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Comment by DoubleGlazing | Hacker News Reader

I used to work for a mobile phone wholesaler that also owned a phone repair business and they noticed this trend as far back as 2013. The age of phones coming in for repair was rising year on year. They were coming under pressure from manufacturers and retailers to disincentivise customers from repairing older phones. One manufacturer even threatened to stop paying for in-warranty repairs if the company offered an out-of-warranty repair service.

The problem is that smartphones are way too expensive. Back in the old days of dumb phones a top end SIM free phone would cost no more than €400. Most people would opt for a cheaper model that allowed for a 12 months subsidy with the phone being free and monthly fees being fairly low by todays standards. In the UK it was common to find deals where you got a cheap phone for free, plus a game console or TV on a 12 month contract.

Now it has flipped. Top end phones are now nudging €1000, this means higher monthly fees plus 24-36 month contracts. That's a hell of a commitment, especially considering smart phones aren't as durable as dumb phones were. Of course people are repairing phones when they cost that much.

Plus, there is less of a feature incentive to upgrade. All I use my phone for is web browsing, email, social stuff and photo/video - it's three years old and does all that with no lag. New models don't offer me enough of an incentive to upgrade.

If manufacturers want people to upgrade more often they need to work on curbing the price of top end models. The more expensive they are, the longer people are going to want them to last. Also, a bit more innovation would be nice - must every smartphone follow the exact same black rectangle design template?

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> The problem is that smartphones are way too expensive.

No.

People keeping their phones longer is not a problem. People creating less trash is not a problem. People choosing to hold on to their money rather than pumping it into tech companies at a furious rate is not a problem.

Something can be a problem from one person's perspective and not a problem from another person's perspective and/or globally. :) (Full disclosure: I upvoted you, because from a global perspective I agree that it is not a problem.)

I'm going to go ahead and say that, if you have a perspective where it's that important for you to be figuring out ways to compel people to send you 1/10 of the average person's discretionary income every 1-2 years, then it's that perspective that's the problem.

Sure, but if your perspective is that you want to design something compel-ling enough that people would send you that money, then maybe it's not so bad.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that perspective though, as the benefits can easily be worth it to the individual. Consider that in many places smartphones are the only gateway to the Internet, and that having access to the Internet (and all the productivity that entails) can easily be worth more than 10% of discretionary income.

As one example: https://foodtank.com/news/2015/01/five-ways-cell-phones-are-...

You're comparing smartphone to no smartphone at all, which is (unintentionally, I realize) a srawman version of what I'm talking about.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't get a mobile or smart phone at all. I'm criticizing planned obsolescence, "free replacements" and other consumer-hostile policies that are designed to try and force or trick people into spending vastly more money than they would need to if they were simply after an Internet-equipped mobile device, and were allowed full agency as consumers.

I do way more meaningful things on the internet with my laptop than my phone. Not all internet access is the same opportunity.

ok but what is your alternative to the capitalist model?

>Something can be a problem from one person's perspective and not a problem from another person's perspective and/or globally. :)

Sure, but also some things (like waste and overconsumption) are objective problems for our societies/environment, and we should not allow companies to profit from them and find ways to make them worse.

All depends how the discarded device is being used -- i.e. the net emissions of the new device. Apple claims to emit about 80 kg of carbon dioxide (equivalent) per iPhone. This is basically in the noise for the typical consumer.

Does that include the whole supply chain?

80kg * 100s of millions adds up soon. Plus this number can sliced and diced in several ways (e.g. does it included total costs for raw materials, transport, and so on, or just the assembly manufacturing?)

I was speaking from the manufacturers perspective.

As a consumer I can see the difference between a €200 smartphone and a €1,000 smartphone isn't as wide as it used to be.

Also worth noting that the wholesale company I worked for made its real money in accessories.

I bought a Motorola last year for €160, which isn't a great deal. It works perfectly well. It isn't slow. (Admittedly I am not glued to my phone 24-7 like some people).

I have no idea why people feel the need to spend 6 or 7 times more for the latest iPhone. What do you get for the extra money that is actually useful? I know it has a "better" screen but I never had a problem reading on the phone I have. Faster processor? Are people performing heavy computing on their phones, or just sending some whatsapp messages ans surfing the web?

