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Comment by greenhouse_gas | Hacker News Reader

https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s9/ for US site.

Small question: Do people still buy $800 phones, and why? If you care about security, these probably won't receive security upgrades for more than a few years (S3 went from ICS to Kitkat. S4 went from Jelly-Bean to Lollipop, S5 went from KitKat to Marshmallow, S6 went from Lollipop to Nougat, so I don't expect this to make it past Android Q[1] (which should come out in two and a half years)), and unlike older models, custom ROM support is quite bad for modern Samsung models (S6 Lineageos just came out. S8 isn't supported yet).

Wouldn't it make more sense to get a slightly worse quality phone, but upgrade it every two years or so?

[1]. Unless Treble will make it so much easier to port to S9.

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Do people still buy $800 phones, and why?

There must be a term for this kind of question. To answer it, yes. Look at Apple’s average selling price and people are buying maxed out iPhone 8s and X’s.

But that question is like the old internet trope - “I haven’t had a television in 10 years. Do people still watch TV?”

That comment was regarding the expected lifetime of a device.

Apple is known for supporting their hardware for a looong time. You can for example, upgrade a 5S (2013) to iOS11. That 8/X people are buying can be expected to be fully usable through 2023, whereas for Android that's ~2 years.

Apple just announced discontinuing support for the original AppleTV that they first sold in 2007 so yeah Apple is pretty good with support most of the time.

You can still download older versions of apps from the App Store for iOS back to 4. I recently reset an old first gen iPad and was able to use older versions of Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Spotify, Plex and the entire iWork suits.

"There must be a term for this kind of question."

I agree. It might be summed up as "Why other people have different preferences than I do ?"

"Why do people buy expensive clothes/cars/watches/tech ?"

Mostly because other people are different from you and will place different value to things than what you might.

Their financial condition might also differ from yours, and maybe $800 dollars are pocket money for them.

It is surprsing in how many contexts the same concept can be applied: "Why so many people complain about bezels ?"

Because other people are different from you, and possibly will place more value on a phone's aesthetics rather than its software or processing power.

TL;DR A lot of other people are different from you. It is surprising to me how this does not seem to be common knowledge.

I usually buy a $900 iPhone, sell it for $600 after a year, and buy the new iPhone for $900. So I spend around $300 to upgrade my iPhone every year.

I used to upgrade my phone after 3 years, at that point the phone becomes very outdated and it's worth is hardly $100. So it costs me around the same if I buy an inexpensive phone every year, buy an expensive phone and use it for few years, or trade up a new iPhone every year.

This strategy only works for iPhone which has great resale value.

Works for Pixel too, but doing this with any of the other android brands would turn out more expensive.

depends when you buy... I sold my last phone for the same amount that I bought it for, a year later (bought it on sale and it was not a Pixel or iPhone)

which phone was it?

Samsung Galaxy J3... not a flagship phone, but I bought it and sold it for around $50 ... another example could be the LG X-charge that was sold by Comcast for $0.01 last year on sale (no contract) and it is $180 now

I think it might work with expensive Android phones if you do that every 6 months or even less... (keep the box and phone intact of course).

that's a lot of work

Anecdote: It takes less than 10 minutes. I call the local iPhone/Mac dealer, we agree on a time, they come, give me money, I give them the device and it's done.

I bought a pixel 2 (for $650), and I would have bought a pixel xl if it weren't for the inferior screen.

something to consider: if I had had a 32GB og pixel at the launch of the pixel 2, I could have sold it for ~$400. if that trend continues, I would be happy to pay about $250 a year to always have a current flagship phone with monthly security updates. that's only 20% more expensive than just buying a ~$400 phone (nexus 5x launch price) every two years. of course you could also sell the cheaper phone, but the non-google phones seem to lose their value faster.

the real question is, why spend flagship money on anything other than a pixel?

