> Higher end devices often have better cameras, better support, better build quality.
True with the camera. But if you're like me, that's not actually a big deal. Better support? I wouldn't know, as I've never needed support so I can't compare. Better build quality? True -- but is that a huge deal? Even the cheapest phones I've used have lasted for most of a decade.
> Each brand has value adds like platform specific apps and ecosystem integration.
I always thought that stuff added by manufacturers takes value away from the phone. And worse, you often can't remove it.
Anyway, I think the point is that a $1000 phone is not 5 times better than a $200 phone. It may be worth the expense to people anyway, of course, but the price goes up far faster than the extra benefits do.
> Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very little to do with the hardware and should not fundamentally be a reason to upgrade to this phone.
But the software development is driven by the profit from hardware sales. Why would they improve the software if it doesn't make money?
I guess in the ideal world the phone's software should be pay-to-upgrade but free-to-stay-as-is.
> Really? If that is true, I wonder how much is due to the fact that the phones are more expensive so people take care of them more or delay their next purchase.
Even if it were the case, it does not matter. What does matter is the amount of matter that ends up in landfills. As a matter of fact, we should be pushing for better built, longer lasting devices even if it means spending a bit more in the short term.
> It's not because the actual quality would be better.
Second-hand iPhones are all over the place here in a way that Samsung Galaxies are not, even though they are more popular. You can argue that it is not a proof of high quality, but it is at least a proof that build quality is high enough that 4 years old devices are on average in a good enough state to retain a high resale value.
> If you pull statistics you also have to filter out the sub 150 dollar Andoid phones which may well have shorter average usage life.
Which precisely is the problem. “But they were cheap” is a terrible excuse as we keep burning more non-renewable resources and shovel up heaps of electronic waste in landfills. Besides, we need to look at cost per year, not cost per device as a cheap device you have to change often is more costly over the long term. I am not saying only Apple devices can have high build quality, but it seems nobody is pushing OEMs towards that direction in Android-land.
>This year I spent $10 a month extra to get the best possible screen and camera on a device I use hours every day. Not because it’s a status symbol. And very happy with my purchase.
And this is how they get people. You didn't spend an extra $10/month, you spent an extra $400 compared to getting the 8. I don't blame you, I think it's worth it, but that's a terrible way to think about prices.
A new smartphone in the US is $600-800 off contract.
In my own experience: that puts it in line with (A) my car which I purchased and titled for $500 last year, and (B) my workstation which cost $1200 without peripherals.
Both my car and workstation are, unsurprisingly, modular systems that can be useful for years or even decades with proper care.
My retired work-station is still in use as a file-server, and that machine is 8 years old. My car is 300,000 miles young without a single major mechanical fault.
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So from where I'm standing: $600 is a rather sizable chunk of change that I'd much rather spend on a system that's _not designed to be disposable._
I can't even find a current-gen smartphone that I'm remotely interested in purchasing. The "smaller and lighter" you speak is not so much _smaller_ but _thinner._
I don't need, or even desire a 1080p screen on my phone; despite being interested in other current gen components like the latest round of cameras.
You can't make the physical package and smaller than the _gigantic displays_ these phones are being equipped with. I would sooner part with $600 for an iPhone 4S-sized "endo skeleton" with current gen "RAM and CPU modules" and a slightly smaller battery. A tradeoff that's possible when you're dealing with modules... but a financial disaster when you're trying to design a mass-market phone to compete with the Android flagships.
>Isn't it pretty easy to to get a good phone? If people buy line A from brand B and are happy with it, I'd expect that 2-3 years later when they buy the latest A from B, they'd get a phone that's as good or better.
I'd argue that there hasn't been a single phone released since the Galaxy S10 that is an improvement on that phone. Sure it might have better specifications on paper, but they are all worse products due to the features that all flagship phones have removed over time (removable storage, headphone jacks, going down to pentile 1080p screens to name a few). For my needs, the entire phone industry has turned to utter crap while prices have continued to climb to pay for ever more camera modules, increasing Qualcomm prices (with the same crappy upgrade support), and marketing costs.
