Submitted 7 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
Smartphone sales down 22 percent in Q2, the worst performance in a decade::North American sales are bad for everyone, except, miraculously, Google.
A sign that the smartphone has reached maturity, I guess. People don’t feel the imperative to upgrade any more. That’s good for the planet!
Time to start development on rectal computers.
Those are called remote controlled sex toys and already exist :)
Isn’t that essentially what that one chess player was accused of?
Those are called remote controlled sex toys and already exist :)
Wait… a few days ago I read something about smart toilets using anal prints and internet connectivity. So rectal computers are not too far off.
I don’t understand the use case of such an invention
Everyone is currently poor as shit.
Or, maybe, people realized that there is no reason to get a new phone every year.
They are not mutually exclusive, tbf.
poor people are poor as shit rich people who are richer off the backs of poor people are not poor as shit
Sure, but even rich people don’t buy more than two phones, if they have one for personal and one for business.
I have plenty of disposable income. But why would I spend hundreds and hundreds on a new phone when I just got a Pixel 5 off eBay for $100?
Pixel 5 was peak pixel… I have a 7a now but TBH preferred the 5 just for its size and rear fingerprint reader.
On the iphone side I picked up an iphone SE 2020 for £120 (no an ios fan but it’s good to have around for development and testing).
There’s really not justification for £800 phones any more when the older ones are this good…
Non essential spending is still through the roof. People are buying all the extra shit still.
“The average sell price is up from $663 to $738 year over year, indicating it’s the premium phones that are selling, and all the cheap vendors are getting shut out.”
Totally disagree with the article’s assumption, I’d say you are more correct. No one wants to or has that much money to pay for ridiculous prices, so sales are tanking. The few who can, or must buy a new phone certainly aren’t going to buy something with no staying power when hundreds of phone makers have coke and gone in the last decade.
That’s what happens when you keep increasing the price without adding value.
You mean removing a headphone jack, SD storage options, and removable batteries aren’t added value? I know they claim it makes your phone more waterproof, but I don’t wanna use my phone in the pool, I just wanna listen to some headphones without charging them.
No no no. Your phone might be waterproof, but we don’t condone the usage of the phone near bodies of water. Intentional submersion of the phone voids the guarantee (actual language on the guarantee of a IP67 waterproof phone).
The new Google 9 comes with 4 wheels so you can drive it without carrying it. We had to remove a bunch of features to fit the wheels and rc antenna, stuff like the phone capability, installing non-Google content, and anything that could prevent ads, Firefox is no longer something you can use, but it’s worth it for zoomy phone functionality.
Also there’s a subscription fee now or you have to listen to ads before your call.
And coming out with a new one every year despite it being the same as last year’s
Despite it being WORSE than last year. I went from a iPhone 10 Plus to an iPhone 11 after dropping my phone in used motor oil and fucking up all the speakers/mics. I didn’t realize that I’d be getting a MASSIVE downgrade in image quality. Comparing the photos they take side by side, the iPhone 11 looks like a 4 MP camera from a decade ago.
The ea fifa sports of consumer electronics.
Blame greedflation. Phones should be cheaper now, not thousands of dollars.
I told everyone that once contracts for cell phones were replaced with payment plans, companies would start gouging their customers with higher phone prices because the customers could now “afford” it.
Greedy ain’t the right word imo.
I don’t know why people still use the big carriers. Subsiding the phones and getting an upgrade every 2 years was the reason to use them. Now they just add the cost of the phone to your bill.
The brilliant thing is they’ve gone from “We’ll buy the phone, but there’s a $200 ETF” to “we won’t buy the phone, and there’s no ETF. But now if you cancel you owe us $1,000.”
Exactly what I was coming to write. Who could have thought that rising notably the prices would have led to less sales?
Phones is basically cheaper now. Features that only found on high end now on low end. SD 4 is insanely good (4g2 is an underclock 730). Very few reason to shell out 1000$+ for phones now
You can still buy a Moto G that is better than an old high-end phone in every way except support lifespan.
Phone price keeps going up but my paycheck keeps going down with inflation
But infinite growth!
The policy of a cancer cell
I still have a hard time comprehending that the current economic mess has just collectively refused to understand/plan/account for the concept of market saturation.
They should really stop over saturating the market by releasing new models every year with little to no meaningful upgrades
They could try innovating, I couldn’t give a shite about the cameras really. If I want to take proper photos I’ll get a DSLR. I’ll never want their smart processing of pics either.
Give me cool features again.
