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We've Reached Peak Smartphone (washingtonpost.com)
You don't really need a new smartphone. From a column on the Washington Post (may be paywalled): Sure, some of them squeeze more screen into a smaller form. The cameras keep getting better, if you look very close. And you had to live under a rock to miss the hoopla for Apple's 10th-anniversary iPhone X or the Samsung Galaxy S8. Many in the smartphone business were sure this latest crop would bring a "super cycle" of upgrades. But here's the reality: More and more of Americans have decided we don't need to upgrade every year. Or every other year. We're no longer locked into two-year contracts and phones are way sturdier than they used to be. And the new stuff just isn't that tantalizing even to me, a professional gadget guy. Holding onto our phones is better for our budgets, not to mention the environment. This just means we -- and phone makers -- need to start thinking of them more like cars. We may have reached peak smartphone. Global shipments slipped 0.1 percent in 2017 -- the first ever decline, according to research firm IDC. In the United States, smartphone shipments grew just 1.6 percent, the smallest increase ever. Back in 2015, Americans replaced their phones after 23.6 months, on average, according to research firm Kantar Worldpanel. By the end of 2017, we were holding onto them for 25.3 months.
I drive a 1999 Nissan. My phone is an iPhone 4. My computer is a 2010 Mac.
I believe the term that you need is "market saturation" of "good enough goods". The new devices promise more CPU and GPU power, but most people including me do not tap that power. It also does not help that recent OS versions have changed graphics, and people do not want to learn old things anew.
I want:
A tiny phone that just dials and talks and runs a 4G access point. You take this everywhere, it's tiny and fits in your pocket and solid enough to not need a case, you can call and read messages, and run it as a wifi hotspot. The interface reflects the tiny nature. Use a Wifi tablet as your main media/work device connected via the tiny phone's hotspot.
Phones as getting bigger and clumsier, and Android tablets have stalled, (largely due to some idiot and his ChromeOS, and 'Android Go' targetting none existant markets).
But to get bigger the phone part you need all the time needs to be separated from the big touch screen part, you only need sometimes.
Something the size of an iPod Nano 8th Generation is what I want.
Uh huh... Wouldn't that be convenient for the NSA and other law enforcement agencies if people stopped buying new smartphones and instead stuck with the old/vulnerable smartphone they have. I've personally upgraded every few years for that exact reason starting with the Nexus 5. Nexus 5, Nexus 6P, Pixel XL and a Pixel 2 in a few months. Sadly the reviews on the Pixel 2 XL haven't been all that great...
Until the next gen memory chips start getting integrated, or some awesome nano tube tetraherz processor gets released, we have reached the more than good enough for 99 % of the population. And thank God for that, we don't need any more heaps of tech landfill as the multiple new generations of phone/tablets quickly obsolete themselves.
I still find it disturbing up to this day that every phones older than a few years old gets out of support for security updates. Too many Android devices with old unpatched firmware in the wild. Iphone? 4 and a half years later and no more updates from Apple. The hardware might be robust, but manifacturers donâ(TM)t give a shit about keeping security & os updates indefinitely. Thatâ(TM)s a major problem. Thoughts?
The more likely explanation is that people just don't have the disposable income they used to, in fact, it has been declining for years.
Computers have reached that no later than 2008. A level of quality that is basically sufficient to satisfy nearly all users, and if all you really care about is office, that level was already reached before the millennium rolled over. You could easily tell that by simply looking at how long you keep your computer. This one here is now about 5 years old and I still have no reason to replace it. I don't think a computer would have lasted me 5 years back in 2000, simply because most new software wouldn't run on it properly.
Today I'm hard pressed to find software that doesn't run and if, I'd be hard pressed to say I want or even need that software.
Same with smartphones today. People can do what they want to do with the cellphones they already have. The need to upgrade because the new version of your OS doesn't run or to finally run the software you want to run smoothly simply isn't there anymore. Better graphics, more CPU power, ok, but what for? Until we replace our computers with cellphones, i.e. having docking stations that turn cellphones into desktop replacements, the need for that power simply isn't there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think the next thing we'll see is an uptick in requests for new batteries from current phone owners.
