of all the world. They make them in Aluminum(extremely expensive to make for small productions) and the big quantity they sell make extremely hard for others to compete.
They dominate the smartphones also. Other manufacturers have more market share but divided in lots of models, and several manufacturers.
The Ipads had been selling fro hundreds of millions per year. There is no sophisticated product in the world that have been sold at those massive numbers in the entire history of mankind.
This is something that Steve Jobs understood very well. The current CEO was the boss of manufacturing for a long time, so he knows it.
But if they continue raising prices, they will lose the mass production.
I understand that you said that they sold the most per a model. But does it count all that much when others sell PC hardware in such a big quantities? They sell more models, but they likely share many many parts.
PC sales peaked in 2011 at 365 million units.
They are still over 200 million per year.
The argument, which you may be able to but have not refuted, is that “PC sales” is not a singular product or even a singular form factor like the iPad.
Apple dominates profits, but not market share. Occasionally, this happens to drive their competitors out of the market, as is what happened with iPod, iPad, and Apple Watch; however, Mac and iPhone, while quite profitable, are not even close to "dominating" the market.
> The Ipads had been selling fro hundreds of millions per year.
This is not true at all. Apple sells significantly fewer than a hundred million iPads each year.
For those curious, here's their non computer sales by year (peak iPad was 2013, with 71 million units).
2002: 381k iPods | 2003: 939k iPods | 2004: 4.4m iPods | 2005: 22.5m iPods | 2006: 39.4m iPods
2007: 51.6m iPods, 1.4m iPhones | 2008: 54.8m iPods, 11.6m iPhones | 2009: 54.1m iPods, 20.7m iPhones
2010: 50.3m iPods, 40m iPhones, 7.5m iPads | 2011: 42.6m iPods, 72.3m iPhones, 32.3m iPads | 2012: 35m iPods, 125m iPhones, 58.3m iPads | 2013: 26m iPods, 150m iPhones, 71m iPads | 2014: 14m iPods, 169m iPhones, 68m iPads
2015: 231m iPhones, 54m iPads | 2016: 211m iPhones, 45.5m iPads | 2017: 216m iPhones, 43.7m iPads | 2018: 217m iPhones, 43.5m iPads
Did you steal half the hardware? I'm trying to do the math in my head and I'm pretty sure the RAM alone cost at least $600. I know I paid significantly more for my i7-2600k w/ 16GB in 2012.
Could not be happier. Android One get's monthly updates from Google for the next 3 years, Feature Updates for 2 years. Clean and stable experience. I've read there are better cameras out there, however it's way better than the Moto G. Build quality is fine for me. I hope it will last 5 years.
Everything was working fine, then update, then brick.
If companies want to sell devices they need new shit to sell. VR, AR is one possible avenue. Smart Home is another. But don’t expect me to just volunteer $1K for a slightly better version of what I already have.
I believe once the industry once again regains its sanity, we might see a new form factor:
1. Smaller, egg-shaped 'pods' that fit more comfortably in your palm and pocket, something along the lines of: http://www.yankodesign.com/2008/05/05/mobile-phone-shaped-li...
2. Thicker, but less dense and more durable (think Nokia 3310)
3. Some form of innovative physical scroll/click control on the edges of the device to alleviate thumb-scrolling (perhaps a pressure sensor with no moving parts)
4. Perhaps even a control on the rear side of the device, that can be activated with the index finger (for single handed operation)
I'm considering a 3310 class device plus a high end pad with a pen (one in the same price range as a reasonable phone) for when my current phone breaks.
(Currently I'm on a Nokia 6.1 AndroidOne and except the camera it is really good and costed literally a fraction of other new phones. Considering the fact that my job pays my phone and it tells something about what I think about current flagship phones and prices.)
However, if the carrier companies still offered subsidized phones I’d be more than happy to upgrade for the subsidized price. It wasn’t until NEXT and all the similar “pay the full price over N months” plans came along that I stopped upgrading regularly.
Seems like the burden of not upgrading has fallen back on the smartphone manufacturer, no? If I’m paying full price I’m either going to buy less often or look for a cheaper option.
Id buy new phone if did one of the followings...
A) had a battery that lasted a month.
B) had free unlimited data.
C) can 3d scan objects
I'll not buy it if it has
A) NSA 2.0 Alexa or ok Google always turned on
B) reliance on Bluetooth. I've concerns about radiation effects.
C) battery lasts one day
I'm simply not going to shell out $1000, or some other ridiculous amount of money, for a phone like some iPhone or Pixel thing.
There are no small new smartphones, there are no QWERTY phones, soon there will be no phones with headphone jacks...I'd love to have a QWERTY for business + small phone with nice camera and durable battery for travel combo.
Camera is infinitesimally better. Processor is better in a way you can’t measure. Oh now you can push anywhere to use your fingerprint!
There’s no more cash cow cuz phones aren’t getting noticeably better. Get back to me when I can stop using my thumbs to type or when the world becomes my monitor. Maybe I sound entitled but some day the bullions these companies keep expecting has to be justified.