Or use the same money to buy two Xiaomi flagship phones and give one away...

do any xiaomi phones have oreo yet? I can't fathom spending $400 on a phone that's already out of date.

Xiaomi Mi A1 does, it is a android one phone and is expected to get Android P at launch.

Sort of. LineageOS 15.1 (Android 8.1) was officially released yesterday. Mi5, Mi5s and Mi5s plus were among the initial batch of about a dozen supported devices.

>I would be happy to pay about $250 a year to always have a current flagship

I find this rent-like model very strange. It was the same problem with carrier contracts. Now that contracts, at least in their original form, are gone, not much has changed. Due to a variety of reasons, people still end up paying the same or more than before.

I'm not saying I literally want to rent a phone for $250 a year. I still desire all the benefits of owning the phone, like selling it for market value at a time of my choosing, being able to switch carriers without paying off the phone first, etc. I'm saying that $250 doesn't seem like an unreasonable annual spend to have a current generation phone with timely OS/security updates. it definitely sounds better than buying a $400-500 phone whose OS is already out of date at launch every two years and then not bothering to sell it because it has depreciated so much.

the only thing that makes it rent-like is that I would pay a similar price every year.

Vodafone (EU) has a plan where you pay ~€10 extra per month to upgrade your phone yearly (trading in the old one, of course).

The new Nokia 7 Plus appears to be a good choice for a mid range at €390. Runs Android One so no crapwares. Snapdragon 660, 4G ram, 18:9 screen, quick charging, 3.5mm jack, NFC.

Well, if you don't mind the enormous 6" display.

Anecdotally, the kind of person who spends 800 - 1000 on a phone also upgrades it every year or two. It's a status symbol as much as anything. Plus there's always the fact that you will have the latest and greatest camera, and for many people that's important.

Personally, I'm with you. Recently bought a Moto G5 plus for a couple of hundred euro and its fine. However, I do confess if I had a higher income I'd probably be another happy consumer of the super high end phones.

Worth noting that in Europe at least they have a very high resale value, so you will make much of the cost back if selling in a year or so in good condition.

I'd say in Europe people try to resell them for high price (looking at eBay DE), but given so many of them are there stuck at the same price for months, I don't think their resale value is actually that high.

No idea what a general profile of such people is, but I generally buy my wife a new top model every 3-4 years. She couldn't care less about status and neither do I, who inherits them afterwards :) This way the phone is used for 5+ years and makes lost initial "saving" meaningless.

I had cheaper phones before but saving a couple hundred euros in exchange for a couple of years of annoyance is not worth it to me. This way I know she gets currently top experience and I, when I get her phone, get a very well understood one.

On the high end phones, there's usually a pretty good resale value. So even though the phone might cost $800, in two years it's probably still going to be worth $300.

In the next week or two I am upgrading my phone and I think I'm going to buy my first iPhone. The only other phone I would consider is one from Google. Because they do such a crappy job with security, I'll never again consider an LG, Samsung, or other third party phone. Apple or Google for me.

"the kind of person who spends 800 - 1000 on a phone also upgrades it every year or two"

Nope, I don't mind how much my phone costs since I use it daily, but I will use it until some component fails in a terminal way. I had a Note 3, swapped its display module once, but it finally died. It lasted maybe three or four years.

> but I will use it until some component fails in a terminal way

This is what I told myself too, but I also upgraded after 3-4 years after being annoyed at just how slow my phone was (or to put it another way, just how much CPU power apps demanded now). The phone still works perfectly fine, it just slows down to a crawl right when you're in the biggest hurry. (e.g. at one point Google Maps took multiple minutes to refresh the screen right when I was driving and trying to figure out the right directions, and I still haven't been able to reproduce it, but I sure as heck don't want to live through that experience again.)

I but a top of the line iPhone every year. I get a tax discount of half of it because I use it for development, then I sell it at the next year and make the rest back.