People will decide that the phone they have is "good enough" and just replace batteries when the charge isn't enough to get them through the day,
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I hate upgrading shit just for the sake of upgrading. I can't justify getting rid of something in perfect working order just because something new is released. I just wait until something breaks, then go out and buy the best replacement I can at the moment, which will last me another several years.
I was glad when AV gear reached the good enough point (1080p and DD 5.1 surround for me), then PCs (after I quit hardcore gaming, I doubt I'll ever need more than an i5 and 8GB of RAM and 1TB HDD for the foreseeable future), now smartphones.
All my devices have all the features I want, and more.
Having said all that, I'm glad we got to the good enough point with smartphones. Hopefully, the prices of high end devices can start coming down now.
Sure, if you can move at the right distance they are good enough.
But even if it's a relatively tame but small bird, essentially no smartphone will give you more than a blob. It certainly won't look beautiful.
Personally I'd call them done when they can replace a cheap binocular, but that might never happen.
And then the horror of the software. If you try to take photos of a flower it'll put the ground behind it in focus instead of the flower, since it is really stupid about what is important.
Snapshot of a butterfly flying by? In your dreams.
They have a looong way to go, but the hardware is getting hard to improve, and the people making them have neither the skills nor the manpower for anything beyond useless UI changes in the software (to a degree, yes, that includes Apple).
-- a paradox attributable to substantial increases in reliability.
True innovation is what's lacking, and perhaps phone manufacturers have been resting on their laurels, confident the need for the "newest shiny thing" would be enough to carry the day.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
* As small as possible, but not at the expense of a battery. Must fit in my pocket. Comfortably. Does not need a screen.
* A full open operating system.
* Enough power to do any consumption, creation and editing of text, code, images, vector graphics, audio, video, and databases. (But not heavy 3D or workstation-level tasks.).
* Ability to use arbitrary USB/ Bluetooth devices (like keyboard/mouse/speaker/mic/cam) and screens/projectors.
* Preferably without a mess of a bazillion devices that would be better with a case around them, and without a bazillion batteries to recharge and wear down.
Then I would only need my desktop PC for the big tasks.
Oh, and <$20 full-featured home "cloud" devices, offering self-resolving DNS, a public dyndns domain with sub-domains, VPN support (to the phone and to an anonymizer), full syncing of PIM data, and the ability to attach arbitrary TB/USB3 drives for a central storage.
Nearly all of that is already available. Basically all that's missing, is proper Linux drivers for my current phone, and the ability to run LineageOS in top (not below!) of it for regular phone usage.
(And now you know why I haven't already done it.)
you'll always have to upgrade because of OS and App bloat. I had an older Samsung tablet (android 6.0) that could not run the newer youtube app, I had to uninstall updates and run the built-in app, which had stability issues. That's but one example... and that's how the hardware cycle is enforced.
Now if you could easily install a different OS distribution, then perhaps the overhead issue could be addressed.
Also, it's Sunday morning and I have a boner.
The planned obsolescence via expensive, non-user replaceable batteries isn't working like it used to. It's time for phone makers to come up with a more expensive part to wear out, one which can't so easily be manufactured by third parties. How about they start designing the screens to get dimmer over the life of the phone, so that by the third year they're completely dark? That should do the trick to get the upgrades rolling again.
I agree that we've hit the point where, for most people most of the time, a phone from 3 years ago serves just as well as the brand new model. And here's the thing about that: I wish vendors would let that be.
Because what tends to happen is they stop making meaningful and useful improvements, and instead focus on cramming in useless "improvements" that make the whole thing harder to deal with. Windows 7 was good enough, and so we got Windows 8 that ruined the UI, followed by Windows 10 which keeps cramming more and more advertising into vital functions while stripping away useful controls. Every version of Windows moves has new "features" and moves around the controls, but none of them actually improve it. Meanwhile, Apple has started forcing Siri into everything and putting that touch bar at the top of the keyboard, which are also pretty useless.