For me the camera was a selling point. I was tired of hauling around a dslr on my trips. I find that the smart processing is good enough 90% of the time and I don’t want to both haul the camera and handle the post processing anymore. I’d rather just have 90% quality photos of my family and spend more time with them. Hire a photographer for weddings, etc, but really the smart processing is pretty impressive for day to day and even trips.
Unfortunately for you, you’re in the minority. People have proven they’ll upgrade for better cameras.
I was considering getting a mirrorless camera and a compact lens setup for traveling with my family. After a week of researching I stayed with my phone. It’s a huge pita (especially once you consider post processing) and the only situations where you will really need one is low light or evening pictures, and nature photography.
So no, hauling a dslr and 3kg of lens is not really a solution, especially with a kid in one arm. My phone is several years old (Oneplus 7 Pro) and the only thing I wish it had was modern camera and software to match.
Like what, though? What is a need you have that your smartphone does not currently serve?
We’ve hit the wall of diminishing returns. How much power do you need to run lemmy?
Ive got a 4k pled 144HD panel in my phone… to read lemmy.
Pixel 6, look at Mr. Monopoly over here. I just got a 5 off eBay for $100. In fact, my last 6 or 7 phones came from eBay. Can’t imagine why I would pay for the latest and greatest.
No way in hell I’d trust some rando from eBay with selling me a phone not riddled with Malware.
Tmobile gave it to me for free after they shitcanned 4g during the Sprint merger. They had to give out new shiny 5g phones to appease users.
Do you put something like lineage on it? I replaced my 5 with a 7a just because it no longer gets updates as of this month I believe it is
I got an iPhone 14 pro as an upgrade (contract). Had a pixel 6 before, wish I had stayed on the 6 to be honest, the 14 pro is amazing but I barely use it for anything.
You need at least 2 pixel 6’s to run a lemmy… sorry 😞
If you’re upgrading your device every single time a new device comes along, you’re just chasing clout and status. They rarely, if ever, have significant performance upgrades that make sense in upgrading when your current device is perfectly fine.
Phones also aren’t special anymore. Like the days where phones were flashy and people needed the best/newest phones are gone. Everyone knows everyone has a phone, nobody cares what phone it is. It reminds me of like 2004-2008 when laptops were a big deal and then everyone had one and it became a tool and people stopped caring what you had.
To be fair the vast majority of people don’t do that and just buy a new phone after a few years when theirs is becoming too old, has issues or lacks useful features
Most people upgrade when their battery is shot.
I just buy refurbished or “New-Old-Stock” 2-year-old flagship phones off ebay for $100 or so bucks every other year.
In fact I think smart phones peaked 3 or 4 years ago and we’re going downhill now. The manufacturers remove features that people like in favor of objectively worse ones (lots of people loved having the fingerprint reader on the back, now it’s either gone entirely or under the screen for some stupid reason?, then of course headphone jacks are going extinct).
When is the last time a smart phone had a major improvement over it’s predecessor? And I mean like, “This one didn’t have a camera, this one does.” Especially since they’re converging on the same 5.7" black rectangle.
I like the finger print reader under the screen
It’s almost as if, they haven’t fundamentally updated smartphones in almost a decade, and now they want $2000 for them.
Also, it’s almost as if we’ve been in a recession for a year. Regardless of whether or not the government wants to call it a recession, we’ve had numerous back to back quarters with negative GDP growth. That’s literally a recession.
it’s amazing that in capitalism a company has to always show numbers rising like there is no physical upper boundary. The most logical and efficient economic model
It drives me insane how many people turn a blind eye to the funny numbers needing to always go up. Every “investor” will tell me how the market has never not recovered; how I’m the fool and surely not them for trusting in the system.
I hate that my retirement depends on a 401k, or money that constantly depreciates.
Constant growth at all costs. In the short term at least. Whether that works out in the long run or not…
Have they considered releasing another hard to hold glass slab exactly like the previous one?
I understand ‘worst sales’ but ‘worst performance’ doesn’t really fit. It’s in my opinion this is a fantastic performance on the market. With right to repair, longer software support, some models with replaceable batteries, we can use the phones longer and make the industry more sustainable and consumer friendly. For the last years already, the model feature upgrades were marginal and it’s fine that way.
In the future, I’d hope for further technical and regulatory development in that direction, resulting in further reduced annual sales numbers.
When the whole western society has been force fed that “we must consume else our economy will collapse”, not continously outselling (and throwing away barely year old work) is bad, this is the result.
