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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 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.
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?
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.
-- 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
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.
Radio Shack TRS-80, 1968 Volkswagen Bug, Carter is President, cell phones are just an itch in the FCC's butt.
Life is good.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Quarter horse. Abacus (that I recently and cheaply reoiled for faster calculations). Lincoln is president. My neighbor just died of cholera. This is the good life!
The best camera is the one you have with you. So if you can get a good camera with your phone that is great.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
Actually my (and most other Americans) disposable income has been flat and is not changing much. (We just looked at our first post-taxcut paycheck.)
See! I can do anecdotes too!
From the Tax Policy Center: The cut is estimated to be $930 this year for the middle one-fifth of taxpayers, which is about $35 a paycheck if you get paid every two weeks.
I don't know how much you get paid, but I'm not going to call an extra $30 in my paycheck a big jump in disposable income.
And I'm not going to celebrate it in any case, because come tax time, I'll likely owe way more than I ended up getting back in my paycheck anyway. Some of the other tax changes aren't going to be apparent until we get to filing next year, and it looks like some of them are going to hurt a lot of people. I really don't know what the SALT and standard deduction changes are going to mean for me personally, but initial indications are that I'm going to owe more come tax time. To the point that it might be worth upping my witholdings, and thus reducing my paycheck.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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.
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!