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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

Smartphone hardware is done. There's no significant gain in buying a new smartphone if you have bought one in last 3 years, absolutely nothing if the battery is replaced; there could be even diminished returns if you buy a new smartphone(unavailability of headphone jack, losing metal body, losing faster biometric authentication).

Improvement in camera could be enticing, but the platforms to which the photos, videos are shared would compress them anyways making them all nearly identical. Better frame rates is the only thing which makes a difference. Case in point : MKBHD made a blind test last year and low cost smartphone Mi Pocophone which scored pathetic camera performance in individual reviews came out top in the blind test.

So, the subscription services are the new lifeline for the hardware manufacturers; included free subscription should add some value to the new customers and if the SW services work; may be compensate for diminishing hardware sales.

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"Case in point : MKBHD made a blind test last year and low cost smartphone Mi Pocophone which scored pathetic camera performance in individual reviews came out top in the blind test."

Marques doesn't have kids.

I loved my Redmi Note 4. I even liked the chin, as the buttons were on it - so my usable screen size was actually larger than the Pixel XL that replaced it.

That phone took perfectly acceptable shots with still subjects that I'd have been happy to live with but the shutter lag was terrible. I have six months of mostly blurry photos of my kids solely because the phone couldn't deal with any amount of fast motion so it had to go.

Recently upgraded to a Pixel 3a solely because of Night Sight and for my use case it was a no-brainer as I can't get the time back. I also couldn't give a rats behind about notches and bumps - my phones go straight into bumper cases and 9-glass before they're turned on.

Some people really do need the less-talked-about features that are only of late getting any amount of attention by manufacturers.

Going from a crappy camera to something like on Pixel3a is truly a leap especially when you are looking photos yourself on the screen.

But say you had bought iPhone 8 (same year as Redmi Note 4) and you share pictures to social media; Pictures from iPhone 11 would be indiscernible to those who see your photos at the other end.

That night photo difference looks a lot better as one example in the landing page. Would that not be a noticeable difference?

> Pictures from iPhone 11 would be indiscernible to those who see your photos at the other end

I disagree. As an iPhone 8 user even iPhone X pictures are massively improved, not to mention a Huawei P30 or Pixel 3XL... night sight doesn't exist and post-processing by external apps only.

I have an 8 and while the X is subjectively better, a moment or two in snapseed can more than make up the difference.

I wouldn't say Massively improved. But it was definitely noticeable. By not massively improved, I mean photos from iPhone 8 looks fine, but when you gets to compare with X, you immediately notice the difference.

The same goes to X and Xs, although the difference is a little less drastic, but P30 and Pixel were both winning, and when you compare it, it was obvious.

Absolutely. I had the same experience with the first Moto G phones - reviews called it amazing quality for the price and had camera samples that were admittedly very nice. There was no way I could get a picture of my dog in that time, or even a group picture with at least one of my friends/family members being blurry - there's always movement with people, even if it's a bit, and youtube testers rarely account for that.

> Smartphone hardware is done. There's no significant gain in buying a new smartphone if you have bought one in last 3 years, absolutely nothing if the battery is replaced;

I am excited about the possibility of graphene based batteries. https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-batteries and https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-battery-mat...

Which could be as early as 2020-2021 if the leaks are correct https://www.techspot.com/news/81435-samsung-rumored-readying... my current phone will last me until then.

More about that https://www.wired.co.uk/article/graphene-batteries-supercapa...

It seems this graphene tech can be used for other things too, the future looks exciting.

• https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-solar-panels

• https://www.techpowerup.com/253839/amd-says-not-to-count-on-...

• https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/16-bit-risc-v-proces...

Graphene battery, foldable display, 5G network, >1TB internal storage, Fingerprint reader at any point on the screen could all kickoff new generational cycle.

But, it will happen in increments and for all the above features to be available in one smartphone which is affordable, will take another 3-4 years and hence my OP comment that current generation is done.

Edit: 1TB

Let's see. I don't agree with many of the points.

5G Network? Every phone will have it in 3 years.

>1TB storage? In Android land you can already buy a 1TB microSD card and stick it into your phone resulting in >1TB total storage. Are many people doing that?

Fingerprint reader in the screen: Who cares if its below the display or on the back of the phone? It's a rather small improvement.

Meant TB, corrected.

>Fingerprint reader in the screen: Who cares if its below the display or on the back of the phone? It's a rather small improvement.

