How phones went from $200 to $2k | Hacker News Reader

How phones went from $200 to $2k

theverge.com

30 pointsTomte28 comments

They are basically comparing the price of mid-low end phones from 10+ years ago to the highest end phones of today. The Motorola StarTAC was introduced in 1996 for $1000 and later, the Motorola Razr was $800 when it was introduced. Adjusted for inflation the difference in price isn't that big and flip phones of the time did very little. You can pick up a phone which is vastly better than the Razor today for $25.

The iPhone wasn't $200 unless you ignored the cost of the expensive phone contract it was attached to, nor were the early top end Android phones.

The only way this article makes any sense if you compare the highest end phones of today to the low-midrange phones from 10+ years ago which makes zero sense.

Most consumer technology has gotten cheaper over the years. In some cases, a lot cheaper, especially when adjusted for inflation. Compare the price of 55" flat screen TV's, 2009 vs today. Compare the price of a mid-range desktop computer, 1989 vs today, etc.

You have a double standard here. Newer iPhones are twice as big and have much higher display resolution. To be reasonably fair you'd need to compare that 55" flat screen TV to an 8K 120" HDR TV. Or flip it and compare the Original iPhone to the iPhone SE which is about half the cost of the original iPhone (when you consider the contract cost) and still has a much bigger/ better display.

Adjusted for inflation 1996's $1000 is $1630 today.

Might be an unpopular opinion, but in terms of value I think phones are worth it. Think of how much time people spend on their phones, and how much frustration you save from not having a PoS phone. For many people, phone's are their "computer".

I completely agree.

As another comment pointed out, the price comparison is poor. What changed is the value of the phone and what people are willing to spend. When phones got good enough many were willing to replace a traditional computer with the phone.

Don't forget that social networks were a thing back at the release of the first iPhone. I suspect far fewer people would be see as much value in a smart phone if they couldn't access Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Reddit on it.

Overall I think rising top end brings a better set of issues than a race to the bottom does. With rising top end, the midrange options are sure to be at least decent, but with a race to the bottom you see huge compromises and underhanded methods to offset slim margins in all but the most high end options.

We’ve seen this play out in the PC market already, but at least there you always had the option of wiping the standard OS install and upgrading hardware to help mitigate shady preinstalls and compromises in cheaper products. With phones, hardware upgrades flat out aren’t possible and many are impossible or impractical to put a clean OS install on.

There's a lot of great phones in the $200 range today. I've helped a few friends buy one at MVNO's like MetroPCS, and they walked out with a 5"+ fast Android under $200 and it always impresses me what they get for 1/6 the price of the phone I carry.

I use a $12 pre-paid phone from Walmart. It has held up great for the past few years. It's probably time to get a new one. It looks like they discontinued mine and now there is a $30 version. [1] The only downside is the T9 texting, but I do not text a lot. The tiny battery in it lasts about a week without any charging.

[1] - https://www.walmart.com/ip/Verizon-Kyocera-Cadence-Prepaid-C...

So did our reliance on a single all-in-one mini computer that we carry our lives, memories, photos and literally everything we do.

Simply examining the BOM cost should reveal the extraordinary amount of processing power, memory, optics, security and system integration that has taken place between $200 and $1000 phones.

So, a fair comparison would be to compare a phone from 2004:

$200 Phone

$200 Music Player

$400 Netbook

$300 Camera

-----------

$1100

Just ball park figures to make a point. I don't think Netbooks existed in 2004.

The closest equivalent to a modern phone from back in 2004 was a PDA (ex: Palm Pilot or Blackberry). You had internet, contacts, email, apps, mp3, and basic camera all on one device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_700p

That's 2005, but it gives you an idea of what was available at the time for ~$500. Looking back on it, it seems like the Treo 700p was still a smartphone as well... I guess I just remembered most of its PDA-functionality instead.

