Smartphones losing sales numbers?

Community Tech Policy & News
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I’ll reference a video here.



Now I can’t find the article used in the video, but this is something worth talking about, I think.

As smartphones reach higher and higher standards we see a 1984-88 CPU climb all over again, but this time for these tiny little risc CPU’s in our phones. They get better and better and climb and climb and climb until finally the bubble pops. And by this, I mean my V20 is about as powerful user wise as one of the laptops I use every day.

Minus wifi download speeds, we see incremental performance boosts every year with more gimmicks thrown in to try and get you to buy new. And I’ll admit, I fell for the gimmicks with my V20. Extra tool screen, removable back, dual cameras… These are things that I have seen labeled as gimmicks in the past year that, ultimately, do we really need them? Well I like my photos and having one teeny tiny screen doing always on for clock and notifications rather than my 1440p main screen makes my battery happy, so not all gimmicks are extra BS.

But what about outside of gimmicks? If people were concerned with performance you wouldn’t see optimus G’s up to G4’s out in the wild still. Not to mention iPhone 5’s, even some crazy people still have 4’s.

So what are we looking at? China has declared that local sales of phones has dropped significantly. For around 2.17 million people, I’d say 15.7% is an insane amount of loss at sales. Big phones for 1000 dollarydoo’s just don’t sell! Who woulda thought! Maybe people just want chrome and wechat? Nooooo, we gotta make the new iphone the same as the galaxy S6 with a different screen and charge 1200! Everyone will buy it!

Well so far all the companies that have tried to play that gamble and have, so far, been failing pretty hard. I know I can say I don’t see anywhere near as many iPhone X’s as I do 7’s and 8’s in my local area, and we’re full of rich kids working for amway. But, what ids interesting is that companies, such as huawei or Blue, that focus on making good 200-300 dollar phones that met the flagship standard 2-3 years ago have been climbing up in business. As more and more phones become 800-1400 dollar norms, where they were 400-700 only a year or 2 ago, better phones for cheaper climb in power.

Now to be honest, that anyone is surprised by this is amazing to me. This is basic bitch economics supply and demand. Theres all these phones for 800 bucks, or this phone that is the same as an LG G5 with 2 cameras for 250. Seems pretty obvious to me. Especially with the LG V20 only being 200 bucks now at sprint, and its better than the V30 in almost every way because of those gimmicks I mentioned earlier.

So maybe this will spark some economic discussion in the major players here in the US, maybe huawei will tell trump to eat a dick and sell here anyways. I know I would appreciate a huawei phone thats basically stock. I refuse to use my V20 till I can root it in august (when oreo drops the root will drop so LG can’t do anything about it), so I am happy with my optimus G. TBH I bought batteries for it so it could be a backup, but the more I use it the more I’m fine with it, even on android 4. 7 runs on it way better than you would think, 5 runs like ass though. And with that you can see why a lot of people really… don’t… care about new phones. Like at all. I know I wouldn’t in that situation.

So what do you guys think?

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1 over saturation of mobile phones has hit its peak. the average consumer now has more choices than ever for a mobile phone be it new used or refurbished.
2 we have started to hit a brick wall when it comes to ARM improvements. IPC is no longer doubling with each generation, power consumption is not going anywhere.
3 ram cost driving up the cost of each new device.
4 people are starting to see that what they have is good enough no real reason to get a new phone unless the one in use gets broken.

in short we dont want to pay over 1k on a new phone that you want us to replace again in under a year.

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Well I think this is pretty normal as the market is reaching or have reached the saturation point where everyone has a smartphone and not all want to change em yearly. I know many people that don’t change phone annually. Almost all of my close friends changes their phones only when its dead or dying.

2 of my friends used to rock a Galaxy Nexus until the day it died and that was early last year, then when they decided to buy a replacement phone they bought a 2nd hand Note 4 because tbh Note 4 is still a great phone even to this date.

These days almost all major mobile phone companies releases their flagship smartphone in a yearly basis. Samsung S9 have been out for a couple of months now, If your phone died recently and you want a Samsung phone, Samsung S8 even S7 would be a great buy not only because those phones are great but they’re wayyyy cheaper than the current flagship.

That is more or less my motto these days when buying a phone, wait until they release a new phone then buy that “older” phone.

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The refurb market is really exploding. You can get some fantastic options, even flagship devices for dirt cheap. The Pixel XL for instance can be had for sub $200 manufacturer refurbished. Why would anyone who knows better spend 3x as much for essentially the same experience. Basically im just repeating a different version of what you said though.

Maybe we will soon see dram come back down to normal.

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Here in the US, providers used to subsidize phones, which put everybody on a 2 year upgrade cycle. That practice has largely stopped, changed to financing the costs amortized over the life of the device. So while they have various plans where you can trade-in after 1 or 2 years, you don’t save any money by doing so. Some price-conscious people caught on to that, and use their phones until they die.

I do think many of you are correct in that today’s phones are “good enough”. As of 2016 or so, you could buy an unlocked phone for ~$150 that would be pretty good, like a Moto G4. No, not comparable to a real flagship, but only your pride would really be hurting using one.

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I’d still be using my galaxy s4 if I could get parts for it. It still serves as an alarm clock and web browser.

Phones hit a plateau years ago. There’s no reason to keep buying them.

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I know what you mean but I could argue that we have next to no choice because everything is Android or iOS. So while there are many different brands, they all look the same and they all do the same things because Android. Back in the day when Nokia used to be the top dog I was enthusiastic about phones because they all had different body design and different GUI and different functions.
Today i don’t bother checking out any Android/iOS phones because they are all the same.

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Yup, I have long championed just updating and using old phones. Still my Note 2 while behind in gimmicks, though it was so far ahead at the time it is only just about on par with most now, is still an extremely capable phone. Still on its original battery and still getting days of use out of it.

It has wireless charging built in, it has NFC, its Bluetooth is older but still completely compatible for all normal uses, oled screen… It still kicks solid ass. I have not needed an upgrade since I bought it.

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this is where the speciality market comes in for the external design. i can buy a run of the mill smart phone pull out the guts change its case throw in a larger battery and have something few to none have . ( this market is small but expanding.)

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Every time I see unbox therapy I want to die a little bit more.

Also, can’t wait for linux to take over phones proper. With the stagnation of hardware the only thing more enticing will be what more you can do with your phone, and since most app are really just browsers dedicated to a specific online service it’s not hard to make anything work when you have a real os that let’s you do things like check your network configuration without root.

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One of the most useless channels I have come across.

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I see this news at a double-edged sword, hopefully it can push OEMs to stop milking us with small incremental upgrades- and get them to step up their cold war with eachother, for instance Apple’s chips blowing past Qualcomm’s latest. But unfortunately the other side of the sword- OEMs have even less reason to make phones long term reliable and to update software. I kept my LG G3 alive waaaay past what LG wanted it to be by using CM13 then LineageOS, and adding thermal compound to the SOC (saw the OnePlus6 teardown and was not happy to see the SOC has no heat pipe or compound…) OEMs will be even less inclined to offer security patches and software/feature updates- and they might even start to go after efforts like LineageOS. I would have stayed in the LG camp if they had fixed their update game but they haven’t. Sounds like Samsung is still slow too, and Moto under new ownership fell off too. Come on Librem phone, we need an alternate.

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It’s gonna be healthy for the industry as a whole to slow down and get a reality check.

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