Fingerprint authentication at any point on the screen could decrease the overall time taken for unlocking the phone and getting to the intended action. It's quite common in android to have always on Amoled display for notifications, touching the notification can directly take one to the app without having to authenticate separately first.

Damn. We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

Isn’t a 1TB microSD card going to be much much slower than the storage used in an iPhone?

Correct, a lot slower; Hence I specifically mentioned 'internal' storage.

Will it be very noticeable?

What would the speed comparison be for all that storage via microSD vs internal?

> Graphene battery, foldable display, 5G network, >1TB internal storage, Fingerprint reader at any point on the screen could all kickoff new generational cycle.

These are all nice, but I'd rather have thin AR glasses powered by the phone's CPU/GPU at some point. Might fix the smombie infestation, too.

I would love one, just for our(brain) memory or lack of thereof; especially to remember faces of people we meet once, when we meet again after several years and they ask do you remember me? The smart AR glasses should give us the name via bone conduction!

Your comment made me research what happened to Google glasses and I found this:

https://www.google.com/glass/tech-specs/

Why are these not available to the public?!? Because of the Google glass PR disaster?

I think that's probably the reason Apple decided not to take a risk with their version:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apple-ar-glasses-cancel...

>and hence my OP comment that current generation is done.

May be it should have worded better, I reread the comment multiple times and I don't get where the current generation is done comes from. It reads to me as Hardware is done, period.

The market is saturated, and of course every company will try to milk it for as long as they could, while trying to figure out the next big thing, if there is any that is the size of current Smartphone market.

> blind test

Well yes, all cameras look the same if you do a "blind" test. :)

out with you!

Not that type of blind. Basically given a scenario, take a picture with n number of phones varying in quality/price. MKBHD the Youtuber then found that a worse quality camera came on top as the "best" quality for twitter/instagram users because that bad quality camera over-compensated with over exposure and some other factors (as far as I recall).

Essentially, camera quality in this day and age doesn't matter, unless you're a "pro" (which I predict 90% of the people who buy the 11 pro aren't)

Case in point: I have a SE and it takes photos fine. I'm not any model or pro, so taking pictures of basic day-to-day events or things is good enough for me.

May I suggest the parent comment was being sarcastic?

Thought of that for a second, but didn't catch on. :P

A few years back one of the big Android sites did a comparison, some new Android phone vs the current iPhone vs some DSLR

They had people vote on the 'best' picture, and they always chose the sharpest one. You could clearly make out which camera took which photo. The biggest problem was that the DSLR was never focused right so it was blurry.

> MKBHD made a blind test last year and low-cost smartphone Mi Pocophone which scored pathetic camera performance in individual reviews came out top in the blind test.

This simply means that it was a crappy test. As far as I remember, people choose a colour profile that was much more punchy.

Cameras are much, much more than a colour profile. These tech reviewers are fun to watch but I wouldn't base my opinions solely on their work.

While that might be true, the majority of people buying a smartphone are just regular people, not photographers, so they'll favour things like punchy colour profiles.

But at the end of the day it's not the opinion of a super-set of consumers that really matters. For owners of iPhones its whether the phone meets their own requirements and expectations that matters. Not whether huge tranches of non-iPhone owners agree with them or not.

I don't give a rat's butt whether 70% of consumers don't care about the features and characteristics of my phone. I care about them, and that's all that matters. Currently rocking a 6s which is serving me fine though.

He took different pictures of same scene under same settings from about half dozen flagship phones, shared the picture on different social networks and asked people to vote.

This test for real-life camera usage is as objective as it can get. Most people shoot pictures to put on social networks, not to submit for documentary film awards.

>This test for real-life camera usage is as objective as it can get

Not at all, most people do not take different pictures of the same scene under the same settings from about half a dozen flagship phones, post it on Instagram and ask which one is better. In fact, this is the only time I've seen such usage.

In practice, people use a single phone to capture moments that do not come back and even if the scene is repeatable people prefer to succeed on the first take, therefore they will take photos until they get one that is good enough and editable. Most people don't even know how the photo will look like until they try a few edits. It is an intuitive process that involves multiple trials and misses.

So the best camera is the one that gives you the photo that is easiest to edit to achieve the picture you desire. #nofilter is a special case, a niche and If you ask me, it's not a nofilter just because the device applied a filter by itself.

Anyway, if that test was correct the cheap and great photos phone would have been a viral hit. When people see a great photo, they do ask how you took it. That did not happen.