Generally it's the camera which incentives my friends with better phones, more expensive phone = much better camera.

Apart from that, it's also the same argument about why would anyone buy an expensive watch or a branded handbag or expensive clothes? It's to show off.

I've purchased flagship Android phones from Samsung/Google for a while. The biggest differentiator for me is the quality of the camera. I've owned budget phones before, and even though I'm not much of a photographer, I find the (relatively) poorer photo quality a big turn-away.

Other smaller reasons include convenience features like wireless charging, a fingerprint reader, water resistance, a nicer screen, and faster Android updates that are available for longer.

Water resistance is easily prioritized if the previous device failed due to water damage -- this was a big factor in my last purchase

Security. My phone is the root of trust for my life. It has my password manager (I never use a PM on a full computer) and is my only truly trusted device.

I wouldn’t trust your Motorola’s timely security updates or hardware trustzone implememtation.

The vast, vast majority of people who buy new phones don't care about security. They buy them because they're the "new shiny thing."

You could just as well use pass [1] or something on a USB stick.

[1] https://www.passwordstore.org/

You can't check your email on a USB stick. You still very much need a phone for most uses.

Funny you say that. I'm the exact opposite. I consider my laptop to be much more likely to be secure than my phone.

The constant availability of a phone is a big incentive to make it the central device.

Most laptop OSes, like Windows, macOS, and Linux, are a decade behind mobile OSes in terms of application sandboxing and also still lagging behind on restricting OS tampering and implementing reliable chains of trust from the system software to the hardware level, e.g. features like secure enclaves.

Unfortunately, those restrictions also make mobile OSes less useful for the sort of technical work that people use "real" OSes for. However, those restrictions make such devices much more compelling roots of trust for our digital lives.

An iOS app can't extract my contacts unless I grant permission, yet an application installed on Ubuntu via `apt` can casually start rummaging around my home directory which I won't know about unless I spend considerable time on mandatory access control profiles, isolation through containerisation or virtualisation, or something equally esoteric for the average user.

I suppose a phone does hold more sensitive information though, like location and mobile payments, making it a more lucrative target.

These desktop OSs don't, however, run a baseband known to be littered with bugs that listens for commands over the EM spectrum amd has low level access to the entire system. Even airplane mode just means it doesn't transmit.

Good point. The lack of visibility into today's blackbox commodity hardware is frightening, such as Intel ME. It's even worse when that hardware is listening to external commands via the EM spectrum and the like, as you point out.

> An iOS app can't extract my contacts unless I grant permission, yet an application installed on Ubuntu via `apt` can casually start rummaging around my home directory which I won't know about unless I spend considerable time on mandatory access control profiles, isolation through containerisation or virtualisation, or something equally esoteric for the average user.

Fwiw, this is becoming increasingly less true on macOS. And the newer Macs also have secure enclaves.

I'm generally not a fan of the trend, as it means more hoops for me to jump through, and I'm not convinced I benefit from this level of security. But, it is much closer to iOS.

Yes, macOS seems to be heading in the right direction (even if it means frustrating legitimate usage patterns at times).

In particular, I like that it kept it simple by either an application being sandboxed with explicit user permissions for certain features, or not being sandboxed at all. Contrast with Linux FlatPaks where even "sandboxed" programs can have a wide range of implicit permissions based on the image configuration, which aren't obvious to end users when running `flatpak install` in the same way that macOS's privacy settings are for each sandboxed macOS app.

I remember some FlatPak applications defaulting to allowing unsandboxed home directory access without prompting me on installation, which seemed to defeat the purpose somewhat. It does block nefarious control flow attacks against programs that declare a strict sandbox, but that doesn't seem to go far enough in my view.

> Most laptop OSes, like Windows, macOS, and Linux, are a decade behind mobile OSes in terms of application sandboxing and also still lagging behind on restricting OS tampering and implementing reliable chains of trust from the system software to the hardware level, e.g. features like secure enclaves.

Desktops/Laptops come with decades worth of software that I do trust. Applying trust at the application level or at a permissions prompt is too late, for the average user it has to be handled by the OS vendor, much like linux distros and apple do. Users mostly just click to allow everything, even most tech savy ones.