Screw the gimmicks. If you can come up with a real improvement that makes things easier and more effective, great. Otherwise, just focus on refinements. Make it a little faster. Make the battery last longer. Start looking at the problems that users actually have, the annoyances and pesky bugs, and work on fixing those.
There's nothing wrong with reaching the point where the innovation has dried up. Accept it, and make continual incremental improvements and refinements.
Apple should have seen this coming a mile away and could have stopped depending on iPhone sales to carry to company. With the amount of cash Apple had to spend over the last five years, they could have found some other businesses to offset a rapid decrease in iPhone sales. They could have gone into some cloud business as most major tech companies did or they should have gone into a video and audio streaming content business like Amazon and Alphabet did. Now, Apple is mainly stuck with a one-trick iPhone pony show, at least as far as Wall Street is concerned. Apple supposedly has a lot of data centers and I have no idea what Apple is using them for. At least the other major tech companies are using their data centers to bring in revenue by supporting services for other companies. Apple didn't even partner with other companies for undersea data cables and I haven't heard any deals with broadband satellite companies. It seems as though all consumers want now in the way of smartphones is cheap $150 Android smartphones because most consumers are too poor to buy anything more expensive. Places like India, Africa and South America sure don't want to be bothered with expensive smartphones when they have no actual need for them. Apple should have realized this day was coming when smartphone sales would come to nearly a halt as the world fills up with consumers needing smartphones every year. Once India gets saturated with smartphones, that's all there is and there's nothing left but even poorer nations with less population. Apple better find some new products or services or some completely new business to take over decreasing iPhone sales.
Or is the author just trying to explain why smartphone sales are slumping? That we have reached "peak smartphone" (that claim isn't new either)?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Then 5G starts rolling out and you'll need to upgrade for that. Probably more than once.
AAPL is trading close to the 52 week high, with a P/E ratio of less than 17. They are sitting on over $250 billion in cash. You don't have the first clue what Wall St thinks about this stock.
So, does this mean we will now get flooded with articles that tell us: "The smarthphone is DEAD! OMG!!! " like we have been told about the desktop PC for 20 years?
Posting from a desktop PC btw.
One of them must be the National ID card. How else would you fight the issues of identity and medical information theft and fraud related to government services? Modern chipped cards are too expensive given the scale and renewal rate, so implement the service on the device most people already have and then subsidize it to those who don't. Too Orwellian? Might as well say that the idea of government services is too Orwellian.
The $200-$400 phones are good enough for most people, and there are now a lot of options these days such as the Moto g or z. Some people are still stuck in the old mindset they have to buy a $800 flagship phone. You don't. The mid-range phones are very good spec-wise, and will also last years -- depending on how ethical the manufacturer's OS support is.
My dad didn't buy a car during the whole tailfin craze. My circa-2007 flip-phone still works perfectly and I intend on keeping it until the whole so-called "smart" so-called "telephone" craze passes.
I'm keeping my current smartphone until it dies. I'm sure one day I'll drop it, someone might bump me and it will go crashing onto the pavement. But as long as it's working I have no need to replace it. Laptops, smartphones,...I'll just keep them until they physically break.
This is a bit different from cars however. My car I can keep fixing. Ten, fifteen, twenty years,...I don't know how long I'll keep it. But as long as the annual repair bills are less than what a years worth of car payments will be, then why bother to replace it.
The problem with laptops and smartphones is that they are cheap and basically disposable and either not worth it to repair or can't be repaired. Sure, you can always fix little things depending upon what it is. If I can do it myself I will. I'll replace a non-replaceable battery because I can. But for the price of the device it may not be worth it. Good enough devices today are a few hundred dollars. I've never been one to buy the top of the line most expensive ones anyway. So if I drop my phone then it's $300 to replace, not $1,000. And I'll probably get 5 years out it before I break it again.
The next thing will be satellite phone connectivity for a smartphone courtesy of Elon Musk. Iridium and the other systems were like the first prototypes. They either offered high bandwidth and limited coverage or full coverage of the planet but limited bandwidth. With a true high-bandwidth satellite network, this would solve many problems.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
If you look at the profits that Apple, Facebook and Google make and then their P/E ratio's you will see just how much Wall St loves Facebook and Google and hates Apple.