The Pocophone was a huge hit though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Pocophone_F1#Sales

I wouldn't be surprised if it was subsidised by the Chinese government and filled with malware

Most people don't edit photos. And to be honest those people posing for 5 minutes to get anyway a crappy picture in poses around famous places are proper pain in the ass.

If you want perfection, get a proper camera and more importantly learn how to shoot with it

I have a Sony A7 and a bunch of lenses. Prob 10k on lenses. I still use my iPhone 7 to take photos of my Daughter cos capturing the moment is more important the the detail or colour of the photo.

I've been using a OnePlus 5T since it was launched and I can't think of any reason to upgrade. It's still as fast as the day I got it, the screen is adequate for me, and it does everything I want to do. That it costs literally 1/4th of an iPhone Pro in my country is the icing on top.

It's not done. There is nothing in the market that I want and what I want is achievable. There's a lack of innovation, not a lack of potential for innovation.

> Smartphone hardware is done. There's no significant gain in buying a new smartphone if you have bought one in last 3 years, absolutely nothing if the battery is replaced; there could be even diminished returns if you buy a new smartphone(unavailability of headphone jack, losing metal body, losing faster biometric authentication).

That's true in the Android world as well. When the GPS in my three-year-old LG Stylo 2 finally crapped out so thoroughly (along with a puffed-up battery, perhaps with a built-in antenna being damaged?) that I couldn't ignore it anymore, I wound up getting a Stylo 5.

As it turns out, it has the same Qualcomm 450 SoC as the three-year-old phone it replaced. It's fast enough for my needs, but no speed demon. The only real upgrades are support for more of T-Mobile's LTE bands, a higher-resolution screen, an aluminum frame, a 3500 mAh battery up from 3000, and Android 9; the camera app is improved, and the Bluetooth stack is more up-to-date. Much to their credit, they had the courage to not remove the headphone jack. There is one major downgrade: the inevitable sealed-case, non-removable battery schtick that I really hate. I hope that fad passes by the time I need to replace this one, but there's too much money at stake for the phone manufacturers not to shaft their customers. I better hope the battery doesn't crap out prematurely.

That being said, I like the Stylo 5; the 2 had excellent battery life even when the battery got puffy, and the 5 is even better (at least in my first week of usage). That relatively-anemic 450 SoC is at least power-efficient.

Can't agree with that statement. There is a thing called Moore's law.

The smartphones will continue to grow and accelerate their hardware and software development. This is simply the future. I the next 50 years I think everyone will use just one device and this is more likely to be something like a smartphone.

What Steve Jobs did in his first iPhone presentation can't be done again. He simply set the bar so high that there is no bar anymore, I don't see how other companies will reach them, not because they can't but because they all try to copy them from that point on, instead of trying to innovate like they did.

I can't also really understand why the public is bashing so hard those events expecting miracles, and making statements that Apple is not innovating. What do you want cloaking software making you invisible? Let's be real, also who is that naive to think that even if they have developed something amazing they will release it right away. Things don't work like that in the real world.

Except Moore's law ended in 2012.

Apple and Steve did some truly "breakthrough" product announcements. Steve mentioned this in his iPad announcement. The timing was right, the technology was right, the market was right.

It's possible we're not going to get another one of those remarkable revelations like the iPhone and the iPad in our lifetimes. And that's ok.

The speed of change has been tremendous in the past 100 years and –besides doing a lot of good– also has serious social and ecological repercussions.

Perhaps I'm getting old, but maybe it's a good thing that the pace of change is slowing.

Yep. I have a BLU smartphone that I bought for $55 bucks off of Amazon. It literally does everything I need and has now lasted me > 2 yrs with no sign of slowing down. I will never understand why people would pay the price equivalent to buying a decently speced out desktop or laptop for a phone when there are so many cheaper alternatives that provide the same features and functionality.

There aren't many alternatives when you consider that cheap phones are Big Brother devices for Google.

And expensive phones aren't? As far as I can tell the only smartphone where you can be sure to not be spied on is yet to be released.

I grant you that an iPhone is still no guarantee, but there is a difference in the level of surveillance that Apple and Google exhibit.

I use my phone so much now that all the actual differences in a more expensive device are significant. Even with the Pro ones it’s a bit like buying a mechanical keyboard. Does it really do anything a £3 OEM keyboard doesn’t? My phone was about the same price as my 3 year old i7 laptop and the processor is faster. It’s a more useful device to me.