> This argument is a red herring. People like new things. People like things that work all the time without modification. Almost no one actually wants a phone or computer that lasts twice as long but is bulky and requires maintenance.
I don't know about you, but I don't feel like throwing $1000 once a year to have latest and greatest. I did went through several phones but that's only because they became unusable with time as applications required more and more resources.
We eventually got phones that are powerful enough to last for longer and even the mid range phones are no longer crappy.
This is why the revenue of companies producing phones dropped recently. Most people don't want to change their device that often.
> Good phones are getting cheap. Cheap phones are getting good. -Someone who is not me
Marques Brownlee aka MKBHD and even he admitted that's not the case anymore.
Good phones are getting more and more expensive. A flagship used to cost $700 5 years ago, now it's $1000+.
Cheap phones are getting good, but not at the rate that good phones are getting more expensive.
> For what it's worth I'm still daily driving LG G2 and it's legit still fast, sure sometimes it's a bit sleepy but it's still more then usable!
A quick Googling tells me your phone is from 2013 and can only be updated to Android 5. Your phone is either:
* horrendously out of date and insecure
* using a custom ROM (which I, for one, and many others probably too, don't want to do)
* not used for any kind of internet facing activity (another thing that I and others don't want to do)
Also, you probably have a very low bar for usability and speed. With modern OSes and sites, that phone would probably be extremely slow and laggy for my (and many others') usage.
Your phone uses a Snapdragon 800 which probably has 10-15% (maybe 20-25% if I'm being generous) of the performance of a modern Snapdragon. Phones are not desktops/laptops, where performance levels plateaued in 2005.
> And the camera is probably way better (and still not anywhere near good enough, FWIW)
The camera on a $1000 iPhone is not good enough? For what? For whom? The cameras on mid range smartphones are amazing, these days. A $150 China phone or $250 West phone is great these days. It is basically adequate for a whole lot of use cases, including normal day to day usage.
> If manufacturers want people to upgrade more often they need to work on curbing the price of top end models. The more expensive they are, the longer people are going to want them to last.
While I agree that lowering the price of a phone will increase the rate of upgrades, I don't think increasing the rate of upgrades is an end in itself for anyone including the manufacturers. If I can sell you one phone for $1000, that's almost certainly going to be better than selling you two phones for $500 each. It front-loads my revenue and most likely costs me less. For the two phones to be better for the manufacturer, they'd need to be taking the lowest margins on their highest-end phones, which is weird.
Selling you a phone every several years means less upgrading compared to selling you one every year, but it also means a lot less work for me. I feel like the actual equilibrium is "manufacture fewer phones".
> Also, a bit more innovation would be nice - must every smartphone follow the exact same black rectangle design template?
I'd settle for the rectangle being available in the same form factors people used to sell. We didn't just converge on "rectangle", we converged on "rectangle so oversized it only makes sense as a laptop substitute".
Because the $1,000 iPhone and a $100 Android don't have the same functionality.
Because you require a very small, Google-centric toolkit means that a $100 phone is a good fit for you. But there's a few billion other people on the planet, and some of them have different needs, wants, and desires.
But feel free to continue patting yourself on the back in public for your lifestyle choices, if that makes you feel better. Not everyone finds nobility in frugality.
>The Pixel is a premium 5" phone, not a budget one.
what makes it premium other than the fact that they're charging lots of money for it? i can't find a real differentiator over something like the oneplus 3, which costs half as much.
i agree with you that it's better than the 5X, but comparing it to this year's competition, it doesn't look so good.
> competition is such that you can get an excellent product [..] for $1,000
The really interesting part is that for ~$1000 you get the best product available at any price.
That's the magic of economies of scale in consumer markets, especially technology. It's so incredibly expensive and largely fruitless to step out of the economy of scale, that practically speaking no-one does it.
I don't have a yacht like Paul Allen, I bet my house isn't as nice as Bill Gates' and my bank account looks nothing like Zuckerberg's. But it's quite possible I have the same phone!