The android and possibly iOS sand boxing also does a poor job of protecting against things like user tracking.

Why's that? My Moto G5+ bought in January 2018 gets updates of some sort or another every few months.

So who do you trust?

As is the 2013 iPhone 5s. What are the chances that you will still get updates in 5+ years?

how are those updates going to look in January 2020

What's your plan if you lose the phone, or it gets stolen?

Status. Being part of the cool kids with their airdrop and animojis that the proles can't use.

Is that a factor beyond high school?

It is if you make it a factor. Some do.

it is a factor in high schools?

Well, kids do have silly rivalries and "clubs" based on things like their family's income and how much designer stuff they wear.

It wouldn't be much different in adult life too, but unlike kids, richer / upper middle class people are not forced in the same space for half of their day with people making less (unless they're their subordinates in an office). Often they don't even live in the same areas of a city (or in the same area of the country). So they just signal their superiority over their poorer brethren on social media mostly (that's where expensive branch pics and holiday instagrams and other consumption showcases come from).

Scott Galloway, a marketing professor, and an interesting guy, thing that it is the main factor, even after high school.

Better camera is a big incentive for many people.

I'd have thought for most people it's an incentive like better car engine, they don't really need it, but they can say "I've got the latest 20Mpx" (when really it's probably the quality of the glass, flash, processing that's most important rather than raw megapixels).

I've been looking at cameras again, I want more control over focus, better ISO, but don't want to pay so much for a better phone because the glass and sensor size is limiting.

Not really - I take most photos of my kids with my smartphone - the quality has been increasing dramatically in the last 5 year and these photos are memories that will last for 50 years. So it’s definitely worth it for me.

Some people use their phone for things other than web surfing. Some examples: shooting high quality video. Taking high quality photos. For many people, the high quality phone has taken the place of a camera. The sub-$1000 digital camera can be replaced by iPhone. You can record music using GarageBand. An iPhone can also replace a Zoom recorder in many contexts. You can use an iPhone to measure rooms, plan furniture and even plan how paint will look on your walls with AR. You can create Keynote presentations pretty easily. You can create documents using Pages or update spreadsheets. You can use iPhone as a POS system: when I had a small hotel, we used iPhone to check in guests and take payments. I also occasionally use it to SSH into servers when I need to do something quick and I’m not at my computer. I use it to read books, so the screen quality does make a difference. The screen quality also makes a difference when editing photos.

The Civilizations AR App is pretty incredible and isn’t possible on low quality hardware. The Chalk AR app for live tech support is also not possible on a cheap Motorola. There are also “fun” aspects, like games, and the Dance Reality app that uses AR to teach dance steps. You can use iPhone to launch model rockets, control drones and a bunch of other cool things. Not everyone is going to care about all of this stuff, but for those that do, iPhone is far more than a websurfing, texting device. The criticism around why would anyone “need” so much power in a phone isn’t unlike the old days when nobody “needed” a hard drive or more than 16kb of RAM. Or a color screen. Or anything other than a dot matrix printer. These expensive phones are essentially supercomputers in your pocket; that people choose to use them for the proverbial solitaire isn’t the fault of the tech. It’s like people that use pocket calculators lamenting why anyone would ever need a Cray.

i buy refurbished iphones. Admittedly iphones have better build than almost all and are better-lasting overall, i wish i could find a decent alternative. At the price points of current iphones, it is impossible to justify it as an upgrade. At least my region, it is either first-time phone buyers, or people wanting to show off/signal.

The midrange Moto G released in 2018 is much less responsive than my old iPhone 6s from 2018 that my son “upgraded to” and it will get updates a lot longer.

Two things for me.

One, as mentioned numerous times here, is the camera. I'm honestly still wanting someone to just release any old smartphone internals that comes with a leading-edge camera receptor and the ability to snap my 35mm lenses to. I'm certain it's not that hard a task.

Two, however, is application development. I generally roll with the latest and greatest smartphone, as well as a handful of various vendors cheap burners, so I can have a clear impression of how my apps work across these devices.

Of course, if I wasn't a dev, I'd still fall back to point one, and still sit here bitching that every new phone release doesn't match my annoyingly specific want/need.