EDIT: The main things a modern smartphone gives you are capacitive controls and a GPS. The "real internet" as well, since PDAs kinda surfed a different... protocol. I forget exactly, but it wasn't HTML, even if it was served over HTTP. Some... format that died a long time ago. I'd estimate a GPS costs $200, plus the subscription to the maps (you had to pay for map-subscriptions back then)

>That's 2005, but it gives you an idea of what was available at the time for ~$500

Really not much, it seems.

For many of today's users, cell phones have feature parity with desktop PC's for their casual use case (gaming, multimedia, Internet browsing, and even a lot of productivity software).

None of that holds for Treo in 2005-2006.

> gaming

Heh. Ask how many friends know how to play Nokia's "snake" game.

> multimedia

People didn't really use PCs to watch videos back then. I mean, you could, but DVDs were usually played on DVD players, maybe your game console. BluRay didn't exist yet, and I'm sure you would have still come across VHS Tapes at that time.

2005... yeah, I distinctly remember renting movies from DVD-rental stores back then. I think Netflix (the DVD-rental part) was gaining in popularity at that time, so people figured DVD-rental stores were going away.

If I remember 2005 correctly, it was a time where you'd have to play with DivX and XVid codecs before anything actually played on your PC. Definitely not easy for casual users.

> Internet browsing

Typical users back then didn't even have broadband yet. 2005 was kinda magical when you could send emails through your phone. For the kids out there: 56kbps (~7kB/s speeds) dial up connections would take 5-minutes to download a 2MB Newgrounds video.

Oh yeah, and Youtube didn't exist yet. Mostly because 2MB files were already difficult to distribute.

With that being said: those 2MB to 5MB Newground games were certainly what the casual people would do on the internet, at least at my school back then. Either that, or distribute TI-83 calculator games (TI83 phoenix).

--------

It was a different time, with different computing expectations.

> If I remember 2005 correctly, it was a time where you'd have to play with DivX and XVid codecs before anything actually played on your PC. Definitely not easy for casual users.

The casual user also changed. I remember that 90% of my computerized friends eMuled all movies they could get. The Lord of the Rings copies filmed using handleld cameras from cinema screens are distinctly burned in my memory.

At the same time, DVD and Video CDs were quite popular when attached to magazines, which bumped the computer usage, as most everyone had a computer and few people had DVD players.

Together, I think most heavy watching happened on computers also back then.

When it comes to the internet, eMule arrived because dial up was dying already, meaning that people could actually use it for something useful.

I don't think usage patterns changed that much.

Well, for Euro 800 (around US$ 1000) you could get circa 2004-2005 a Sony-Ericsson P900-P910.

It did have GPS/Maps (separate paid for program) and it could navigate the internet via WAP.

Mine lasted some 10 years (admittedly I used it much more as a phone than to navigate internet) and sported an exceptionally good handwriting recognition.

> and it could navigate the internet via WAP

That's what it was called! Thanks, I was annoyed at myself for not remembering the name of that.

You are probably thinking of WML - wireless markup language. A stripped-down version of HTML that let you do webbish things on devices that could never run a "real" web browser. Sites had to write their own WML pages for mobile users to be able at access the site.

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/wml/wml_quick_guide.htm

When the iPhone came out with a desktop-class browser it changed the game. Steve Jobs called it out in the iPhone keynote:

> We wanted the best web browser in the world on our phone, not a baby web browser or a WAP browser, a real Web browser, and we picked the best one in the world, Safari, and we have Safari running on iPhone. It is the first fully usable html browser on a phone.

> The "real internet" as well, since PDAs kinda surfed a different... protocol. I forget exactly, but it wasn't HTML, even if it was served over HTTP. Some... format that died a long time ago.

This was actually only the case for feature phones. PDAs, at least those running PalmOS (like the Treo) could surf the real internet.

I still have a Palm TX hanging around and the biggest problem is not the protocols themselves - it could access GMail just fine with the default mail app, and Blazer supports HTML just fine (if a subset that made sense on PDAs in 2005) - but connecting to WiFi. It supports just WEP and WPA-PSK, or WPA2 Enterprise, and it doesn't work with my home router.