*Im of course aware you can root Android phones and jailbreak iPhones, again this isnt what OP is talking about - they void warranties and are challenging/time consuming even for tech people.
https://motorola-global-portal.custhelp.com/app/standalone/b...
However, I agree that OP is talking about document centered interface instead of application centered.
Nowadays, Lineage will work perfectly OOTB 99% of the time. And 100% of the time if you buy a phone which is already compatible.
EDIT: Here's another example. Let's say you have a VPS on which you have root, but you don't have ring 0 access on the machine where it's running. Are you in control then?
Unless you have root access someone else gets to define what “general purpose” is.
Someone else gets to tell you “no, that’s off limits”.
That’s doesn’t sound like being in control of your own device to me.
Root access is just a platform specific construct, and it doesn't necessarily have an important purpose on every platform. Furthermore there are lots of ways that a platform could take away your control even if you had root access, such as through binary firmware blobs (which I'm sure you're running dozens right now, as am I probably).
Root access is the machine never being permitted to tell the human owner “no”.
Nothing platform-specific about that what so ever.
On the contrary I’d rather say it’s so detached from platform it’s more like a fundamental principle than anything else, a technological ism of sorts.
Nowhere are Linux syscalls part of the official stable APIs.
But I do agree. It’s sad to see the PC-era, and the free software ideals, die-off. Slowly the idea of running your own software on your own devices is becoing arcane.
Ever since I've been using computers (late 90's onward), my experience has been that running your own software has always been arcane. I can count on one hand people I've known in the flesh who've done this. Peoples' eyes get wide as if you're about to empty their bank account with your mind if you tell them you wrote a script or a program to do even the simplest of things.
Joe and Jane Phonetypical of today wouldn't have been the proprietary software-creating types of yesterday, they would've been the AOL, Microsoft Word and solitaire-using types.
But yeah, I see your point. Of course my memory is somewhat clouded by the circle of people I choose to surround me with.
(Edit: But even the 90s has started the downward slope. There was a time before that, and in first half when systems booted into a BASIC-interpreter)
An interesting case to exemplify: Minecraft started out as java application. You downloaded a set of jar-files an ran. The software was proprietary, but it was yours to run, and java being what it is, was fairly simple to modify and extend. A large community of tinkeres and hackers grew up around this capability of modding the software in various ways.
Then commoditization happens, Microsoft bought it, rewrite it in c++ and started selling it as a service with an app-store. Modding is still part of the echosystem, but the barrier to entry is sufficiently high that I have hard time imagine any new generations of hackers growing up as Minecraft modders.
However, needing tinkering is not generally a desirable capability from an everyday appliance.
Ford is now down to a single gasoline car.
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/products/mobile/phones/d...
The camera difference is actually huge compared to 2-3 year older top models, if you experience it first hand. I posted my experience in another comment here [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18896617
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/google/pixel_visual_core
Apple probably has a similar block built into their SoCs directly. Computational photography will require more and better HW to handle the compute, so I wouldn't bank on camera improvements stalling out for some time.
As an example of runway, look at the Light L16 (which the Nokia 9 Pureview is rumored to use their tech). It takes medium format DSLR quality photos that you can adjust depth of view in post processing. That will filter out to Android & Apple phones eventually.
1) Decided on a minimum acceptable functionality for a device
2) Set up uncompromising logistics chains to support creating a device (eg, famously, touchscreens)
3) Price at a rate that was extremely competitive when considering the device components
4) Crush competitors who could only offer cheap goods that didn't really do what Apple's could, or expensive goods that could match functionality but not price - recall the iPad's original differentiation was it was cheaper than expected, given what it did. It looked very cheap compared to the preemptive tablet releases of the time trying to head its success off at the pass.
They've made a lot of money over the last few years, but that strategy doesn't seem to match the modern Apple's approach. The price gap between an iPod Touch and the cheapest iPhone is not something I'd have expected of 2010 Apple.
EDIT I looked for a source - https://www.videogamesblogger.com/2010/03/29/ipod-touch-vs-i... - initial iPhone was extremely comparable to an expensive iPod.
Just to confirm, up until a couple of months ago, the difference between the low-end iPod Touch and the cheapest iPhone was $150, and today this is $250. I don't recall there ever being a time that this was significantly lower.
Thought I'd get a iphone X to replace my 7 but meh
Very true, I'd say a downgrade is the trend. I saw like 10+ people deciding to switch from "superphones" down to mid-range models, and even dumbphones for their new phones. People who had ultrabooks, often try Atom based notebooks and sufraces. The key deciding factor for such people, I think, is having a good screen and bearable ergonomics (no microscopic keyboards, or batteries.) The data I have access to tell that the "big screen, small CPU," is the category with the biggest year on year growth. Atom based 14 and 15 inchers are selling like hot cookies.
As a person working in the industry, I can say that's a very visible trend. People switch their devices more due to battery and physical wear than actual need for more features.
In that respect, things got very "Japanised" in respect that Japanese cellphone makers are often making new models every season with no real changes other than cosmetic.
Japan is also the only developed market where "dumbphones" ever saw few upwards trends in last 5 years.