APPL is marked down heavily at the slighest rumour. The others aren't.
We've reached peak smartphone when you can get the equivalent of a Nokia 8 with 6GB RAM/128GB SSD in a solid sturdy case and replaceable battery for 120$.
But yeah, as far as super-thin flimsy built-in-battery Smartphones go, the market is pretty much saturated, that I'd admit.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I have a Nexus 5X. Google hobbled it with 2GB RAM and now a bit over two years since introduction, that is simply not enough. At best that causes it to be slow switching between apps. At worst, it causes apps to be bumped out of memory when another app is opened. For example if I'm listening to podcasts and running navigation using Google Maps (both in the background) and open a web page one of the other apps shuts down. 2GB is simply not enough. Other than that I could continue to be happy with it.
As time passes and S/W features continue to increase, this could happen to any phone.
OTOH who wouldn't be happier with a faster processor, better camera, better battery life etc. that a new phone provides.
i have a galaxy s6 now, but it dont have FM radio, cant replace the battery myself, i am not buying a new phone until i can buy a phone that has those features. plus i dont want to disable apps i dont like or use, i want a phone that does not have third party apps bundled in like facebook, or microsoft office, i know those apps are not crucial for the system, they are third party crapware,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It seems that that challenge always comes down to batteries. I have a nearly-four-year-old Samsung Galaxy S5 that still works fine. The camera is great and I see no reason to upgrade for now. Part of the reason that's the case is the battery is user replaceable. I just pop off the back and pop in a new battery. I'm probably on battery #3 now. It's also got a microSD slot, so I know I'm never going to run out of storage.
I think dying batteries is likely what drives a lot of upgrades.
But but they told us demand for DRAM was increasing by unexpected numbers and why prices nearly tripled for the same ram already manufactured even two years before said demand appeared had to increase in price for the PC market. Because, like, time travel and reverse the sticks back into raw materials and re-make them for lpdram mobile phones and other devices and such, that explains it all, it can't be price manipulation pfff.
Just look at the huge demand on the eyePhone xXx!
They're selling toilet paper. And it's going to be called 'WaPoo'!
The inability to easily change out the battery coupled with the knowledge that at least Apple is / was slowing down their older phones means it doesn't matter if we have reached peak Smartphone or not.
They are DESIGNED to be replaced every few years to ensure a steady revenue stream for the manufacturors.
I have an iPhone 7. Here's what I want in my next phone:
1. Longer battery life
2. Better signal reception, both cellular and WiFi.
3. Even better camera; it's already pretty good.
4. Even more durable; screen less likely to crack, more resistant to exposure to liquids, etc.
5. Even brighter screen to help w/ viewing in sunny conditions.
That's about it, really. Don't need a bigger screen, don't need the phone to be thinner or lighter, don't need more pixels, don't need gimmicky new features like facial recognition, don't even really need a faster CPU, more memory or more storage.
I blind taste tests, new coke always came and still comes out on top of all colas.
Only if people see the label, do they not like it.
It's a nice example of how subjective reality really is.
Same as with top wine "experts", who ascribe vastly different properties to a bottle of white wine, versus the same wine, with red food coloring, and a different label. Or the same champagne with a higher price tag.
I prefer Red Bull Cola at room temperature, btw, on case you assumed I'm a partisan fanboy. ... Unless my mind is making that up too ... ^^)
(Chilled, it is too bland. But unchilled, the i individual ingredients can really be tasted in it, which I love.
This is the normal cycle of new gadgets. Appliances. Think of any of these technological tools as appliances. New technologies or inventions arrive to make some aspect of daily life better or easier. The device penetrates the market at some rate, greater or slower, depending on many things: sense of relevance to your daily life (perhaps heightened by ambitious advertising), the cost of the new technology which invariably subsides with greater market penetration and competition, and giving up on old paradigms of doing things as the new technology proves itself or younger generations favor it or as older generations wait until breakage or obsolescence of the old devices requires them to update.