> How many people are happily buying those really cheap phones, though? I've known a few, who bought a couple per year(!) because the hardware kept failing
This is my parents. Between the two of them I bet they average 3 new phones per year, because they keep buying cheap Android phones, but they just can't bring themselves to spend more, even though it'd actually be cheaper and then their phone wouldn't suck. Plus because they keep buying Android and all these cheap phones run on different major versions and with different vendor customizations, they're constantly having trouble with wildly different UI for even basic things like the phone "app".
> You paid $200 for a flagship, or nothing for a clunker,
Nope. I paid $170 for a Moto G a few years back and it was a great choice. I got a fairly modern phone. Not too big, I don't like big phones. I got updates at a pretty good rate. And the best thing, I don't have a contract. And if I sit on the phone and break it, I'll go and try to buy another one. If I bought a $600 and sat on it and broke it, I would be rather upset.
That's happened with a previous phone. And a family member said, "Well why don't you buy insurance for it". I noped on that and set a new benchmark for my mobile phone -- if I am too upset if it gets destroyed or broken then I need to buy a cheaper model, I can't afford the expensive model. $200 is about that price point currently.
>> If I'm to buy an expensive phone it has to basically be a portable PC.
There's so many off market phones right now, or year old phones that are right around the $350 price point.
I just left Verizon, got a OnePlus 2 (https://oneplus.net/2) for $299 and it doesn't come with all the bloatware you get from carrier subsidized phones and its pretty much stock Android.
Sure you have to dig to find the Nexbit's, Blu Products, OnePlus and Meizu's, but they're out there and are very competitive in that $3-$400 range. Far less than what you're seeing for this brand new models that seemingly coming out every 6 months now.
> Am I cheap, poor, frugal or outdated to find it mildly funny US$400-450+tx are considered cheap phones nowadays?
I can’t speak to whether you’re any of those, but I can say this. Anyone spending significantly more than that (I’m included in this category) is either:
- Buying it for the quality of its camera (me again, not that I’m an especially avid photographer; I almost exclusively take pics of my pup)
- Some mix of spending too much or not realizing they’re in one or more categories below (some large majority, I’d wager)
- Doing a cost benefit analysis that favors spending more upfront for a longer-term investment (me again again, although my phone ownership lifecycle has shortened significantly; it’s still beneficial because my hand-me-downs benefit loved ones)
- Married to the software (me once again, much moreso on mobile than on general purpose computers these days)
- Enthralled by compute power or some other hardware particularity (o_0 I’m probably just getting old but I mostly don’t get this… okay I’m amused that my phone is more powerful in many ways than its current high-end laptop companion)
> I don’t get it, it’s a phone, with a camera. The camera just needs to be good enough, and for most people it’s been good enough for years.
Imho this is due to the fact that they don't have much to improve on. This is why we get 4k+ screens / 120hz screens on mobiles, 108mpx sensors are already rolling out already, &c.
It's a dick size contest, it doesn't make sense and no one actually need these things but it's the only way to make people buy the next iteration.
> It doesn't seem premium Android phones have something spectacular to differentiate. Sure, you can spice up the camera, make the body more glossy, and add a beautiful screen.
... you so realize that your hot take is the minority opinion, right? The vast majority of customers consistently choose phones based on hardware features.
> But the software is just another commodity that would be available for 1/3rd the price. That's why Google Pixel would always feel exorbitant even when the price is almost close to Apple iPhone.
Google's phones always launch with the cutting edge version of Android and receives consistent updates. Isn't that the experience exclusivity you're clamoring for?
True with the camera. But if you're like me, that's not actually a big deal. Better support? I wouldn't know, as I've never needed support so I can't compare. Better build quality? True -- but is that a huge deal? Even the cheapest phones I've used have lasted for most of a decade.
> Each brand has value adds like platform specific apps and ecosystem integration.
I always thought that stuff added by manufacturers takes value away from the phone. And worse, you often can't remove it.
Anyway, I think the point is that a $1000 phone is not 5 times better than a $200 phone. It may be worth the expense to people anyway, of course, but the price goes up far faster than the extra benefits do.
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