The maturing of the smartphone industry is cause for celebration
economist.com
economist.com
I want things like a phone that I can set on a flat surface and it will project a large monitor view onto a white wall and also project a holographic(?) keyboard in front of the phone that I can type on (I'm not expecting to feel the keyboard since it is just light - but when I hit the A "key" it should type an A).
I want a battery that lasts a week.
I want a wired headphone jack.
I want it to be fully waterproof.
Etc.
Aren't those things the same thing?
So how does those dreamy claims make the market immature?
I'm happy to pay a premium for high-end quality, especially if I don't have to feel guilty about it.
With battery replacements and iOS upgrades improving performance, it seems like nobody has done more than Apple here, and indeed their stock price is even suffering for it.
What more are you looking for, honestly?
Someone is going to do it and make a lot of money, I'd prefer it to be the company that isn't actually an advertisement company pretending to be a phone manufacturer.
As phones become more and more powerful over time, I can see my phone replacing my iPad or (perhaps) even my laptop - but I don't see them lasting as long as that. They're smaller (and therefore more prone to being dropped), with you constantly, and are mostly glass. Even with technological progress aside, I would expect most people to go no more than five years between replacements.
Our current lifestyle of buying a new phone every 3 years is incredibly selfish and is destroying our planet.
I always joke that the next iPhone will probably be made out of porcelain. I'm not even sure that would be worse.
Also, are you willing to accept increased unemployment when less employees are required due to diminished demand?
When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
There are unlimited jobs that require virtually no consumption in areas like research, art, teaching, music, wildlife conservation and so many more.
Most of the areas you mention are funded by other revenues, either directly by companies, or indirectly by governments taxing revenue or income. Without revenue most of these areas will also see reduced budgets.
Then again, one of the pillars of the consumerist dogma is that you can change yourself and the world by changing how you consume, which, in my opinion, is false, at least in our current socioeconomic reality. So while I think it definitely matters where you put those 25 cents, consumerism as a whole is as much a distraction as a problem.
Mac users: rejoice!
I think (as I said in the previous discussion) that the key issue with the lengthening phone upgrade cycle is security patches.
Manufacturers are trying very hard to have built-in obsolescence: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/31/dutch_court_says_sa...
Unless this fundamentally changes, most non-techy users will have to needlessly upgrade perfectly good devices, run insecure software or become much more savvy about which manufacturers are better in this regard - and the outcome is likely to be some malware has a very large distribution followed by a lot of press.
It would be nice if they could set the mandatory support period to the same length as the patent protection period. If Samsung thinks four years of support is enough, than the patented technologies in the phone should only get four years of protection.
This would be a golden opportunity for a manufacturer to come out with a promised 5+ year support cycle. I think one of the reason they don't is because each manufacturer has 78 slightly different models every year to support, but in a maturing market they should have a better idea on what the market wants and cut that down. Why does know one learn the limited SKUs lesson from apple?
In that respect the Librem phone is arriving at almost the perfect time, it's close to PC levels of supportability.
I think even Apple has forgotten that lesson.
We can break the innovation opportunities down into several areas:
1. Hardware
2. Operating System
3. Software/Apps
Hardware hasn't been innovated. The closest thing we got was the hope of a modular phone that was bought for the patents (?) and killed inside of google. The best thing we get is better cameras, biometrics, and screen resolution. Not many people care about cameras (not including selfies), biometrics is sort of a lame duck (who needs their face constantly scanned? or fingerprints as passwords for everything), screen resolution doesn't anymore because the screen size is so small -- majority of people play easy games, like LoL, PUBG, and Candy Crush clones.
Operating system experience is converging on features between iOS/Android to the point they are really indistinguishable.
Software is limited because of hardware specs, walled gardens, and the learning curve -- but much more nefariously I software devs might just be afraid if they build something cool these companies would just turn around and steal it/bake it into the OS.
Alternatively we could see adoption start moving horizontal into other peripherals like VR/AR/IoT devices (watches) -- but I'm not holding my breath on that until I see a company come out with something amazing. For instance the precursor to the iPhone was the Samsung i300, the leap from the i300 to the iPhone wasn't that big for me, but it changed a lot of things that just made sense.
The leap for peripherals right now would be too great to expect a magical turnaround in adoption -- but I would love to be first in line to be proven wrong.
So where does that leave us? Well we need to rethink things from the ground up again. We've hit local maxima with experience.
I have a feeling that Apple forcing the move to AirPods is laying the groundwork for that. I would love an iPad that was just a battery and a screen, that connected wirelessly to my phone for processing. Likewise, I'd be interested in a laptop that did the same - but it has to be wireless, and the phone's battery would have to be at least two or three times the capacity of the iPhone X.
I want a removable battery, micro-SD slot, audio jack, and control over the OS/interface comparable to my desktop. I don't give a crap about shaving a millimeter off the thickness, or 3 grams of weight. And I'm one who trims my backpack straps extra short.
These people need to realize it’s strategic.
So it should be no surprise that they last the same as other phones with similarly standard hardware (but considerably lower prices).
Nevertheless some Apple owners choose to ignore this or do not appreciate it being pointed out. :)
In some ways, I wish this were the case. But my reading is that Apple's custom processors are still far ahead of the competition, and last time I looked it was hard to match Apple's fit and finish, especially if you are looking at anything other than the very top of the Android market. And for something that you keep in your pocket and handle regularly, a feeling of solidity is worth something.
It's a tragedy that you can't buy an iPhone with an unlocked bootloader. There's some interesting potential for innovation there.
(This is even more true in some other market segments. The hardware for the last couple of generations of Apple Watch is amazing, and that makes OS-imposed limits on what third party apps can do tragic).
It's a shame that Huawei phones can no longer be unlocked too, part of a trend towards dumbed down consumption devices I suppose.