Netbooks didn't exist in 2004 (they were introduced in 2007 by Asus, with their EeePC model), and a $400 laptop in 2004 wouldn't do you much good. My CoreM laptop from 2006 was $700, and it was by all means a conservative choice in terms of firepower.

Ditto for music player, IIRC $100 would barely get you a portable CD player in 2004.

This only makes your point stronger, and as you said, it's just a ballpark figure anyway.

People were definitely using iPods (and competitors) back in 2005. I remember that for sure. There were a LOT of cheaper MP3 players. It took a bit of technical know-how to rip a CD back then, but it was certainly something I did regularly.

I don't think CD Players were ever super-popular. Walkmen (tapes) were extremely popular, but CDs came out around the time when iPods + clones existed. So most people I knew were listening to music on an MP3 player of some kind.

CDs were used for burning mixed-disks, mostly to give to your friends to share music. Giving CDs to your friends was a "I liked this song, maybe you'll like it too" kinda deal.

As soon as you got a CD from any friend, you'd rip it and put it into your own MP3 player.

In 2004 I had a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook P7010 which was 100% supported by Debian, by any means a netbook years before that word was invented. Not cheap, still the perfect tool to take around plugging it to network sockets and make tests: small, light enough, some good computing power, long battery life, and a wonderful 10" 1280x768 really bright screen. It lasted about 9 years, then a fall (not my fault) destroyed one of the screen hinges, and the high cost of repairing and upgrading ($$ battery and $$$ microdimms) turned it into a few recycled parts.

One assertion the article makes that I'm skeptical of is that the price of the phone used to be hidden in the monthly cost of the plan but no longer is. I have no evidence, but it definitely feels to me like my cell phone bill has been going up steadily and that there is no "phone sold separately" discount. I'd really like to see some numbers on whether the service cost has really decreased in real terms by the amount of the cost of the phone over two years.

I've always bought my phones outright and never had a prepaid plan until relatively recently. I've stayed around the $250-$300 price point since I started buying cell phones. What I can buy now for that price is vastly superior to what I could buy even only 4 or 5 years ago.

If anything, with inflation, the price of low-midrange phones has been dropping steadily and the quality and features you get for that price has been climbing at least in my observation.

Service prices have been climbing. The plan I have now isn't available with my carrier any more. The closest plan to mine costs twice as much as I pay for 3GB less data. They don't even have plans that offer as much data as I get anymore.

Well the phones do a lot more. There are still dozens of $200 smart phones on the market without all the bells and whistles.

Yup. I got my Moto x4 for ~$250, and it does way more than I need it to. I just don't see a point in getting a >$500 phone.

Even after reading the entire article head to toe, I can't understand that people would pay over 1K for a phone. So what if it folds? Is it a social status thing? do people go around showing it off? (honestly, I haven't seen that)

I bought a used HTC One M9 about 2 years ago, refurbished for 80$ and it does every I could ever want with a phone: online browsing, hacker news, apps, great graphics/sound. None of the apps are laggy. there doesn't seem to be any downside at all. Admittedly the battery is weak, but then so are most of the new phones.

There's an oversupply of stupid people. It is causing problems all over.

I got my Galaxy S4 from the reuse/recycle program that I started in my building. Works great. Free.

FWIW, I replace my phone every ~4 years on average. With the XS Max, I have the latest OS with the latest security updates and a state-of-the-art web browser and an outstanding screen & audio. Admittedly it contains a bunch of technology I'm not making much use of at the moment, but even then the battery lasts more than 24 hours easily with regular use. If/when those killer AR apps come along, the phone is equipped to take advantage of it.

The price of the phone was something I was happy to pay, for the peace of mind that I've got a device I can depend on for as long as I want to keep using it.

I got burned about a decade ago by carriers not supporting Android updates on the early HTC devices and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps that has changed but this chart still doesn't inspire much confidence: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards

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