The plucky local Mom 'n’ Pop phone maker faces death People are spending a little more on their phones, squeezing local and niche phone manufacturers. “The market is consolidating around bigger players. Small players with low price propositions are really struggling,” Gartner’s Anshul Gupta told us, reflecting on the Gartner’s latest numbers. Gupta has seen the trend of higher …
I paid for the "wear and tear" replacements in the family Xperia fleet after the summer about twice of what I paid for the last lot.
The mid-range models are simply gone now. There is land-fill and some weird "low end of the high end" which starts at ~ 200 or thereabouts. What you get for that price is definitely not mid-range any more. In fact, there are very few features to distinguish between a 200£ phone and a 500£ phone from any manufacturer at the moment.
So it is not surprising that the high-end players are doing better - they are selling at double of what was their ASP last year and the landfill is frankly on its way out.
I think everyone must be dazzled by the headlights of Samsung and Apple. If you look around a bit you can find really good spec phones for a fraction of the price. I bought an Elephone S8 from Gearbest for 175 quid and it's brilliant. It's got a gorgeous 6" 2560 x 1440 screen, Helio X25 Deca Core 2.5GHz processor, 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. Its 21MP camera isn't quite as good as it should be, but it's still better than a budget phone one and other than that I was amazed at how good the phone is.
I think everyone must be dazzled by the headlights of Samsung and Apple.
Possibly, but this is also a change in the market as refresh rates decline and people hang onto their phones longer. The premium manufacturers are much better equipped to deal with the longer cycles, meaning there are fewer sales for the others.
So, rather than a dash for the shiny, it's about sticking with known brands.
The premium manufacturers are much better equipped to deal with the longer cycles,
Apple maybe. Here in the Android camp, I don't see anybody dealing in any way at all with longer handset refresh cycles. And why would they? Apple are a vertically integrated quasi monopolist, but the Android handset makers are simple manufacturers, who make their money when the get paid for a shipped device. Deduct warranty costs, that's their profit. The concept of supporting the embedded software of a product is as alien to them as candyfloss is to an octopus.
... it may be true. Personally, I doubt it as consumers will have less need to flaunt their wealth when it is more commonplace, but we'll see.
However, I would have thought the opposite is likely true in the "anglo-saxon" economies where real wages are going down for many people.
The easiest way to economise on a new phone is to what more and more are doing: extend the replacement cycle. This leads to the mid-range being squeezed as people stick with what they have rather getting a replacement that is more or less the same, or they splash out on the latest and greatest.
Phones now have to compete with music and TV subscriptions services for people's reduced disposable income.
"extend the replacement cycle"
This tends to imply buying more expensive phones from better known makers. With Apple, Google or Sony (don't know about others, this is just an observation) you can reasonably expect two release cycles before what you have is either getting slow or gets no further updates. If there's a big security hole that then doesn't get an update, you may not want to use a phone for anything mission critical.
The easiest way to economise on a new phone is to what more and more are doing: extend the replacement cycle
For the lazy, yes. But IME the easiest way to economise is to go SIM only and then explore the colourful world of Chinese challenger brands, where there are some stonking bargains to be had.
My first consideration on getting a new phone is how long it will be supported. I used to have an Android; not only was it unreliable, it never, ever, got OS updates and barely got other updates, nothing at all after six months. It was replaced by an iPhone. Years later, still getting updates, including OS updates, over the air, no problems. I will probably replace it in a year or two with another iPhone, having got in excess of six years out of it. Yes, it cost more than the Android, but I'd have had to buy three or four of 'em in the same time period. As I didn't buy a top-of-the-line iPhone, it cost about double what the Android had cost. Spending more in the first place resulted in a lower TCO, as the phone plans and carrier were the same for both the Apple and the Android.
My second consideration is the use case. When I got the Android, I was fairly new to the whole smart phone thing, and didn't have any investment in various stuff: apps, music and other media, books, etc. Over the last few years I have spent a lot of time making my life more convenient by accessing stuff from the phone. I have a lot of stuff parked in various things on the iPhone. (and my iPad, but that's another story) If I were to move to Android now, I'd have to rebuild all of that. That's not happening unless Apple totally loses the plot. It's just too much work. I would expect that people who have spent most of the last five-six-seven years on Android also have far too much invested in that 'ecosystem' to be able to easily move.
I will not be buying an iPhone X. I might buy an iPhone 8, or whatever succeeds the 8, next year or the year after. It will be more expensive than low-end Android. It will also last longer, be better supported, and fit in better with my existing 'ecosystem' than any Android, no matter how cheap or expensive.
The major reason why I have Apple devices is not about shiny. It's about the fact that when I tried Android I got burned, badly, while the Apple devices did what I wanted, when I wanted, and how I wanted.
YMMV.
"It was replaced by an iPhone. Years later, still getting updates, including OS updates, over the air, no problems."
Yeah, except that latest IOS 11 made my iPhone 6 barely usable. Simple things like looking at the recent calls and picking the a number - and suddenly the phone refreshes the list and the phone dials something else I selected. Every casual thing has gotten slower, things like just scrolling lists etc.
I would have been happy with IOS 10 and stream of updates.
If you have an iPhone older than a couple years old, it is best to skip the .0 release and wait for the .1 release. Often people will report the .0 release slows the ones 3+ years old like your 6 - the reasoning goes that Apple is concentrating on testing with the latest models (i.e. the 8 & X in this case) and not worrying about optimization on older models. The .1 release often addresses these issues, it is probably the optimization/cleanup release.
iOS 11 should if anything be faster on your 6 because it is 64 bit only, whereas iOS 10 supported both 32 and 64 bit models, and thus included run time support for 32 bit libraries that is no longer present now. I can't say my 6S plus was faster on 11.0, but it was certainly not slower.
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