Worst performance of trying to get your money.
They doubled the price while removing core features like headphone jacks and microSD.
The people who bought phones as a status symbol ran out of money and the people who are advanced users are sticking with their old phones that are simply better until planned obsolescence forces them to buy another older model.
I haven’t felt the headphone jack removal as much as I thought I would, though I’ve had a few sets of Bluetooth headphones for traveling since about 2014 or so
Good. We should be using our phones for longer.
Phone plateaued 5 years ago for the average user.
I have a one plus 6. I’m on it for hours everyday. Reading. Browsing. Listening. No gaming. Lots of pictures.
My online data ran out long before my phone data - for pictures.
Phone runs fast. No more updates so nothing changes on me anymore.
I have zero reason to update. Would I like a better camera? Sure. But not for 1200$ I don’t.
Could my battery last longer? Yeah. Sure. But I can replace it if I want for 20-40$
My next phone will probably be a refurbished last Gen phone. Nothing more then 400 I imagine.
I upgraded from a 7 to a 14 pro and while it doesn’t hang up on the newer OS as much (a problem it developed over its lifetime), it’s not really an appreciably better experience overall. The camera is nicer.
like desktop PCs
like DVD players?
no innovation, no need for a new device
apple seems to have quit innovating and google is just a fat fuck that is so lazy their core product search has gotten shit.
nokia nokia lol
Good. They should never have been that high anyways
Every major company releases the same phone year after year and the only significant change is the price. I don’t mind using the same phone for few years.
Waiting on replacement batteries to come back. Also 1k is a no way from me.
Maybe they should bring back some form-factor diversity that niche consumer segments could gravitate toward, instead of every manufacturer targeting only the largest (and blandest) portion of the pie and ignoring the rest of it. If it’s not clear, I am holding out for some decent “mini-sized” Android option.
Partly because everybody’s finances are stretched pretty thin, but also partly because phones got Good Enough like 6 years ago and so at this point you basically replace one when it breaks and replacement cost exceeds repair costs unless you’re an enthusiast who demands the latest and greatest… which is why the lucrously short support window for security patches on most Android devices is obscene. I know the technical reasons for them, but they’re still unacceptable.
Lmao stopped upgrading years ago…
When this 5 yo phone kicks the bucket, I’ll upgrade to a 4 yo model for cheap
Literally not missing out on anything and saving a fucking bag doing it
Mine is 5 years old, a Samsung S9. Other then the shorter battery everything seems to work just fine.
Cause they keep making them shittier and shittier. Like I can’t replace my battery like a fairphone, replace all the parts, have a microsd slot and fingerprint reader like the older phones. People complaining about size and weight. Check out the Samsung S5, what was fucking wrong with that? Worked fine and waterproof. Fucking bitchasses keep complaining about how it’s not possible.
finally some positive news.
Maybe because the only “innovations” that can be made to the smartphone is new cameras and new form factors, and only one of those is being focused on
It is amusing how cell phone companies want people to think about their products like a fridge or video game console, yet are shocked when people seem to only want to buy a new one when the old one breaks.
Well… do we all need to change our perfectly fine, advanced and fast pocket computer every year just to have always the latest -> IMO No.
Good for the environment that it’s a bad business year.
muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Who would have thought that the stagnation in development means people don’t want to buy a new phone for a 2% better camera every year. I recon we gonna see anti repair hitting new heights tho cos u gotta squeeze money out of people somehow.
foggy@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Stagnation in development, wages, >$1000 flagship pricetags.
Rise in inflation, cost of living.
Weird!
3arn0wl@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Perhaps at that point the consumer will opt for the repairable options.
muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Hmm its crazy that almost like rampant consumerism isn’t the most efficient thing to do
DrM@feddit.de 7 months ago
I think thats whats going to happen. Fairphones are mid-range, but a midrange phone is enough for everything nowadays. The only reason I want to switch my phone right now is because the fingerprint sensor is broken
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
Happened to desktop PC’s a couple decades back. Once there’s no reason to buy a new PC or phone, you stop buying a new PC or phone. Before that buying a new PC every few years meant less lag and needed ram/hard drive space.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Something not long ago reminded me of Weird Al’s “It’s All About The Pentiums” from 1999. And I went through it line by line to see what holds up and what doesn’t. Best line: “Your motherboard melts when you try to send a fax.”
There’s an entire verse dedicated to the joke of how quickly computers became obsolete, which just isn’t a thing anymore. A decently spec’d desktop can last a decade in service now.