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We're No Longer in Smartphone Plateau. We're in the Smartphone Decline. (nymag.com)
The days of double-digit smartphone growth are over -- and the next decade may start to see smartphone sales decline. A report adds: From roughly 2007 until 2013, the smartphone market grew at an astonishing pace, posting double-digit growth year after year, even during a global recession. They were the good years, the type that would inspire a Scorsese montage: millions and then billions of smartphones going out; billions and then trillions of dollars in rising company valuations; every year new models of phones hitting the market, held up triumphantly at events that were part sales pitch, part tent revival. (To nail the Scorsese effect, imagine "Jumpin' Jack Flash" playing while you think about it.)
But just like every Scorsese movie, the party ends. Smartphone growth began to slow starting in 2013 or 2014. In 2016, it was suddenly in the single digits, and in 2017 global smartphone shipments, for the first time, actually declined -- fewer smartphones were sold than in 2017 than in 2016. Every smartphone manufacturer is now facing a world where, at best, they can hope for single-digit growth in smartphone sales -- and many seem to be preparing for a world where they face declines.
But just like every Scorsese movie, the party ends. Smartphone growth began to slow starting in 2013 or 2014. In 2016, it was suddenly in the single digits, and in 2017 global smartphone shipments, for the first time, actually declined -- fewer smartphones were sold than in 2017 than in 2016. Every smartphone manufacturer is now facing a world where, at best, they can hope for single-digit growth in smartphone sales -- and many seem to be preparing for a world where they face declines.
Obviously smartphones aren't being made thin enough. They need to make them as fragile as a wafer, then they can sell more.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Everyone I know "wants" a new phone, but they don't want to pay a grand.
The market is saturated. Phones are good enough and not enough people care about a new camera to justify buying a new one. Smartphones, from any manufacturer, are not status symbols anymore.
Why do we need article after article to tell us the obvious?
I hate fat people.
I also think we've reached a point where a thousand bucks is more than people want to spend on their "cell phone," regardless of how cool it is. My Samsung Galaxy S5 is long in the tooth, so I just replaced it - With an S7 that cost me $225 CAD.
I don't think I'm alone.
I'm still waiting for a legitimate flagship phone to replace my Note 3.
Every phone released after it has been worse, by some measure:
- Missing key sensors (ie. thermometer, which is super useful while winter camping)
- Missing the headphone/mic jack
- Missing physical home and back/task switch buttons
- Having locked bootloaders that are difficult to deal with
- Having poor support for LineageOS/AOSP
- Being constructed of metal/glass that breaks/bends easily compared to plastic, along with bizarre screen curvatures
- Having wear components, such as batteries, glued in and non-replaceable, limiting the lifespan to ~18 months
I have literally thousands of US dollars to spend on a new phone, and can't wait for the day something is released which rivals the Note 3.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Now with smart phones. This leaves manufacturers with two options: 1) Open new markets, or 2) Actually innovate. Unless a whole bunch of new tribes are discovered, the former ain't happening. Which means we all hold our breath and wait for #2.
Until that happens we should all prepare ourselves for wave after wave of dull non-innovative over-priced dreck.
Plus we need a viable third OS. KaiOS looks promising, but it needs to be on flagship phones.
They call them smartphones but they behave like dumbphones, making the user and everyone else involved dumber. They are designed to keep you dumb. The novelty of the name "smartphone" has worn off a long time ago.
Phones are good enough and not enough people care about a new camera to justify buying a new one. Smartphones, from any manufacturer, are not status symbols anymore.
Tell that to my wife. She salivates every time the Pixel 3 commercials come on. To hear her tell it a wider selfie camera is the only thing standing between us and a life of complete fulfillment.
I guess this means that Apple will have to get out of the tech business and become a hedge fund.
Tell that to my wife. She salivates every time the Pixel 3 commercials come on. To hear her tell it a wider selfie camera is the only thing standing between us and a life of complete fulfillment.
I'm not sure if I should be jealous of you or feel sorry for you.
Headline: "We're in the smartphone decline"
First line of post: "...and the next decade may start to see smartphone sales decline" ......unless you prefer the politician's usage of "decline" (decline in growth). Ugh.
I know Penny Marshall wasn't the most attractive woman in the world - but I don't know how someone would confuse her with Martin Scorsese.
#DeleteChrome
The number of people who own smartphones will increase, but if they don't replace them every 6 months when a vastly better one comes out, along with killer apps that need the new capabilities, then people will hang onto them for longer. This is better for the environment, and for consumers.
... Unless they are built to last only 6 to 12 months. And they aren't repairable.