I was in the "$100 phone, cheapest possible carrier" camp for years before getting a Pixel 2. I was using my phone for work and really needed something with clearer reception. It doesn't seem like call quality is really affected much though. I honestly regret the decision. I don't do anything that actually requires my phone to be this quick, and I haven't noticed any change in call quality, at all.

Normal people have stopped using desktop and laptop computers and replaced them with smartphones (why don't we just call them PocketPC's?) and tablets for a big chunk of the population. I'd imagine HD video viewing and gaming to be a big use of the computational power of the smartphone.

Exactly. I made a very good decision this time around; I wanted the cheapest phone that was fingerprint-protected and had USB Type-C, since I wanted it to last me several years and pin codes are painful.

I got my current phone for 160€ (if I'm not mistaken) 1.5 years ago and I couldn't be happier. Browses the web perfectly and runs my few apps great, I'll keep it until it breaks. I'm so happy that I'm even considering buying an extra screen to have reparaibility in the future in case they are hard to find then!

It's funny that many of my non-tech friends who spent half a month salary on an iPhone (Spain) are quite confused about me using a cheap android.

Edit: also note that my 160€ phone now is way better than those 400€ phones 6-8 years ago. And there's not even that much difference with a current 800-1000€ phone.

Or just lag the smartphone cycle. I upgraded from 5C to a 6S a couple months back by snagging my friend’s used phone. It’s amazing in every way. Could not be happier. I can’t wait to see what the iPhone X has in store in 2022 or so :-)

This is a good strategy for most consumers. I paid $150 for my iPhone 6 on swappa, and couldn’t be happier. Still going strong.

This is less possible on the Android side of things. The standard now is three years of security updates from the time of first release. And this often doesn't include device driver and some middleware updates.

Obviously people do hold on to phones for longer than the support term but that's far from ideal.

Is that in USA? I had to bypass my UK provider to install any updates. I imagine software updates limit hardware updates considerably.

If I could buy a new 128GB SE, I’d do it. I waited too long and now they’re only available used or in the 32GB size. I’d still be using my 5S (it still has the latest OS and works well), but I wanted to try the Apple Watch and it required an upgrade.

Why not just go used? I got mine on eBay for under $240 shipped. It was 'B' grade according to the seller, which from what I could determine meant it had literally two scratches on it instead of zero, otherwise the device was flawless. Battery health was 98%.

The real reason is I thought I had 30 days to return the XR, but it turned out to be 14 and so now I have it :-)

The theoretical reason is I trust a phone more if I know it’s direct from Apple.

Now that I have the XR + Watch combo, I’m seeing if I can get by treating the XR as a “desk phone” and the Watch as a “mobile phone”. So far that’s been working out pretty well. If I get tired of it, I may rethink things and try to get a used SE.

The oligopoly juiced prices for flagships and is shocked it affected demand.

People have substitutes.

Even if you want a niche feature like Google Fi support, you have to dig a bit but the Moto Android one entries are fine.

Internal memory is tight though. Expandable memory can't support apps or the OS, where sizes are growing...

Seems trivial to give these all 256 or 512 gb but they are stubbornly kneecapped on space and hard to expand.

Maybe space is how manufacturers are fighting back. We know with the battery scandals they aren't averse to "justifiable" planned obscelesce.

When do we get a dozen low cost Shenzhen competitors to diversify the market?

If you have an unlimited no throttling data plan you can just put everything in the cloud.

I plan to upgrade my phone (unless it breaks first) when I can get either 1TB or unlimited data :)

I realize it might take 3-5 years, but that's okay.

Almost nobody has these though...

That's certainly not ideal. My connection gets dropped all the time just walking around, not to mention going into a building, and carriers aren't incentivized to upgrade their infrastructure to make it more reliable.

I have nearly that and put all media I can in the cloud, but it's still complaining about space because I have apps installed, a feature the phone apparently wasn't designed for.

Being able to stream an app would be nice.

Wait a second... we have those, they are called websites.

Maybe apps themselves are the problem.

>Seems trivial to give these all 256 or 512 gb but they are stubbornly kneecapped on space and hard to expand.

Fast, durable storage is a lot more expensive than an SD card with dismal random performance a few thousand cycles of endurance. The big-name manufacturers do use storage as a segmentation feature, but many new manufacturers are happy to offer you reasonably-priced storage and microSD expansion.