This happened when electric lights replaced gas lighting and candles, when motorized automobiles replaced horse and carriage, when washing machines replaced slapping your clothes on a stone by the river, and for any other mechanized or electrified appliance. For all of them, market penetration increases as the populace adopts it. After that, sales are flat, varying only in relationship to population expansion, steady state turnover of devices as old ones break and must be replaced, and episodic upswells in sales as some new feature or fad or incremental improvement beguiles the populace.
By analogy, I went to find info on this by looking for information on washer-dryer penetration over the past century, an arbitrary pick, it could have been microwave ovens or stereo music systems or whatever. I came across the following article of interest that covers all technologies, "The Spread of Technology since 1900". It is a great little article that looks at penetration and saturation of a whole host of common household devices:
https://pietistschoolman.com/2...
For the past few years, especially with respect to the appearance of tablet computers and Win 8, then Win 10, the industry got nervous, claiming "the end of the PC, the end of the desktop", and that Win PO8 had killed the PC. No, it is just that the market has matured, newer devices seem to be more hardened against changing technologies thus having a longer useful life, and various form factors that supplant the big box machines have all found their niches. Thus sales must reduce to the rate of steady state turnover. Now, in just the past few months, reports have revealed nervousness over tablet sales declining. The market is saturated, everybody who wants one has one, and turnover will be steady state replacement, unless some compelling new technology or feature drives everyone to upgrade.
The computerized handheld telephone has now hit that steady state plateau. Without compelling new features or paradigms of use to spur a global upgrade, and with an already robust set of features, more than any one person needs or uses, reasonably durable and well made, the market is now in its steady state dynamic.
Companies or investors looking for the huge profits of a new and advancing market will be disappointed. Investors looking at such technologies as commodities or utilities à la gas, sewer, and electricity, can always garner some low level income over the long haul. The fascinating question is, what will be the next lifestyle and society changing gadget which will then go through the same 10 or 100 year lifecycle?
We hit "peak phone" quite a while ago, everything since then has been minor tweaks or adding bullshit "features" that practically no one uses.
For example, Samsung's "eye mode" where it keeps the screen on as long as you're looking at it. Whoopdedoo, how could I live without that?? Or their multiple on-screen swipable toolboxes and favorites and recently-used apps and blah blah blah blah blah. Or a configurable button that isn't allowed to do anything that I'd actually want it to do- it can't be assigned to anything worthwhile, so what's the point?
These gadgets/features are a sign of developers who are desperate to come up with something new but not necessarily useful.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
While there is a time and place for sat phones, they will not with anything close to current technology even come close to completing with the network performance of an edge device, it's also likely this won't change anything in the future. This gap will grow significantly as phones move to 5g.
The distance issue is likely an issue that won't be overcome soon, and for practical purposes it likely won't be cost effective compared to more terrestrial based solutions.
I am extremely saddened by the fact that my scientific discipline - materials science - is nowadays abused to design extremely precise engineering techniques for planned obsolescence. Limiting battery recharge cycles was a great method, but some far more sophisticated ones have emerged. These are based on:
- fatigue limit of components subjected to repetitive strain (including designing built-in vibrational modes - that's right, the vibrational modes are added on purpose, and affect parts with a defined fatigue limit (like copper, for instance).
- oxidation of polymers, especially elastomers
- polymer deterioration induced by "useful" additives, like some fire retardants and plasticizers (though fire retardants are much more effective).
These techniques are nowadays quite deeply developed, and their ONLY purpose is to bring the product to a very limited lifetime AFTER the warranty period. Therefore, for profit of the corporations and at direct odds with all consumers. As a scientist, this makes me actually quite sad. My only consolation is that I don't work in the industry, so at least I am not on the dark side.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
For the average person I would agree with you.
But something you are overlooking is that smartphone processing capability is advancing much faster, percentage-wise, than laptops (which have stalled for many years now and at this point even regressed thanks to meltdown).
At first as smartphones came along, I would happily skip upgrading every other year, and would have been tempted to skip longer periods if I did not need the devices for testing.