So we'd expect annual sales to drop once the market is saturated (by definition)
A phone, smart or other wise is an individually addressable network terminal. It's not a fashion accessory.
Once everyone has one, other than radical changes in technology (no, I don't mean "disruptive" garbage) or replacing broken equipment, at the prices as they are now, people have no reason to buy.
I've carried an S5 for about 5 years now. I got it to switch from Sprint to GSM and real LTE. It serves me well and when the 5G network deploys, I'll replace it. Until then, there is no real reason for me to trade "up".
Another issue is that there is no obvious software limited by hardware in the cell phone market. Maybe in the future AR will help to drive hardware technology. But so long as AR development is relegated to isolated applications no one will care.
If we're talking new sales of phones, yes we've reached a plateau. If we're talking about % of world population that use a cell phone... no, we haven't reached a plateau and won't for a long time.
The main difference is, phone sellers raised their prices so much that people want to hold onto their phones longer. When a new phone costs $200 you don't mind replacing it in a few years. When a new phone costs $1000 you would be peeved if you were forced to replace it in two years.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Nope. What we need is more peop^Wcustomers.
If we can manage to double the population over the next five years then the smartphone manufacturers should see a return to previous growth figures.
No sig today...
Jealous of what, exactly?
No sig today...
Of course, I've owned both. The curved screens make no sense in the real world.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Everyone who's going to buy one already has one. All that remains is the upgrade/refresh/break-fix treadmill.
No matter how true your points are, the industry will fight a downhill reality. And the swarms of surfacedwellers in their socnets are susceptible. Consider the DeBeers diamond brainwashing.
They have every incentive to convince us that spending $1000 to go from capable-phone-1 to capable-phone-2 is "worth it", if not an utter necessity to being A Complete Human Being.
My work pays for my phone and data (currently I have an iPhone 7 plus with unlimited data). I can upgrade every 18 months. I have been able to upgrade for about 3 months now, but I haven't done so. My current phone is still as good as the day I bought it in every aspect. There is absolutely nothing in the more current iPhone offerings that would tempt me to move over. I have too many apps to consider moving to Android. Maybe Apple will come out with something compelling next year, but based on the rumors so far I'm doubting it.
Yeah, what do you do when everyone who wants a smartphone has one ? Unless you are one of the Apple fanboi who HAVE to have the latest, the phone you have is just fine. I've got a Galaxy S7 that I got for free for renewing my phone contract. Everytime a new phone comes out my attitude is "I'm not going to get a new phone unless either this one dies or I get it for free." I mean, do you really have to have the latest?
Another day closer to redwood heaven
If they make a decent interface from a phone to a real monitor, (and they get their butts out of their heads when it comes to bluetooth support for mouse and keyboard) then most people's use-case for owning anything other than a phone really diminishes.
I don't know if it has to be wired. Mirroring the screen via chromecast didn't work so well for me, but maybe they could get it working. There's a few niche products out there that have a dock, but they didn't catch on.
I could see a world where we all just walk around with our main computer on our body all the time. Instead of a work computer or a rig at home. A workstation would just be a chair, monitor, keyboard/mouse, wifi, and some place to plug in. And of course a bitchin' VR supporting super-computer next to a cybernetic psychic dolphin.
Anyone that shallow is probably hot...
Beware of the Leopard.
For every computer that must interact with humans, there is a limiting factor....the human.
This happened to desktops. They got so fast that the biggest slice of CPU time went to waiting on me, the memory was big enough to hold anything I could conceivably ever want to work with, and I couldn't take enough pictures to fill the hard drive.
So people moved to laptops, because they were becoming just as powerful but portable. Then they became just as powerful, and the point of buying a new one went away.
So people moved to phones, which were more portable. I can't think of any app I have that doesn't spend more time waiting on me than I does processing. There is no point of adding more megapixels to camera, and it stores more pictures than I can be bothered to cycle through. Other than a broken phone (and, I bought a Kyocera this time to avoid that scenario) what is the point of spending $1k on another one that will just spend MORE time waiting on me?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Even in 3rd world countries, most people over the age of 11 already have two.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
They need to boast more about the camera zoom. I don't care about megapixels... that's not gonna win me any dickpic awards.
You basically can get an iPhone or an Android (which now have little to differentiate themselves)....it's time for something new! Bring back Blackberry OS or Windows Mobile.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A lot of people are saying the decline is because "people don't want to pay $1000+ for the latest phone!". I'd say that's far less of an issue than the fact that the market is finally saturated with really good cellphones!