>When do we get a dozen low cost Shenzhen competitors to diversify the market?

We've already got them - Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Elephone, Ulefone, UMIDIGI, Cubot, Oukitel, Blackview and a whole bunch of others. Only the first three are likely to be competitive on the western market, but Xiaomi are already taking big bites of market share in many European markets. They'll sell you a perfectly serviceable mid-ranger for $150 and a flagship killer for $300.

Huawei? I've been very skeptical as to whether recent negative press is motivated [in part] by protectionism. They seem to have taken a lot of telecoms market share (in the UK at least).

I wouldn't really class Huawei in the same group. They do sell a number of reasonably-priced midrange phones, but they're a multinational telecoms behemoth with a very peculiar ownership structure. IMO they're the Chinese Samsung rather than a genuinely disruptive player.

> The oligopoly juiced prices for flagships and is shocked it affected demand.

It didn't affect demand, it affected market clearing quantity because demand was not (assuming, arguendo, the description of surprise is correct) what the makers involved in the “juicing” of prices thought it would be.

OTOH, if there are effectively competing alternatives to those offered by the “oligopoly”, then it is not an oligopoly.

which phone specifically did you choose? now I am tempted to buy the same model..

Local Spanish brand so not very useful here...

>I wanted the cheapest phone that was fingerprint-protected

Just because it says "fingerprint-protected" on the tin, doesn't mean it has good fingerprint protection.

Depends on the use case of the "fingerprint-protected". For me, the fingerprint sensor is just the fastest way to open my phone.

Even with no security/pattern you have to first press the power button, then swipe up. With a fingerprint reader, you tap your finger to the sensor and the screen is not only on, but the lockscreen (swipe) was bypassed.

I’ve just never understood the value proposition of how I’m better with a $1000 phone than a $100 phone, $500 cellular iPad, and $400 in cash left over.

I buy a $50-100 phone every 12 months though! (At the low end, specs are still rising quickly.)

The iPad doesn't fit in your pocket.

Neither does the X or any of the “plus” model face slabs.

Now I'm confused as to how I carried around my 6 Plus all that time and now the X... (and I'm not a big guy, small pants size).

...I'm legitimately not sure how you comfortably fit that thing in your pockets. I can make it go in, but it's not comfortable; I can't imagine walking around with it all day.

You're somehow either wearing very pants from me, or you have a very different comfort tolerance.

(This is very reminiscent of the discussion I have with people who tell me they can fit a Nintendo Switch in their pockets...)

While I agree almost all phones are to large, I don't know they are that bad.

I recently overheard a conversation where someone was amazed by a colleagues small phone and wanted to know what it was. "Wow, what is that phone its so small!" "uhh, it's just a pixel." "Aren't pixel's huge?" "Those are pixel XL, this is a normal pixel..."

The pixel 3 is 37% larger in volume than the iphone 5. It is only 15% larger than the iphone 7... gosh but I wish phones release normal+ xl + compact.

The front pockets on my jeans are 8x7 inches, or 7x7 if you want some margin to keep things from poking out. Anything up to about 4 inches wide is perfectly comfortable when I'm sitting, so let's say 7x4 for a device, minus a bit for thicker devices. A switch without the joy-cons is a good example of something that's right about at the limit.

An iPhone XSMax is 6.2x3 so it fits very easily. It's only a quarter inch larger than my own phone. An iPad on the other hand is 9.4x6.6, way too big. An iPad mini is 8x5.3, which lets it be crammed into the pocket but not be comfortable while sitting.

Do you never sit down or pick things up?

WhatsApp doesn’t work on the iPad. That is the one thing keeping me from the situation you describe.

> If manufacturers want people to upgrade more often they need to work on curbing the price of top end models. The more expensive they are, the longer people are going to want them to last.

While I agree that lowering the price of a phone will increase the rate of upgrades, I don't think increasing the rate of upgrades is an end in itself for anyone including the manufacturers. If I can sell you one phone for $1000, that's almost certainly going to be better than selling you two phones for $500 each. It front-loads my revenue and most likely costs me less. For the two phones to be better for the manufacturer, they'd need to be taking the lowest margins on their highest-end phones, which is weird.