But over the past few years, I have in fact gotten a new phone every year because the upgrades have become more compelling. The processing speed is notably faster every generation. The authentication features like TouchID and now FaceID keep advancing. The cameras advance notably in quality, and because the processor speed has improved so do camera features that require processing (like the quality of panos or HDR images). The battery management keeps improving.
At this point I've shifted to doing a lot of photo editing on an iPad Pro, and I am actually looking forward to the next generation of that platform to give be a decent processing boost for working with images. They are arguably superior for such work because they adjust color temperature of the display automatically based on ambient light, not to mention being able to work directly on the photo with an Apple Pencil (which work way better than the Wacom Cintiq I tried using a few years ago)..
One a side note, I do not honestly see how someone could use an iPhoneX for more than a day and then claim the smartphone platform has "peaked", as we have a long way to go and major changes are still underway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just threw out about 50 from the back of a closet. Not even Goodwill will take them. The Friends of the Library stuck some in their "free" box and no one would take them either. Surely the Smartphone is not the epitome of design for what it does. Could its job not be done by a different sort of device altogether? How about sticking the display on an intraocular lens and the CPU on an embedded chip? No more texting--just talk, or maybe even just think. At least you couldn't forget your phone that way.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
You have reached the saturation point with phones, Everyone who wants them has them. Aside from marketing hype there is little functional difference between phones. Maybe a little bigger screen, a little more memory,a little better camera, but basically the same from model to model. There has been no real new killer app in years that requires a "better" phone. The carrier move from subsidized phone cost to buy it outright hasn't helped any either. The once apple heard of buying anything new apple put out is gone, Apple itself has gone from Disciples of Jobs blindly following to grandma just wanting a phone to take pictures of the grand kids. Want to sell a phone give us good battery life, good screen size, good memory and most importantly a good price.
I've got an iPhone 6 with 16GB of storage. I was quickly out of space until I decided to put all my photos on google photo and I switched companies from an Exchange based company to a gmail based company. Now the only thing I have on the phone is the few apps and some music.
True innovation is what's lacking, and perhaps phone manufacturers have been resting on their laurels
Not so much resting on laurels as the combination of lack of vision and fear of failure. Steve Jobs knew how to incorporate ideas into innovative new products and wasn't afraid to take risk.
20 year old Land Rover... still runs great.
5 year old Nexus 5... still runs great.
60 year old house... still runs great.
(I won't go into my clothes... what's a few holes?)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Scaling for the 13 vs 14 month quarter: (77.3/(78.3/14*13)-1)*100=6.3% growth. That's better than the market average for every year since 2014 based on the chart in TFA. In addition, the X went on sale ~4weeks later than historic Q4 iPhone launches. The 25 month upgrade period (vs 23 months) could be partially attributed to apple customers waiting for the X as well I suppose. On the flip-side, I'm a content owner of an iPhone SE...
ly modifies the verb look.
Which means that both the author and the editor failed basic English.
Before I even read the article, I immediately judge the age, and knowledge of the author, and gauge the article with immediate skepticism.
Pffft! You're just trying to be PC.
...a smartphone that fully services ALL our compute needs. I'm talking about a smartphone I can drop in a docking station, connected to a big-ass monitor, mouse, keyboard and other peripherals, and it runs a full desktop OS and all my desktop software.
We've been slowing but surely moving towards that and there's of course been a few attempts to make it literally true already, with varying degrees of success. None have completely managed it though, and there are of course pretty good technical reasons why not.
But I really believe it's the next step, the next big innovation, the next thing that will get people to buy a new smartphone (and, incidentally, something that the manufacturers will be happy about because they'll likely be able to charge quite a bit more for it). That's not to say everyone needs this, wants this or will buy this, just that I think it's the next logical step and the next thing that will spur on sales.
I know for sure it's the thing I've been waiting on. I had a Surface Pro 3 for a long time as my primary desktop machine and I think we're not too far off the point where they can cram that into a (large) smartphone form factor and have it work well enough to be viable. Maybe another 2-3 years would be my guess. That power is likely sufficient for most users' needs and I know I'd be very happy to have only a single device for everything.
So yeah, that's my bet.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
I don't care how thin my phone is.
I want a small, thin, rugged phone.
