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Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

This is such a weird statement.

What hardware realm? They're involved all over.

Right now they're absolutely crushing the camera market - the A73 and AR73 are taking the world by storm, with tons of Canon and Nikon DSLR converts (Including myself). Their GM lenses are the sharpest available at a lot of focal lengths, the bokeh is close to the top of readily available modern lenses, etc. They're certainly competing there.

Their UHS-II cards are some of the fastest on the market.

The PS4 is the leader in lifetime sales vs. other consoles.

What hardware are you talking about?

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I agree with you but I do think Sony missed the chance to take advantage of their camera expertise and invent the best cameraphone first.

The number of people that would buy a phone just for the camera is a small market and the phone market aside from the iPhone is a low margin commodity market. Samsung makes a lot of money from the phone market - but not from selling phones. They make most of thier money as a component supplier.

Sony's camera division makes money from selling camera parts to other companies - including Apple.

Other factor also contributes to the demise of Sony phone division. Here in my country, Sony Z1 and Z2 boom as they are probably the first premium phone with nice camera and waterprof body. But bad aftermarket support and service destroy that advantages very quickly. Nowdays almost everyone avoid Sony smartphone. Either you choose phone with more support and service center such as Samsung or go to other way with Xiaomi (cheap with almost non existance official service & support).

The had the best cameraphones - the K800, K850 etc were way, way ahead of the game.

Then the iPhone came out and just being a phone wasn't good enough.

Now everyone else uses Sony's sensor anyway so what is their advantage? Lenses?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_T610

Maybe not the first, damned close.

The Xperia phones and E-paper offerings are products where Sony could have been competitive with the market leaders (Apple, Amazon), partly because they were among the first to market, but they chose not to spend much on R&D and thus lost their dominance.

My comment does not refer to the gaming and photography divisions, as those are cash cows for Sony.

Their phones have been treading water in the market for years.

Depends on the market i suspect.

That said, they seem to do way less marketing than Samsung or Apple.

Even so, they have carved out a niche of making smaller Android phones (their Compact variants) that share internals with their larger brethren.

OffTopic, the Switch isn't the leader?

PS4 has more units sold than Switch and Xbox One combined.

The Switch has been out for less than 2 years, vs. 8 years or so for the PS4, which is quite a head start. It may outsell the PS4 right now, though.

> The Switch has been out for less than 2 years, vs. 8 years or so for the PS4, which is quite a head start

You're off by a factor of two. The PS4 has been out for 4.5 years, not "8 years or so".

> It may outsell the PS4 right now, though.

In FY2017 the PS4 sold 19 million units. The Switch sold 13 million (15.5M sold in total so far, but 2.7M were in FY2016).

Thanks for the fact check.

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