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Smartphone Shipments Declined For the First Time In 2017 (theverge.com)
2017 was the first year that smartphone unit shipments didn't grow, according to a new Internet Trends report. "Shipments actually declined by 0.5 percent, as IDC noted in February," reports The Verge. "In 2016, shipments were lukewarm at 2 percent yearly growth, but this downturn is significant." From the report: Among smartphone shipments, Android and iOS have all but completely pushed out every other mobile operating system. And despite the growing price of today's top flagship devices, the average selling price of a smartphone has steadily fallen over the years. As more of the world now owns smartphones, growth has basically stalled. Similarly, internet user growth has only grown 7 percent in 2017, compared to 12 percent in 2016. More people are accessing the internet than ever, on an average of 5.9 hours a day. And they're browsing on mobile, indicating that they're just holding onto older models of phones instead of buying new ones.
I vote for ditching the display and the concept of holding the phone. The next big thing should be leaving the phone in your pocket and interacting with it via peripherals only with the primary display using augmented reality glasses.
Smartphone shipments haven't gone down. Android shipments have gone down. iPhone shipments have gone up (50.7m to 52.2m YoY).
Average selling price hasn't gone down. Android average selling price has gone down. iPhone average selling price has gone up ($655 to $728 YoY).
There's a story here, but it's not the one being told by the headline.
Now that that practice has been bred out through consumer uproar, people are probably realising they don't actually need a phone every 2 years because most are good for 4 - 5 years for 99% of the population.
Estimated number of smartphone users: ~2.5 billion
Smartphones sold each year: ~1.5 billion
Estimated growth: ~200 million
Average lifetime: 2500/(1500-200) = ~2 years
The facts reject your hypothesis.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Based on the assumption that Android phones last about four years, which may be an underestimate (my own phone for example) then over five billion Android phones are in use right now. This is the real story, this is phenomenal. And all running Linux, this is even more phenomenal. We did something historical, maybe the biggest technology story ever. Certainly a key event in history.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
They can't afford a proper iPhone
"Proper iPhone" is a not a thing.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
1) At the beginning, item X (desktop PC, flatscreen TV, smartphone, whatever) is damn expensive and almost nobody except rich hipsters has one.
2) As R&D costs are amortized and production lines ramp up, prices drop, more people can afford item X, and sales increase.
3) Then really cheap Chinese knockoffs appear, and sales really take off.
4) Eventually, everybody that wants one, and can afford one, has one. At that point sales drop down to replacement levels for older ones that wear out, fall on the floor, are stolen, whatever.
A few years ago there was hoopla about "the end of the desktop PC". The PC market hasn't disappeared; it's matured and sales have stabilized at replacement levels. I expect the same to happen for smartphones.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
My iPhone 6S will soon be 3 generations “behind”... but it does everything I want, and still gets security patches (as does its predecessor). Apple has apparently realized this - after all, they spent 1/3 of their iPhone spotlight event talking about how their glorious and great newest iPhone’s best feature was... turning yourself into a talking poop emoji. Oh, and they’ve once again made incremental improvements on the camera. Woo hoo!
It’s not like it’s any different on the Android side, either.
If you have a smartphone that was purchased within the past 4-5 years, and the phone is not physically broken - there’s just not a compelling reason to throw another $800-1000 at these companies.
#DeleteChrome
...was because the USB port finally gave out. I now have a Samsung Galaxy S8 Active. It's boring, it looks like a grey rectangle, but I can go swimming with it if I want to. Assuming the stupid built-in battery doesn't die out exactly when my two years are up, I'm gonna keep this around for a long time. All I use my phone for is some photography social media and web usage. I don't need a super duper phone.
hookers and grits.
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/t0lte
I suspect it's in part because Apple got caught artificially slowing down older devices
Apple slowed down those devices in order to avoid an expensive battery recall process.
Don't you think a bigger factor is that hardware performance improvements outgrew software requirement increases? At this point even a several year old mid-range phone feels fast enough running the latest software, while previously smartphone hardware genuinely struggled to keep up with later more featured/bloated (delete for preference) software.
Same thing happened in the PC space, remember when your PC felt slow, even obsolete every year trying to run the latest software? Now I can use a budget laptop from 2010 and run exactly the same software as a brand new high-end laptop without it even feeling slow.
I have two thousand US dollars to spend on a smartphone, because I haven't upgraded since 2013. My note 3 has a replaceable battery, full sensor complement, headphone jack, MicroSD slot, hardware home button, silkscreen back/menu buttons, IR blaster, unlocked bootloader...
There doesn't exist an equivalent phone, let alone a better phone. However, if any company is interested in making an actual flagship phone (think: ugly, powerful, maintainable, and with no wear items glued in), then I will pay two thousand US dollars for it.
Do you hear me, Samsung?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC