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The Smartphone Sales Slowdown is Real (axios.com)
Earnings reports from Samsung and Qualcomm on Wednesday suggest a serious industrywide slowdown in smartphone sales. Samsung's report is especially telling, since it also makes displays and other components for Apple. From a report: The smartphone business is an incredibly crowded space, so a slowdown could lead to even steeper price competition. That's a potential short-term boon for consumers, but could put the hurt on a whole host of technology companies. Samsung's take: Its written outlook was terse and brief, but damning. Of its own phones, it said "[p]rofitability in the mobile business is expected to decline quarter-over-quarter due to stagnant sales of flagship models amid weak demand and an increase in marketing expenses to address the situation." Similarly, it cautioned of weak demand in its display and chip businesses, which supply components for both Samsung and its phone rivals, including Apple. Qualcomm's take: The phone chip giant also predicted a slowdown, cutting its forecast for 3G and 4G smartphones.
When my old phone (Samsung S4 note) does everything I need it to do, is quick enough and I managed to buy a replacement battery recently.
I do not need a new phone, along with its misfeatures, learning curve, and expense.
and now that we know why iPhones get slow over time the sames true there. What I want is longer battery life, better connections and faster downloads. And we're a decade out from the last two (waiting for spectrum rollout) and I think we've peaked on battery life. I don't need a faster GPU. I really don't care what my phone games look like.
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...from my cold, dead fingers.
I'm sure reaching/surpassing the $1000 mark for flagships has nothing to do with the decline in demand whatsoever! Keep making them more expensive while only adding minor new features and little performance.
And in other news: "China's smartphone market suffered its worst decline ever in the March quarter--an 8 percent YoY drop in unit sales--but Apple still managed to achieve 32 percent growth, directly attributed to "strong performance of its iPhone X.""
Also, what Samsung actually reported in its display panel earnings statement for the March quarter was that "OLED Earnings declined due to weak demand AND [note] rising competition between Rigid OLED and LTPS LCD."
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Not that much has really changed regarding performance for the average PC user. It's good enough so why upgrade. Phones are now experiencing the same thing. Plus they are very expensive.
Like having a headphone jack and a screen without a notch. Until phone companies have the courage to listen to their users then why "upgrade".
What do companies and investors want? For each individual to own dozens of smartphones? I have never understood this worship for growth at any costs, and for punishing companies that do not growth, for any reason. No wonder the market behaves as if it were in the hands of a baby.
Here's their real problem: "and an increase in marketing expenses to address the situation."
They drink their own Kool-Aide. Cable companies are the same way. Prices keep going up and all people see for it is more and flashier marketing instead of better service (or in the phone case, just stop, noone needs a new model every year, let alone 3 different ones!).
Says the guy who keeps reloading Slashdot to be the first to post this in every thread.
They keep adding expensive features, and have neglected to add use cases for the last couple of years.
No one should be surprised. We saw this happen with computers and now we're seeing it happen with smartphones. The market is saturated, the existing installed base is more than capable of handling most workloads, and therefore fewer people are motivated to upgrade every year. You want us to buy new phones? Build them with longer battery life and less crapware/spyware. The screens are already good enough. The cameras are already good enough. The operating systems are already good enough. Gee-whiz bells and whistles aren't going to motivate us to upgrade anymore. And stop building phones with notches.
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. . . -based smartphone OS, or more configurability, or privacy, or replaceable batteries, or headphone jacks, or true bezels, or SOMETHING that is positive and that people actually want instead of all the proprietary, soul-sucking negative stuff you're always pushing.
I liked it better when you got a subsidized phone for the price of a 2 year contract. This business of paying for it monthly over a year or two stinks. Paying full price is crazy when the cost is over $700. I will keep my old Samsung S3 until dies. More price competition would be welcome, IMO.
Normal people dont want to spend $1,000 on a phone. I know I don't. I'll keep running the same phone for as long as it lasts and receives community ROM updates. Updating for hardware reasons is pointless; my phone is nearing 2 years old and has 6GB DDR4 with 4 CPU's. I don't even play games on it. Why should I upgrade it? It's overkill for taking phone calls and texting.
I've got two thousand dollars with your name on it.
All you need to do is make an actual flagship phone with a replaceable battery. I, and many others, will not purchase a device into which consumables have been glued.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
---and as spares I bought 2 second hand for nix off TradeMe (eBay equiv in NZ). The newer models have higher res (but beyond my unassisted resolution), better cameras (my one is good enough), faster/more cores (no processing issues) and more RAM (well that's something that would help but not a show-stopper yet).