With a big battery.
Millions of non-sheep do.
MAKE US ONE !
With each generation of phone, more and more features are removed. Why would someone willingly downgrade to a new phone?
My Note 4 has:
- a wider screen than any available today
- a user replaceable battery (I'm on #3)
- an IR transmitter
- an easy to hold faux-leather back that isn't slippery
- a headphone jack
- HDMI output (via MHL)
- an SD card slot
Almost all new phones get rid of the majority of that list (if not all of it).
It's not that people don't want to UPGRADE, it's that people are sick of seeing the newer phones as a DOWNGRADE from where they already are!
My dream solution is, to have the screen separate from the device.
Because in the long run, I'd move to a heads-up display solution. (I'm an augmented reality programmer.)
Modularity is a key concern for me in general though. It allows flexibility, and I don't have to throw one away when the other breaks. Also, I can mix and match.
Or even use one of the one with multiple of the other.
I wonder if people will start to realize pc, laptops and tablets aren't dead then if they realize the same thing is happening with smartphones.
I think alot of people thought when purchases of computers and laptops had begun to tail off that it was because people didn't use computers anymore. I personally think its because improvements in computers aren't what they used to be. You no longer have video games like Crysis that upend what we know and expect about the capabilities and limitations of computers where the average computer can't play such games. Companies aren't pushing boundaries anymore. They're playing things way too safe.
In the age of Crysis (what I call the golden age of computer gaming), games were coming out every 3 months that pushed a computer to its knees, despite previously being powerful enough to play almost anything previously. Four years later, I'm still using the same graphics card. Almost 7 years later I'm still using the same processor, memory and motherboard. There literally hasn't been a video game that has pushed my computer to the point of needing to be upgraded and I didn't buy top of the line gear when I got it either. Z68 fatality mobo, 3770k cpu and 970 gtx with 32gb of ram. While I've neglected to move to anything beyond 1080p for my main monitors, the gains achieved by upgrading are at an all time low. Increasing resolution on already good looking games rather than pushing the boundaries of the graphics themselves is no longer a goal. I believe people still use computers and laptops, but there is not currently any tech beyond mining crypto that is pushing hardware.
Smartphones are beginning to see the same market saturation, though because every smart phone has a public IP address, we have a much clearer idea how many smart phones are in the wild and how many are actually being used. People who want one have one, people who don't, wont ever get one. The things that people want to do on smartphones can easily be handled with software upgrades and hardware upgrades now are incremental because everyone is playing it safe rather than introducing new tech.
Don't forget the most compelling reason to upgrade: unpatched critical software vulnerabilities.
Using a 2 year old phone is like insisting that you don't need a condom to have sex with a prostitute.
When they start removing features (ie headphone jack) you know they're just pulling at straws for "innovation"
I got sick of upgrading. I will replace/upgrade when my old working stuff break down like my KVM from Y2K, PS/2 mice and keyboards, Casio Data Bank 150 calculator watch, HP PhotoSmart printer from 2006, etc. Also, I never buy the newest models unless they are free or very cheap.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've never subscribed to the cult of revenue.
Tall, but not growing. Worthless.
———
Apparently, one man's peak is another man's poison.
I bought my first and last cell phone in September 2012. Then, when I figured out the Android security model, I turned off the data modem, and the Wi-Fi (except when in use while I'm at home). I haven't installed a new app since my Pebble watch.
Fitness App Runkeeper Secretly Tracks Users At All Times, Sends Data to Advertisers — 13 May 2016
That was the last straw. Now it's basically just a phone with benefits (the sketchy kind with gifts that keep giving).
I'm technically in the market for a new phone with a larger form factor, but there's presently no phone out there with a security/privacy model than entices me in the least.
Also, I'm still using my old Pebble watch as a vibrating pill timer (the hardest alarm to ignore in a busy place), but I'm now effectively out of the smart watch game, as well.