For many years, you had a situation where the people with enough money would always buy the latest and greatest phone, and typically hand down their old one to another family member, trade it in, or sell it online (eBay, Craigslist, etc.) at a big discount. The thing is? When cellphones were still getting major new features and significant upgrades at a fast pace, that meant the new phones really were significantly better than the ones they were letting go of. The "churn" helped a lot of people get their hands on a name brand, legitimate "top tier" smartphone, who couldn't otherwise afford or cost-justify one. But they still had a phone that was inferior to the "new stuff", and within a year or so? They, too, were looking to upgrade.
I think we're at a point now where the people who spent the money for the "best" phones are happy to get another year or two of use from them. They're not so quick to let go of them. And the last generation of phones that other people are carrying around are "good enough". Sure, the new ones are nicer -- but they're not missing features they can't live without.
Especially with the phones sold via contracts where you pay it off in monthly installments? Anyone with a decent full-time job can technically afford to buy a new one, even at $1000+. The point is, they don't WANT to have that chunk coming out of each paycheck when the only thing they're getting for it is a couple of new camera special f/x or "an even brighter, more colorful display than you last one that already looks amazing".
I'm one of those people who used to upgrade iPhones with pretty much every new revision. Maybe not on day 1? But within 3-6 months or so, I usually found a buyer for my existing phone and kicked in the difference to get the new model. It was always worth it, for things like the phone adding a new cellular band it supported for LTE data with my provider, or the Touch ID feature, or the phone gaining a second camera lens for telephoto -- not to mention faster CPUs and often more memory in the devices.
But now, my iPhone X really has everything covered. I can't see how there's almost anything compelling about upgrading to the new phones over this one? The X is plenty fast enough. (The big argument for needing more CPU or GPU power on the iPhones, at this point, seems to be for people using virtual reality or AR-heavy apps -- which I don't do much of with my phone at this time.) I've already got the Face ID feature, and having it work a second or two faster is "nice to have" but not enough to spend much money to get it. I'm even told my battery life is probably a bit better on my X than what I'd get if I upgraded it.
I'm sure I'd like a cellphone with 5G data support, when that's actually rolled out in a substantial way. But I think that's probably the next "upgrade driver" for me, and perhaps many others.
There are only so many people that want/need to buy smartphones just like there are only so many people that want/need to own cars. Once you've saturated the market the only new sales you get are those replacing older models and those reaching an age where they buy their first smartphone while losing the sales that would have gone to people that can no longer use a smartphone (whether that's due to age, health, or death).
If there are no new markets for manufacturers to sell to, then there's little new growth to be found. Realistically, there is zero wrong with this situation. It's only the capitalistic mindset, the mindset of greed, that demands to see profits grow every quarter. A stable annual profit in the billions of dollars is nothing to sneeze at. And in a market with a decent amount of non-colluding competitors, this situation is actually to a consumer's advantage since individual companies that can't acquire new markets to feed growth, will instead offer discounts and features to try and steal their competitors' market share.
The only thing they really have to worry about in this scenario, is for some product to come along that makes the smartphone obsolete. Not sure that product exists though, unless someone invents a neural link interface (not that Musk isn't trying).
The responses to this comment puzzle me. Somehow the idea that a woman would be interested in an improved tech product is interpreted as proof she is shallow, while men doing the exact same thing, incidentally the raison d’être of this site, is not interpreted the same way.
Move over five stages of grief, we're at the fourth stage of leash.
The fifth stage of leash is where the hapless victim becomes adamant that the codependent relationship (who really controls that pesky CPU?) and corporate surveillance is all in your own best interest, and for your own good.
Father knows best.
Long live the hunchback salute.
We're No Longer in Smartphone Plateau. We're in the Smartphone Decline.
We're not. We may be in the Smartphone Sales Decline because we're effectively in a Smartphone Feature Plateau, but we definitely are not in a Smartphone Decline.
0x or or snor perron?!
What seems to have passed everyone's notice is that we have successfully raised an entire generation (with spillover to older generations) that have become unable to go poop unless they take their smart phone with them.
So there will always be some demand even if the new features aren't driving otherwise-unneeded upgrades.
If I ever got a mod point, then I'd give you [KixWooder] an insightful mod for that comment rather than a mere interesting. Hypothetical since I never get mod points. Or maybe not even relevant, since I do want to comment and I think that would cancel my hypothetical mod point...
The most significant aspect is that we reached saturation much faster this time compared to computers, (but also relative to any other technology I can think of). The capabilities of the smartphones are beyond what most people can actually use, and even though the capabilities are increasing (and the prices are decreasing), there's no reason to buy a new one. The available new customers are just late adopters yielding ever lower profit margins (as the prices continue to fall).
