Smartphone sales down 22 percent in Q2, the worst performance in a decade::North American sales are bad for everyone, except, miraculously, Google.
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.
Stagnation in development, wages, >$1000 flagship pricetags.
Rise in inflation, cost of living.
Weird!
Perhaps at that point the consumer will opt for the repairable options.
Hmm its crazy that almost like rampant consumerism isn’t the most efficient thing to do
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
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.
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.
I remember a great AMV to that song. Always loved me some W.A. White n Nerdy was a real banger. Also, I heard “I think I’m a Clone Now” way more than “I think We’re Alone Now.”
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.
It’s internet capable!
Does it have Bluetooth?
It’s all about the vibration alert
Neuralink!
(Shudders)
Analink?
Thats the fountain pen I keep in my butt
For an in depth analysis of your shit
That could actually be useful (IBD gang)
Isn’t that essentially what that one chess player was accused of?
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).
I find hilarious* that they claim their phones is waterproof while shoving a water sensitive sticker that triggers with the small hint of humidity to deny warranty.
*infuriating
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I miss the jack, and I can still replace a battery if need be (have the equipment and know-how) but no SD card slots is a real kick in the nuts. I’m keeping my n20U.
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.
Oooo does it have a foldable screen that no one asked for?
I had a non-waterproof iPhone from 2009-2021 and never had an issue. I hate apple’s BS excuse to sell airpods.
And coming out with a new one every year despite it being the same as last year’s
The ea fifa sports of consumer electronics.
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. EDIT: OK guys, I get it, I was wrong. It was an iphone 8 Plus, not 10 Plus.
There was no iPhone 10 plus…
It was an iPhone 8 Plus. The only thing I like about the iPhone 11 camera is low light performance vs. the 8 Plus. But nearly everything else about the 8 Plus cam seemed better. Image sharpness, noise, telephoto more desirable to me than fisheye, etc.
lol no worries I was just thinking you meant an XS Max which would be the equivalent to a 10 pro max. Going from that to a regular 11 would be a relative downgrade.
Idk I jumped over to Apple with the 12 and the camera on that was better than my pixel 4XL. I got a 15 pro max now and it blows the pants off my 12.
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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.
And one for infidelity
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?
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.
Blame greedflation. Phones should be cheaper now, not thousands of dollars.
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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.”
If you think you’re not using “the big carriers” in the US I’ve got news for you: you are using the big carriers. They are all either owned or leasing bandwidth from the big carriers. It’s nothing more than an illusion of choice.
If they are cheaper or different in any meaningfully way, it’s still worth it. Not sure if would be considered an illusion of choice or not, unless you want to boycott them of course. Not American though so not sure how different they are.
But for example I am on a cheaper carrier owned for the most common carrier here in Spain which is quite expensive. And it’s cheap as fuck compared with the main one and unless you want their tv deal it has 99% of the same services for a fraction of the costs.
I’m using their towers, but paying 1/3rd the price. My point is why pay the premiumto use them directly if they took away the only advantage of doing so.
Exactly what I was coming to write. Who could have thought that rising notably the prices would have led to less sales?
You can still buy a Moto G for like $200 that is better than an old high-end phone in every way and runs Android like a champ. Only flaw is short support lifespan.
They should really stop over saturating the market by releasing new models every year with little to no meaningful upgrades.
Even mid-range phones nowadays are good enough to last long after they stop receiving updates, it therefore makes little financial sense (for the average consumer) to buy the newest model every year, not even touching on the environmental impact.
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.
I mean this right here: I miss those glorious days in the late 2000s when phones were fun. You could buy a phone that fit your lifestyle. If you text and email a lot, get a phone with a keyboard. Take a lot of photos? Get a camera phone. Like listening to music? Here’s a media phone. Like games? Here’s a gaming phone. Just want a thing that can make phone calls that will last a month on a charge because you don’t use it much? Here’s a regular old flip phone.
Nowadays you don’t even have a real choice in size. Want a small phone that’s easy to fit in a pocket because you usually have a laptop with you anyway? Get bent!
Yeah I won’t be buying a new phone until they return to a reasonable size. I have a tablet and laptop for real work.
Unfortunately for you, you’re in the minority. People have proven they’ll upgrade for better cameras.
See how I said “I”, that means it’s a personal view so the statistics for the masses don’t matter…but also this post is about declining sales.
You made zero substantive input to this conversation.
No need to be rude.
This is the reply of someone with nowhere else to go, there is no need to be rude just as there is no need to be relevant I guess.
You were snarky initially and it was unnecessary, you get back what you put out.
My intention wasn’t to be snarky. Sorry you took it that way. 🤷🏼♂️ Get outside and enjoy the day instead of bickering with me. I’m just some stranger on the interweb. Let it go. I’m not worth it. lol.
I had a lovely day, it was a stunning day on the Danube. Hope yours was just as nice.
Like what, though? What is a need you have that your smartphone does not currently serve?
I want my phone to be usable with a dock where I can put in a keyboard, mouse and screen to use as a PC like the steam deck.
Isn’t Samsung DEX exactly that?
Wow you are right, I never heard of that.
We’ve hit the wall of diminishing returns. How much power do you need to run lemmy?
Ive got a 4k oled 144hrtz panel in my phone… to read lemmy.
And my pixel 6 is considered aging.
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.
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
GrapheneOS, definitely worth checking out!
No way in hell I’d trust some rando from eBay with selling me a phone not riddled with Malware.
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 😞
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Pixel 6 has 1080p90 OLED but ok
Its a 6 pro my Bad
That’s 1440p120
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
Constant growth at all costs. In the short term at least. Whether that works out in the long run or not…
Good. We should be using our phones for longer.
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.
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 the 7 developed over its lifetime), it’s not really an appreciably better experience overall. The camera is nicer.
Plus you can probably run stock Android on the op6 if you wanted to run Android 13
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.
And with one graph that argument is out the window.
Well there are foldables, which are growing as category, but I don’t know if it makes a net difference and anyway they’re too small to make a difference currently.
"There are some of you who want phones that are easier to fit in a pocket, but we’ll break the deal we made with Satan if we ever build 4 inch phones again, so here’s a 6 inch phone that bends in half. The screen is so soft your stubble will ruin it and the Earth’s atmosphere is too coarse for the severely complicated hinge to survive a month. That’ll be $9900.
Except whenever a manufacturer, including Apple, tries to market a phone that’s smaller than the average size, nobody buys them.
The only people who actually want smaller phones are some very loud people on the internet.
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
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
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.
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Honestly… most people probably would benefit from a phone as powerful as a laptop. Imagine I could carry my laptop in my pocket and all I need to turn it into an ergonomical computer would be to pop it into a docking station. I would love that. I barely use a computer outside of my work computer, to the point where it’s barely worth owning one. I do, for some random fringe cases, but it gets used once a week…
I would love a laptop powerful phone with docking capabilities. Just have it down regulate to normal phone needs, until it’s docked.
You can even make the phone thicker if you want, if it’s going to be that useful, I don’t care about a little extra weight in my pocket.
Most Android phones can already do this with a cheap USB-C hub as long as they support video out. Samsung phones have DEX, which even gives you a desktop interface, but it can be disabled if your apps have issues with it.
Wow thanks! I just saw DEX in the hidden option menus and wondered what it even did. That’s really cool.
Does it just launch a bigger version of your phone, or is it like a separate OS where you can have multiple windows doing different things simultaneously? The Samsung marketing materials mostly seem to talk about being able to use your phone and the other screen separately. But it doesn’t really go into detail what you can do on the other screen.
