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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.
...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.
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.
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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Yeah, there's not a lot of difference between a $150 phone and a $700 phone once the GPU is removed from the equation.
And now the cell phone promoters have learned that the replenishment rate of a product drops once it becomes "good enough", just like PCs.
Considering the Galaxy S9/S9+, Note 8, and upcoming Note 9 all have a headphone jack and no notch your analysis is useless.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Personally I'd be up for upgrading my phone right now, but it seems the phone manufacturers have decided they don't want to make a phone I want to buy. I'm on project fi, which gives me limited options to begin with. But I have a hard requirement of a headphone jack and no bloatware. I'd get a pixel 2, but....headphone jack? The Moto X has the bloat.
Phone makers, maybe quit making shitty phones and give us what we actually want and we'd upgrade our phones. But as is, I'll keep my current one as It's got the features I want, and the new ones don't.
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.
There are new batteries one the way that far out-perform lithium ion (much safer as well). Unfortunately, they are the missing link in the quest to deploy robot drones on the battlefield. I'm truly concerned about the progress of technology and its impact on society when these new batteries hit mass production. It will unleash a wave of advanced functionality and power that is not possible today due to power/battery constraints.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
You're assuming parent AC wants an Android smartphone.
#DeleteFacebook
Here's an idea.. DUAL boot! Let me run IOS or Linux based on input to Grub...
Yea I know, not until Steve Jobs says so and He isn't saying much these days.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
https://appleinsider.com/artic...
noone needs a new model every year, let alone 3 different ones!).
Well, there is that one guy at work... :)
Good, now maybe memory prices can come down a bit.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
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.
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).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Moto X is hardly bloated on software. Moto Actions and Moto Display are really light experiences and something I'd prefer over stock. I use Essential PH-1 which is less bloated than either the Pixels or the Moto X4 Android One phones.
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.
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.
Well, there is that one guy at work... :)
*Those* guys can probably tricked by changing the software wallpaper without changing anything on the hardware side. :)
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
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
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.
Buy a battery case. It gives you a thicker phone with some heft to it and a lot of extra power. Two problems solved.
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.
Most of us want an Android phone.
Your fantasies otherwise might amuse you, but they're just fantasies.
Yeah. Leave a connector plugged into the charging port while carrying it around so it fails much faster than otherwise. That's a solution. For you.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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!
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).
That's why I have a moto E4. It does what I want it to do, is easy to handle, and doesn't have stupid stuff. (And does have a headphone jack).
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.
Your sig here!
Using a very old iPhone 4S that is fine for my rare usage.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Do they have any cases that can charge wirelessly on compatible phones?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
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.
Err no there's zero stress on the charging port for most battery cases. Also WTF you doing that is making your connectors fail. It's a phone not a cricket bat.
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.
Hah-Hah.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.