I bought a couple of those BLU phones as testers to ensure our apps were usable regardless of device (in an office full of flagship phones this is easy to overlook in “hallway” testing)....I’m not generally a phone snob but I will say that using the BLU phones makes my 4 year old iPhone feel like an ultra luxury rocketship from the future. The difference in performance and quality is remarkable side by side.

Cheap phones provide the same functionality, they just do it slower.

> Smartphone hardware is done. There's no significant gain in buying a new smartphone if you have bought one in last 3 years

Agreed. Even a Xiaomi Mi A2 with Android One for 130-150€ is almost on par with these high end phones that cost eight times as much: It's fast enough. It has a gorgeous display. It has a decent camera and it has up-to-date software. In these times of diminishing returns it's amazing that Apple is able to fetch these prices. It shows us how much of a vendor lockin there is. Perhaps (hopefully) also how much people are willing to pay extra for more privacy.

I doubt many people are buying iPhones for extra privacy.

Well I am. It's anecdotal but it's the one thing that keeps me on iOS.

I'd bet given the rise in privacy plugin use for browsers (Privacy Badger, uBlock, etc) I'm not the only one doing that either.

I am, but I definitely agree many people don't consider privacy in that choice.

I am. Will not switch to Android unless there is some astonishing quality difference.

Snd it can't be a small number, as Apple constantly mentions privacy in their marketing, down to the level of individual services.

For the subset of people who care, they're virtually a monopoly.

I am.

A privacy conscious company wouldn't remove from their app store all the VPN apps as they did in China

[1]:https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/apple...

> Improvement in camera could be enticing, but the platforms to which the photos, videos are shared would compress them anyways

Strongly agree, and the reason for that is that is that level of quality is good enough for the 99.99% use case of photography and anything above is simply a waste of storage space.

If you are actually a professional artist, it matters. If you're doing computer vision, it matters. For the other 99.99% of photos, it doesn't matter.

What Apple is selling at this point is just the aspiration that you're in the special 0.01%, or could be.

Agree and disagree.

Yes, the chips and sensors used in modern phone cameras are ridiculously good for the size and cost. And phone cameras started replacing budget and mid-price P&S cameras years ago.

But, Apple's move to a triple camera set-up is really compelling. Not only has the phone replaced the average P&S, it's now replacing higher end P&S. The main argument for a separate P&S these days is a zoom lens. Apple just made that argument moot (superzooms notwithstanding). You can now take landscape, snapshot, and portrait photos natively on the camera without stitching or cropping. That's amazing. Or, at least I think so.

I was considering replacing my wife's older Canon S90 P&S with a new Sony RX100 IV. I probably won't bother - I'll just replace her iPhone 8 with an 11 Pro.

I guess that's why Apple seems to be positioning their Phones for `Pros`. I kind of feel like it's the `Note` equivalent of Galaxy series. And also for the same purpose, the showed videos of Professional Videographer shooting videos with the iPhone 11 Pro. Those are the people who'd probably take out raw video/pic and edit it in Premire or lightroom.

This opens a huge area of business for them, if they can convince ad film makers devices because the current set of filming devices that they use aren't inexpensive.

With Apple these days, Pro means ‘bloody expensive’, and even more so outside the US. The rebrand may help to justify the pricing, but it’s odd to do that with such an incremental update, rather than save it for a year with a bigger design change.

For a lot of the world, a $500 smartphone was a luxury, and a $1500 smartphone (like a $3000+ laptop, or $1000 monitor stand) is an unfunny joke.

While they’re amazing devices, they’re just not replacements for a real computer, being locked down, with no exposed file system, and the imprecision of touch-only input.

I live in a country where practically no one except businesses possess personal computers and maybe 50% of the urban population has a smart phone (usually some $30 Huawei crap). I worry that this kind of leap frogging that 3rd world countries do is harmful in this specific case. The web to them consists entirely of Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Telecos provide extremely popular subsidized “internet” packages that consist exclusively of access to these sites. Instead of the web and technology being catalysts for production, they are solely used for consumption.

This in my opinion is very dangerous and will prevent the country from ever becoming a producer of information and services.

> Smartphone hardware is done.

I'm as sure as I agree with this statement that this can be a historic comment about smartphones until the next breakthrough happens :)

I find is pretty silly to say smartphone hardware is done when Apple is still sporting a notch.

I get what you are saying but that would still be a pretty incremental update right? It wouldn't make the phone significantly more usable, really only a bit prettier.

I think the point here is that the recent "big" features are all pretty minor things like 60fps screens etcetera, they are really nice but nowhere near as important as the new things we used to have every generation.