Selling you a phone every several years means less upgrading compared to selling you one every year, but it also means a lot less work for me. I feel like the actual equilibrium is "manufacture fewer phones".

> Also, a bit more innovation would be nice - must every smartphone follow the exact same black rectangle design template?

I'd settle for the rectangle being available in the same form factors people used to sell. We didn't just converge on "rectangle", we converged on "rectangle so oversized it only makes sense as a laptop substitute".

I baught Xaomi Redmi 5 for $150 a year ago. I could've easily bought the latest iPhone, but when I compared them, I saw zero difference except for the camera. This phone was pretty much ideal for me for the last year, until it broke down (turns out browsing Twitter while lying in a bathtub with slippy hands isnt the best idea). And because of how cheap it is, and the fact that pretty much everything important is synced in the cloud anyway, I'm about to go and buy a new one without stressing over it at all. Out of curiosity, I compared the latest Redmi with the latest iPhone and Samsung Galaxy, and I again don't see a single reason to buy the flagship phones, even though I'm exactly their target audience in term of income.

The problem with smartphones is that they've solved all their problems and the cheap devices are just too good.

There is also rapidly declining value from smartphone as a status symbol and part of identity. People are willing to pay extra for real or imagined increase of status. It has been few years since someone asked what phone I have. Sometimes someone asks "Apple or Android?" for practical reasons.

People check out new smarphones when they are considering buying a new one. They (mostly men) are not so interested checking out new phones all the time as they used to be.

Only thing can think of that could change the trend is AR/VR (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality) really starting to deliver.

What makes you think people buy phones as a status symbol? I usually hear this from people who don’t buy Apple products misunderstanding the motivation of those who do.

It used to be a real thing until a few years ago. Now, it's debatable.

Decades of research for marketing, branding and consumer behaviour seems to indicate that signaling to others is large motivation in buying decisions. Links between status signaling behavior based on expertise, need for status, and brand prominence seem to be significant.

People are not always consciously aware of their motivations. Something just makes them feel right and they rationalize other reasons to justify it for themselves.

Interesting recent research: Coming apart? Cultural distances in the United States over time https://www.nber.org/papers/w24771

>The brand most predictive of top income in 1992 is Grey Poupon Dijon mustard. 42 By 2004, the brand most indicative of the rich is Land O’Lakes butter, followed by Kikkoman soy sauce. By the end of the sample, ownership of Apple products (iPhone and iPad) tops the list. Knowing whether someone owns an iPad in 2016 allows us to guess correctly whether the person is in the top or bottom income quartile 69 percent of the time. Across all years in our data, no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016.

If you can afford it, a Mercedes is a nicer car than a Toyota. An iPhone is better than most android phones and has a whole Apple ecosystem around it which many find is worth the premium. One might not be “signaling” as much as simply being able to afford a superior product.

That doesn't at all suggest that their phone or computer is the way they do that, or that this is what people who buy Apple products are doing.

Slightly tangential: I use my phone for the exact same things as you and I usually upgrade every 2-3 years to a high end model for a top camera.

Me and my girlfriend both own the Sony Xperia Z3, which had a cutting edge camera when it was new.

I upgraded to the Galaxy S9 a few months ago, she still has her Z3. The advancement in photos is striking. It's incredibly noticeable, especially the reaction time after pressing the button and the low light performance. To a point we explicitly use my phone to reshoot images we already did on the old phone, if we like the motive. I upgraded mostly because 16GB internal space wasn't enough for me anymore and Android keeps bloating. But if I had experienced the camera difference before, it would have been enough to make me upgrade.

From my non-professional perspective the only thing lacking to a real camera is optical zoom. Otherwise I'm positive many shots of the S9 turn out on par or even better than mid-level Canon/Nikon reflex camera shots, if taken at the right distance.

The camera market is getting more and more redudant for non-professional use cases.

You're wrong. The s9 photos can be passable in optimal light on a screen, but they're a mushy mess even at base iso (which is under 50). You can't make a big print, while you surely can with a midrange dslr.

I'm not a professional and not even an enthusiast, so my subjective impression might contradict objective measures.