Converting it to anecdote form (as a data point), what I am doing with my latest smartphone is only slightly better than what I was doing three smartphones ago. Actually, there was one major feature of my old PDA that I still haven't ported to the smartphone era, but mostly I've been looking for new things I actually want to do and not finding much. (Voice dictation is the main one, but it would run on the old phones, too.) The main reason I got a new smartphone this year was because it was free, but if prices keep falling, they may have to pay me to go through the hassle up the next "upgrade".
(Perhaps my perception of the lack of new and desirable features is just because I've mostly stopped playing time-wasting games? Most of the "new" games are just flashier versions of ancient classics. Interesting coincidence that I'm almost finished reading Fire in the Valley right now, and it mentions many of the old games (and brings back the memories). I don't play them now, but I'm confident I would still enjoy them. I just feel I have better uses for my time and absolutely no need for more and newer ways to waste time. (Well, except for that literacy development game no one has developed yet...))
Pay me to upgrade my smartphone? Well that's also how I'm feeling about the latest pains of Windows 10. Come to think of it, I didn't pay any money for those upgrades to Windows 10 and I have no desire to ever again pay Microsoft for anything... (Just my allergy to corporate cancers typing?)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Jealous of what, exactly?
Being with someone who's clearly very easy to please.
...especially when you're force to stuff them in a case that doubles the size.
Sorry, who is forcing you to do that?
I have had the same phone for almost 3 years without a case and I have never broken it. It's nothing extravagant for sure - a BLU Life One X. Just be careful with your damn phone! I think having a case somehow makes people think their phone is protected so they can treat it like it's not an expensive electronic device. Cases are no guarantee of anything, my wife and daughter have both broken their phones in the last year, and both were in good cases.
I think you are right on price creep, and I refuse to pay it! People LOVE to complain about it, then they stand in line to get the next awesome phone. It's amazing to me how much time and money people are willing to spend on keeping up with the latest phone/status symbol. As long as they are willing to do it, manufacturers have no incentive to stop charging so much.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It really irritates me that people describe falling growth as a decline.
-Any product reaches market saturation.
-Sales will shrink because of maximum penetration.
Smartphones in decline isn't less unit sales being made, it would be fewer smartphones being used.
Holy shit. Have you seen the BV9500? Actually there are a bunch of armored phones out now... the Ulefone as well! Interesting.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
easy there mr. white knight, you might scuff that armor. Anyone who sees the ability to take wide angle selfies (not photos mind you, but selfies) as *THE* key feature is probably a bit on the shallow side.
Virtue signaling? reddit's that-o-way bub,
I tossed out my box of six smart phones from the last 10 years of upgrades. I expect to go down to about 25% the phone purchasing rate as the current generation is capable enough for my needs. Looks like smartphone makers innovated them right out of a job, that's progress!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Samsung's software is shit indeed. So install an alternative rom, like LineageOS.
Circumcision is child abuse.
If you're in the US, go look at new phones from your carrier (which is how everyone here buys phones).
With the advent of $1000+ iPhones and $900 Pixels and Samsung Galaxies, the finance term has moved from 24 months to 36 months, in order to keep the payment/bill increase in the $20-$30 range. Everyone here finances their phone with their bill (not an unreasonable choice, given lack of interest charge). The finance term directly sets the replacement interval.
What the heck were these companies thinking by increasing the price to $1000? It's as bad for the manufacturer as it is for the consumer. What's truly shocking is that with many phones we're still going be financing them past the point where they're guaranteed security updates.
"Easily influenced by ADs"-wife :P
I am still using an iPhone 4S! :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Or just heavily market the necessity of two phones per person.
Hot girl with two phones: "What, you only have ONE phone?! What a loser!"
Ugly dude with one phone: *sob*
A few years ago, I purchased two phones right after they were released and they were awesome and subsidized. When it came time to replace one of them because of a malfunction--after a couple of good years--I bought . . . the same phone for a fraction of the original price. Now that the replacement phone was dropped, flat, and cracked, and I'm going to replace it with . . . the same phone for a fraction of the original price. Good memory and battery life + affordable price = WIN! It just doesn't make any sense to do anything else. Several years ago, it was "cool" to have the latest and greatest flagship phones, but no one cares anymore.
Make love, not reality television.
As the tech and its market become more mature there is less change and longer effective product life thus fewer sales. This happens with everything. Eventually every market stops being driven by growth and product updates and moves more to replacement of damaged or failed items.