Moto G5+ is an awesome budget phone (especially the version with more memory). 90% as good as the flagships for less than half the cost. Also, I quite like Motorola's version of Android. Very minimal with a few very useful features. The double chop motion for the flashlight is ingenious.

Caveat: If you care about a lot about the best possible photo quality, then it probably isn't the right choice. I found it to be good enough for my needs.

With the iPhone having 40-50% market share in the US, I doubt anyone sees it as a status symbol. Besides, every major carrier has some sort of monthly lease or 0% interest plan. It’s not that hard to get an $800 phone affordability.

You're probably right for the US, but it's definitely a status symbol in the EU which is a bigger market than the US.

Most people don't buy $800 phone, they pay $30+/mo for two years until it is paid off or they trade it in for something newer and continue paying $30+/mo.

$30/mo is comparable to $20/mo for most people, and they get the newest shiniest thing (and non-tech people don't know that Android phones don't get updates after the new model comes out).

It would unless of course you buy brand where that is less of a problem either because they are supported longer (iPhones) or because you can install something like LineageOS.

I personally will never buy a Samsung again. I got a June security update in December.

Sadly if you buy an Android phone, don't ever expect it to get updated. You might get lucky, but don't expect any ongoing support

Please don't spread misinformation. Just because your carrier isn't pushing updates to you doesn't mean Android phones don't get updates.

I would like to find a carrier that does actually push updates. But this was a specifically branded Samsung update. 6 months after they should have

Carriers should not be responsible or even allowed to push updates outside of very limited reasons. Samsung made the phone they should be legally required to actively update it

Except with iPhones they don’t get to delay the release.

Buying it for a full price isn't the best idea, but it seems like T-mobile US likes to do a "buy one get one free" deal on those about 6 months after the release (that's how I did it last year with S8+). No contract either, the phone will just be locked to t-mobile until you pay the whole price, which you can do over 24 months (no extra charges) with the option to pay the whole thing off at any moment.

>> Do people still buy $800 phones

The iPhone X is the best selling phone since it came out, isn't it?

They're having problems with slow sales and are cutting production as a result.

http://bgr.com/2018/01/29/iphone-x-sales-high-price-supply-c...

Leaving out a big word from the headline:

>reportedly

Even the source the guy links to is his own article that is also conjecture. Great content.

It seems pretty unequivocal:

> Samsung Electronics is to slash production at its OLED panel plant in response to customer Apple's decision to reduce output of the iPhone X following weak demand

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/AC/Samsung-to-slash-OLED-pa...

None of the words in your quote are sourced by Apple, they are entirely based on rumors in the supply chain.

Trying to read the tea leaves on what supplier changes mean for the overall market is a waste of your time. It’s about as far from unequivocal as I can imagine.

Forget about Treble, OEMs are the ones expected to deliver updates and they don't even have to certify their phones for Oreo, if they are initially released with an earlier version.

Hence why the majority of new 2018 devices thus far are all coming with Nougat.

Usually Samsung has a lot of deals so you end up getting a BOGO offer or some trade in offer so most people don't end up paying 800 bucks for it. I think I paid like half of that.

I generally buy $600 phones, but I spend a fraction of that buying used/refurb (eBay,etc.). I have an S7 Edge+, S7 Edge, 2 S7s, an S6, and an S6 edge. I spent maybe $1400 on all combined, with all but the S7E+ being in essentially new condition (it's cracked and ugly but makes a good, free WiFi server).

I need a phone that does everything. Water proof, wireless fast charging, vr, use it as a credit card everywhere. Slow software updates are something I knew going into it. Oh and a headphone jack. I try to find phones that do everything my s8 does but I can’t.

I paid $650 for my Pixel last February.

One thing it could do off the bat was work with my $50 Daydream VR headset, which only a few Android phones could do at that time.

I am an Android programmer so having a nice phone is worth it for me.

For me it's the antenna. Top end phones have better reception/antenna.

Status symbol, premium materials to show off.

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