There's just no good reason for me to change yet... And I won't be crying if I break it... just swap in more bits from the other carcasses. When I can't fix it any more... well then I'll upgrade then & celebrate the good run that I have had.
is polishing a turd at this point.
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You pay what you pay for a smartphone and you expect it to not require replacement in two years or less. I wouldnâ(TM)t pay $800 for a laptop and expect in two years to replace it. Yeah maybe one for $300 I would consider replacing but the real improvements in smartphones havenâ(TM)t materialized like the manufactures would like you to believe. Then you have Apple throttling them on purpose which makes you not trust the company. I will replace my smartphone when I think I need to. Not when Apple or Samsung think I need to in order to make money.
Good, now maybe memory prices can come down a bit.
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It's common in the technical industry for a product to start out with a steep profit margin as large gains are made in functionality and performance. As the technology matures, the performance and functionality curves level out, with each new iteration having fewer compelling features. Manufacturers will try to keep this going with "changes for the sake of change" (Flat icons! no, 3d icons! No really, flat icons! No, animated icons!) but that typically only extends the phenomenon another couple of iterations. There will usually also be an attempt to increase sales by making consumables like batteries an integral part of the product, forcing an upgrade or inconvenient repair, but again, that only has so much effect.
Sales drop as features asymptotically approach some practical value, and the product becomes a commodity item. Smart phones have become commodity items. Computers became commodity items a few years ago.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There's no new MUST HAVE features on the new model phones. Thus no impetus to spend money on them. Once 5G starts widely rolling out, there may be surge again, but my guess is the carriers will charge / throttle 5G nearly out of existence so that may not be all that cool either.
Downturn in sales confirms smartphones are dying. In the future there will be no smartphones. Those of you who still have smartphones are dinosaurs stuck in the past.
Yup, no need to spend a kilobuck.
My wife got me a Motorola E4 plus for christmas, a 200 dollar phone, on sale black Friday for 99 bucks !
It is big, latest android, great camera, and a battery that last for days.
Why would I buy new hardware when I'm confident that my experience is poor due to software? I don't know if it's the H1Bs, the push for diversity or reliance on Moore's Law but software is shittier than I remember it being 10 years ago. YouTube updated and half the time it doesn't work. VLC forgets a video has embedded subtitles if I open a different app. Fast forwarding in Prime video does something annoying, I can't even remember - I stopped using it. A new phone would give me this same experience along with whatever shit the manufacturer decided to bundle. No one will read this, no one cares.
I for one would probably have invested a 4-digit number of bucks into new smartphones, had the industry offered me something not ridiculously oversized. I am not blind or fat-fingered. I do not want to carry a brick around. So I had to stick with my many years old smartphones, from an era when small smartphones were still on offer.
And if you have a look at the crowd-funding success of e.g. the Jelly phone, I am not quite the only one fed up with today's XXXL bricks.
I paid my Note 4 around 700 €. I would happily be geeky and buy a Note 8, although I don't like the screen ratio and the rounded edges (what for ???).
But a little more than 1000 € for a Note 8 ? Are you crazy Mr Samsung ???
What's next ? A Note 9 with a stupid notch for 1300 € ?
No, I'll keep my money and I'll have a look at alternative OS like http://www.resurrectionremix.c... when time comes.
Totof
Unlike the rest of the world, in the US it used to be you'd have a phone for a year, maybe two, and then you'd qualify for a "FREEEE" phone, or if you wanted a higher-end, maybe $10 to $50. Of course, with that deal, you were stuck with that phone AND that carrier for the one year or two year period. Now that's mostly been taken away and we pay full price for the phones. Suddenly we're not getting a new phone every year or two. I got my Galaxy S4 - my first "Smart" phone - five years ago when it came out in 2013. My only reason to get a new phone at this point is that the Android OS (Lollipop, 5.0.1) hasn't had updates in a long-long time.
My Moto X pure has 5.7 inch screen, which is great for my old eyes. So the thing touted as the next generation model has
1. same CPU
2. same GPU
3. same RAM
4. smaller screen, 5.2 inches
5. costs $100 more
I'm just curious if Motorola is wondering why no one wants to "upgrade"
You've saturated the market, there are few possible new customers who don't already have a working device and see no reason to buy a new one.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
is a bitch. deal with it.
try separating your product from all the others.. ya know, like giving customers what *THEY* want.. like replaceable batteries, easier to replace displays, media card slots, more durable devices, and actual security updates for a number of years, based on the lifespan the user expects to get out of their purchase, not the 24 months (or less, if at all) you want them to buy a new one in. the smartphone maker that does these things will benefit at the expense of their competitors.
Does this mean the price of DDR4 modules will return to a reasonable price now?
