Meizu's $1300 'Zero' Smartphone With No Ports Got Just 29 Pre-orders on Indiegogo (androidpolice.com)

Posted by msmash on Thursday March 7, 2019 @06:45AM from the no-thank-you dept.

Chinese smartphone maker Meizu generated some headlines in January after it unveiled Zero, a $1300 smartphone that doesn't have a headphone jack, or a charging port, or a physical SIM card slot, or any buttons, or a speaker grill. The company said it would make the phone available to consumers via Indiegogo crowdfunding platform. Well, the market has spoken. AndroidPolice: Meizu set itself an eminently reasonably bar for the campaign, too, at $100,000. That may sound like a fair bit of cash, but Meizu would only have had to sell 77 phones in order to meet this goal. It managed just 29. It's unclear how many of those were Meizu employees, other than to say "not enough."

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Re: Not very brave at all by Anonymous Coward · 2019-03-07 07:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Apple manufactured hundreds of millions of smartphones without headphone jacks, knowing that suckers and fanboys would in the end be OK with spending a ton of cash to purchase Bluetooth and/or overpriced Apple branded Status Symbol headphones.
Fixed for you.
Yes, Apple knew their target demographic, but for many people a $2 (or free) pair of earbuds is just fine. By raising the cost of ownership it just helps them cement their position as a maker of luxury phones, which helps stabilize their profits now that the market has reached a saturation point.