But who is actually making big prints? I've never done a singe one and likely won't do anything bigger than a photobook page. That's exactly my point about dslr's becoming redundant for more and more users.

I own a 500€ low end dslr and it feels worse than my 500€ phone that I carry with me anyway.

This is somewhat strange. I mean, low end dslrs generally have good image quality (the d3xxx series from Nikon is excellent technically) but bad haptics (the controls are too modal, terrible menu systems, etc.) - I still think that they feel nicer than grasping a phone to take pictures, but it's debatable. The auto modes on the phone are better but they have a lot less to work with.

I used the example of big prints (big here means bigger than A4) because it's the most immediate demanding application that I could mention. With a phone you also don't have the resolution to spare to apply perspective correction to photos of buildings, dynamic range to deal with less than gentle, bright scenes, etc.

> The auto modes on the phone are better but they have a lot less to work with.

That's probably the basis for my impression. I basically only use auto and am not educated enough in photography to use manual mode in most cases.

You don't need to be especially sophisticated to enjoy some basic advantages of DSLRs - eg aperture priority (you tell the camera what aperture size you want, it works out exposure time and ISO) is an easy first step. (This controls, essentially, what bits are in focus for your shot.) Plus it's a feature few phones offer, or indeed can do much with, as they have such a tiny aperture (5mm of glass to let light in, say).

Increasingly I'm happy enough with a phone (giggle pixel 1 which has a halfway decent camera + software support) for walkabout use, but the benefits of a small DSLRs for holidays or other special events is hard to beat.

What phones do have, is heavy post processing. You can make DSLR photo look much better than for a phone, but you need to spend some time in photoshop. Phones are now doing photoshopping for you, so out of the box they tend to often look more attractive.

Mirrorless cameras fixed most of the dSLR haptics. A newish Panasonic with a Leica or fixed Lumix lens will take better photos than any phone. The disadvantage is that you might not have it on you. Heck, my old Ricoh GRD3 takes better photos than the phone.

Depends; I don't like single-dial ones. The Sony fullframe ones are decent (but I prefer directly coupled mechanical focus and real aperture rings, most FE lenses don't have those, sadly) and have exp. comp. dials, which I find useful.

Leica M rangefinders still have the best controls for non-action photos, which is a bit sad for a design from the early fifties.

The sensor itself is great, but they come with budget lenses. Not just optically mediocre, but they're slow, usually starting at f/4, so you're throwing a lot of that sensor advantage away compared to a phone with f/1.8.

I have a 3 year old print on my wall of my kids, taken with an iPhone 5, cropped from a horizontal framing to vertical, and then printed at 11x14". I did a bit of post-processing on it to sharpen it up, and it looks fantastic (until you look at it from less than a foot away). I need to repeat the process with the X's camera. ;)

>Not just optically mediocre,

Modern kit lenses are optical marvels. A couple of decades ago you couldn't buy a lens with the quality and versatility of Nikon's 18-55mm kit lens.

Wow, is that really necessary? It almost hurts physically to read that strong of a statement directed at another person.

You aren't even really disagreeing with the OP. You could have said: "You're right about the 99% of non professional use cases (sharing on social media and the occasional small print), but not the 1% case of big prints.

I said that op was wrong, not a bad person for being wrong or something like that. There is a significant measurable technical gulf between the capabilities of a current phone and a last gen midrange dslr.

Where did OP say they were making large prints? Who does that these days?

And for what it's worth, I made a photo book from Google photos with pictures all taken from the pixel 2. It looked great.

We probably have different standards for what makes a "great" print. Mine, which are of course very subjective and distinct from the artistic quality of the content, involve having a file that outresolves the printing method to the far corners precisely resampled to what the drivers expect (200 or 400 ppi for Lamdba c-prints, 360 or 720 for Epson inkjets, etc.). This would result in very small prints with a phone, even disregarding other more subtle issues.

Most people however probably view images on a screen, 4k is only 8Mpx.

> 4k is only 8Mpx.

It should be noted this is only true if you don't zoom in at all, since no phone camera has optical zoom :(

I really doubt the camera is nearly as good as my DLSR, which is a few years old at this point, if nothing else because the lens is so much smaller in a phone. Second I have several (well two) lenses without optical zoom (40 and 50mm), which can achieve really low f-stops.