What the fuck are you ranting about? And to who?
Can we start calling them smartcameras? My actual phonecalls account for 0.001% of use, as do most others!
My old phone was a Galaxy S5. The issue was that it was short of RAM and short of storage. The thing was constantly swapping and slow has hell, and updating apps was hard because I was so short of storage.
But I upgraded to a reconditioned S7, for 1/3 the price of a new S9. I just can't justify paying for the brand new latest/greatest.
I think it was a bit more than two years ago that most carriers stopped offering two year contracts that gave a nice discount on the phones. I bet the phone industry is just starting to see the slowdown from that as everyone who might be shopping for something new is seeing the high price tags of a brand new phone. I have an iPhone 6S Plus and it still works great, does all I need it to do. Sure, the new one has a faster CPU and better camera... but it's not $800-$1000 out of my pocket better. If there were two year contracts again and I could get a new phone for half the price, I might consider an upgrade. Till then, I'll stick with what I have.
Question everything that you've accepted without thinking.
Sales will slow, prices will have to come down, to attract buyers. The steep increase in prices to the point 600-800 dollar phones are considered "normal" is insane! 200-300 dollar build costs, for "flagships" that retail for $1000? Insane!
All...devices are compromisable. There is no such thing as s totally secure device.
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That poor bastard. I pulled my Nexus 4 out of the closet when I quit my job three months ago. Still does everything I need it to do. But then again, I don't need data, GPS or any app on 24/7. YMMV.
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People want updates, at least for security and TLS etc. Updates are expensive. They are, you have to pay a few software devs to pack up driver patches etc.
So.. make us pay for updates? I'm poor, and I'd gladly pay $30/year for updates, because I can't buy a $800 phone, or buy an old used phone and risk pissing the money away because I can't manage to install LineageOS.
a $100 or $120 phone with the specs listed by the parent, and a $30/year subscription? shut up and take my money. I never actually say that, and I hate subscribing or paying for everything. But I want to pay $30/year for updates (so for you the vendor, it's like I bought your phone every year. over the years I'll pay you like $150, if it reaches six years)
Better yet : hit a few buttons to reset the phone to a clean state, bloatware free. then on first run hit an icon to apply all the updates. done in a few minutes (I won't care it it takes half an hour). Optionally, give me a list of "apps" to disable so they'll be disabled before they ever run, and no time will be wasted updating failbook, twatter etc.
Using a very old iPhone 4S that is fine for my rare usage.
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There are many good enough android phones by Mi, Lenovo(Motorola) in india for around 15,000 Rs (a liitle more than &200) there are with replaceable batteries and one can easliy use them for atleast 2-3 years. If one needs a better phone than these there are one plus(company name) for equivalent of $500 and these have face recognition, dual camera and 6Gb of ram and are as good as a $1000 phone.
You're thinking of the old Eveready flash-light batteries that were designed to be replaced on a whim because if they run out of charge, they're dead. But replaceable rechargeable batteries are built for a different purpose. They're meant to be replaced when their charge cycles become too frequent or the time they hold their charge too short. So it isn't like you can swap them out every time your phone is about to run out of juice. That's what the cellphone charger is for!
Cost is a factor, less so for the devices, but more so for the service. Especially in the US prices for cell service are obnoxiously high for rather spotty coverage. That means that those who have one won't buy a new one every year and those who do not have a smartphone won't buy one, even if they could afford a device, they will shy away from the high monthly prices. Cost aside, for some there are not many use cases that make such investments reasonable. Landlines and wired Internet are not only cheaper, they have far superior speeds and voice quality.
Compare the s9 to the s8, how significant of a difference is there? Nothing is being added anymore things are being taken away (like headphone jacks), and performance increases are nowhere near the jump they were. This is when products should diversify to offer different niches but is bread everyone does the same
Nearly everybody who wants a smartphone already has one. And the ones that most people have are Good Enough so there is less incentive to upgrade. We've seen the same cycle with other tech products like PCs; there was no reason to believe that smartphones would be an exception.
I bought a Xiaomi A1 for 168 Euro. it is the size of a Samsung S9, battery lasts 3 days, and has the 'unbranded'/light AndroidOne OS.
For a laptop I bought a Acer 14" Chromebook for 260 Euro, it had full HD screen and all-Alu casing, better than a 13" MacbookAir of 4 times the price.
If you are an average person with average requirements, any bottom of the range phone or laptop suffices. But not you, you are special, you need a 1000 euro phone and 4000 euro laptop. Just for whatsapp, email, facebook, other internet browsing and online banking.
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Of course news about a fake are Fake News.