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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.
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.
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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Replaceable batteries...miss those. Have a Galaxy S6 that works perfectly fine but needs a new battery soon which is gonna be a pain to replace.
This is just a normal phase in the lifecycle of any product. Eventually the product is good enough for the standard uses and there is no real gain in buying a new one when you don't have to. Same thing already happened to PCs. Until someone figures out a whole new use for them, sales will lag. Good managers should have a plan in place for this predictable phase.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The flagships are all pushing thinner phones with minimal bezels. F that. It's hard enough to handle a phone already without fat-fingering an edge and triggering some unwanted change.
I want a thicker, easier to handle phone, and take the room to put the headphone jack back in, along with a larger removable battery and sdcard. Bonus if you have front facing stereo speakers in the bezels (with no display notch).
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