I wouldn't be surprised if a phone is better at reaction time, and possible for compensating for shaky hand moments. In the first case a DSLR has a mirror that has to be moved mechanically, in the second case the smart phone has much more processor power (and presumably better sensors).

And you definitely right that a better phone tend to mean a better camera.

Everything you said and you can get an excellent phone for 200 quid without a contract in the UK (Nokia 6.1 with AndroidOne) that does anything most people would reasonably want.

I have one and it is excellent.

I think it's your latter point that's the key issue. This is something that has been able to be predicted from years ago. Most people do not use phones for many hugely intensive tasks: email, messaging, audio/visual (music, photos, videos), and a handful of generally low resource cost apps. Like you mention it's exactly what happened to PC. Phones that are now years old can perform these tasks practically just as well as new phones and will be able to do so for the foreseeable future, so why would you buy the new phone? The fact that new phones have become much more expensive is just going to accelerate a process that was already happening, rather than being a cause of that process in and of themselves.

And really this process has repeated in countless consumer hardware products besides PCs. Televisions were another example. The change from CRT to flat screen was a pretty big change. And the TV's kept getting bigger, flatter, and with better image quality. But eventually people decided that their TVs were big enough, flag enough, and looked good enough. And so TV sales have begun their extremely predictable plummet.

These are all welcome trends by a societal point of view. Living standards are increasing. Even low income have access to decent electronics such as iPhones and nicer TVs.

>>One manufacturer even threatened to stop paying for in-warranty repairs if the company offered an out-of-warranty repair service.

That is...100% illegal. Especially if we are talking about EU.

Why would that be illegal?

Cause 2 years warranty is required by EU law

That's not really true and is one of those myths that are repeated all the time. The EU customer law says that any defect present at the time of purchase has to be repaired by the seller if found within the 2 years of purchase(it's actually 6 years for most products).

The problem is only faults found in the first 6 months are presumed to have been present at the time of purchase by default - any fault found later has to be proven to have been present at purchase by the customer(and predictably, that can be very difficult). So no, if your iPhone breaks after 18 months in EU, Apple doesn't have to fix it unless you can demonstrate that the fault existed on the day you bought the device(that it's a manufacturing defect essentially).

And even then, it's not on the manufacturer - the law binds the seller, not the manufacturer of the devices(however, obviously whoever sold you the device can use the same law against whoever sold it to them in the first place)

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...

Read the first sample story, exactly the opposite of what you described.

I agree with your second point even though in the case the store it received the product from a European distributor then the store has a 2 year guarantee from the distributor.

?? It's not the opposite. It's exactly what I said. Follow the links on this site for explanation of what "legal guarantee" means. Particularly read the bit under "How to get goods repaired, replaced or refunded". It's only for issues which existed at the time of purchase. If an issue appears after the initial 6 months then you have to prove that it existed from start.

The sample story:

"Carla bought a hairdryer with a 6-month seller's guarantee. When it broke after 8 months, she took it back to the shop. The shop assistant told her that her guarantee had run out and that she was not entitled to a refund.

Carla rightly pointed out that she had a full 2-year guarantee free of charge under EU consumer protection law, and that the seller's 6-month guarantee only offered additional services. The shop agreed to replace the hairdryer."

So it broke down after 8 months, meaning it was not faulty from the purchase time and it was over the 6 month period you are referring to. Either that is wrong or they are not interpreting the law correctly themselves either.

Their own story is wrong in that respect, because Carla is not entitled to a repair or replacement until she proves that the hairdryer had a factory defect. Their own FAQ says as much:

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...

"I bought a phone just over a year ago, and it has stopped working. The trader refuses to fix it for free. Do I have a two-year legal guarantee?"

"The legal guarantee covers any defects presumed to have existed at the time of delivery and which become apparent within a period of two years."

Because the seller(in this case, the manufacturer of the device, as the carrier will be their customer) is required to repair a faulty device. They can't provide this service conditionally.

They were threatening to take their in-warranty service centre contract elsewhere because we offered to fix phones out of warranty. They weren't refusing to fix phones within the minimum warranty period, they were just trying to frustrate out of warranty repairs.

Ah. Well in that case it's just shitty, but not illegal.

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