My Samsung Galaxy S5 lives in a newish 5500mAh battery case and sports a relatively fresh install of LegacyOS. I got it shortly after it launched and have no reason to replace it. Spent a few bucks on a new battery, upgraded the MicroSD card to a larger cap and flashed a new (cleaner) ROM. I thought about buying a new smartphone, as the phablet idea has always appealed to me and the new Note looks really nice but then i decided i would rather put that money towards a new guitar.
I see a huge wave of older smartphones making their way to the trash heap as wireless networks start to reallocate spectrum currently used by 2G and 3G protocols for newer 4G and 5G protocols. I also suspect that many people are in for a surprise when they discover that their supposed 4G phones only support LTE data and not LTE voice.
As example, I have a Galaxy S5 Neo released in late 2015 that supports LTE-A. But as an unbranded member of the GS5 series, Samsung never enabled voice-over-LTE, so it uses 3G UMTS to place voice calls. Unless Samsung has a change of heart or my carrier pushes a voice-over-IP solution that I can use with LTE data networks, my phone will stop working in a couple years.
Even if wireless networks keep a few MHz of spectrum around for M2M devices (ie, home security cellular backups), don't expect it to be on better frequency bands.
Have we reached Peak Peak yet?
We're not at Peak Cellphone but the only new customers are young people buying their first phone (or having it bought for them by their parents.) There are people who have chosen to NOT have a cell phone - and those people aren't going to change their minds much. And there are people who can't afford a cell phone - and that's not likely to change much. The time of easy growth is long gone.
And the time of easy feature based growth is closing too - because most new features offer only small marginal benefits over a relatively new phone. Vendors are caught between improving their phones interfaces to support some of those marginal benefits and alienating their customers. Smartphone interfaces aren't as terrible as they once were and real improvements are harder to achieve.
It all gets down to what do people use these devices for. And for all the apps and features available - most people don't drift outside of the intrinsic functions of texting, photos, calendaring, web browsing, navigating, and a few other apps like social networking, a few games, and maybe a job related app (if you're a sales-drone.)
Really, do you use your phone any differently (qualitatively or quantitatively) more this season than last season? Are any of your apps lagging behind? The app vendors know better than to drive away their customers.
That's why there's a trend to rapid charging and non replaceable batteries, its inbuilt obsolescence. The faster you pump charge into a battery the shorter its lifespan is likely to be, then just make sure its near to goddamn impossible to exchange batteries, and you have people needing a new phone every 2 years.
How many Oreo Android phones have replaceable batteries? - I think there might be one from LG - and thats it.
Honestly, it's an Iphone and deserves to fry.
Took me 6 years, but I finally replaced mine. I should have gotten a new one 2 years ago when it started acting up, but I just put up with it until I got this new one for free and on a cheaper plan a couple of months ago.
That being said, the title AND first sentence are miss leading.
As always, RIM was ahead of the curve.
Why would I want to carry around all the horsepower to drive a big-ass workstation when I'm not docked at one?
Why would I want my big-ass workstations to not work without a phone docked at them?
Keep the two independent I say.
The phone manufactures can entice us buy a new phone every 1 or 2 years if they will offer them to Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T at a huge discount. Then the phone company gives us the $199 upgrade again. I did that in the past and if I had to sign a 1 or 2 year contact so be it, it was worth it to get a new phone every 24 months, and not pay $600 to $1000 for a phone. Now-a-days they charge you the full retail price, no contract and divide up the cost over 24 months. There is absolutely no discount you pay full retail, so there is no incentive to get a new phone and why I still have my Samsung S5 that works perfectly.
You've said about faster processing speed every generation, authentication features kept advancing, cameras advance notably in quality, and you look forward to the next generation (hardware). Wouldn't that be an Enthusiast user? PC users who focus on extremely high-end computing and care for the likes of graphic, CPU and other hardware performance.
just saying
We haven't seen the peak of Dumb End User.
Low-end phone hardware is more than good enough. It's my carrier network that's utter crap. 15 miles outside a major US city and I still struggle for a usable connection. Now they want to charge me extra for "high speed" above 2 GB, when "high speed" is comparable to a 28 kbaud dialup connection, which throttles to about 9600 baud when the cap is surpassed. Why the hell would I spend more for a faster phone when my bottleneck is elsewhere?