The parent is exaggerating but really, 90% of spotlight on these models is the new camera system but Huawei &co. was offering similar features for a long time.

I think the notch is a lot less annoying than the weight. Maybe I have small weak hands, but I feel a physical strain from using my iPhone XS. Unfortunately you can’t seem to buy a new SE around here.

That would hardly be the weight, since it's quite (to very much) less than older phones we all used in the 90s and 00s, and early 10s...

I’ve only had smartphones since 2012, but it’s definitely the heaviest phone I’ve owned and my wrist also occasionally hurts after using it. Older phones probably weren’t used as much as we use then today either.

Smartphones I’ve owned:

HTC One X: 130 g

Galaxy S5: 145g

Samsung Galaxy S7 edge: 157g

iPhone XS: 177 g

I’m happy with the screen size vs the phone size on the XS, but I didn’t realize I wanted something lighter too. This phone is way too heavy. The new iPhone 11 Pro is 188g. Hopefully next time around they make something lighter.

Same for me! When I first bought it, I liked that it felt “premium”, but after using it for a while, I definitely have some strain in my wrist from the weight. Maybe it’s because it’s small enough to use one handed but too heavy to actually be comfortable. Have you tried a pop socket or something similar? (I have not) I’ll definitely be checking the weight of new phones from now on. I may even upgrade if the weight is less on any model. I would like to see something like the SE come out, because I want a phone that can do everything but is compact, but their solution seems to be the Apple Watch so you have a super small screen to accompany your phone instead of a smaller phone screen.

The notch is a rather small issue that only affects looks. When the display is off, you don't see it. When the display is on, you usually look at the display, not the notch. Sure it's not pretty but personally I don't really care.

I mean the notch is basically the symptom of having gone into anti-feature territory. Removal of headphone jack, removal of physical home button, removal of TouchID for face recognition that is much slower, removal of 3D Touch... the iPhone 20 at this rate will just be a slab of metal.

>of having gone into anti-feature territory

Headphone jack, sure. But after face ID / full screen, I wouldn't go back to home button and touchID if they'd paid me...

There's nothing about sporting a notch that's problematic, except when it comes to OCD.

If it didn't have the notch it would just have a larger bezel on a side, or some BS like a popup camera.

The "camera behind screen" idea barely works (for obvious reasons), and is hardly what would revolutionize mobile hardware. It's an aesthetic concern, not a functional one.

Things that might do that, larger camera sensors (e.g. 1"), week or more long batteries, total voice control, etc.

> Smartphone hardware is done.

Eye tracking based scrolling would be something that I'd like; for reading long articles/books. Using regular camera is prohibitively power hungry; not sure if there is research for special purpose cameras for this purpose.

Didn't the Samsung galaxy S4 have this?

You can almost generalize to computers. It's still crazy the pace of pocket hardware has gone through. But these machines have more oomph than a pixar workstation in the 90s, the vast majority of the users will never even need 50% of that.

Unfortunately we all need the performance due to the unbelievable bloat of the web. And even with my iPhone X a lot of sites are still laggy and unpleasant to use. The state of the web is honestly really sad and makes me feel bad about our entire profession.

I would be so pissed if an iPhone X would lag on the web. I'm actually pissed right now just reading about it. BRUH

I have the same feeling. Sure, manufacturers still try to experiment a little with their folding phones etc., but overall the software and hardware changes very little from one generation to the next.

I bought my last phone over 4 years ago and it wasn't new back then. The only reason I'm thinking about buying a new one is the software version. But it probably won't cost more than $200, because that's already enough to get better hardware than I got 4 years ago for double the price, and I don't have an issue with performance.

Needless to say, I don't quite get how flagship phones still sell so well considering you can do basically everything for a small fraction of the cost. Is there really a mobile game or other app out there which requires top specs? Would such a game even sell enough quantities?

Better selfies or Tik-Tok videos. I presume we, HN crowd aren't big fan of those.

The biggest issue I have with buying a new phone is getting fewer features(!!!). I have a OnePlus 5T and that's the last OnePlus to have a headphone jack. There's nothing that I can "upgrade" to without losing that feature(from OnePlus). And the performance of the 5T is more than enough, so there's literally no reason to upgrade.

Why not just use a small, cheap headphone adapter (or several)?

That's not really the point, is it?

The point is that the upgraded version ships with less features. I use bluetooth-headphones so I don't care, but I can easily see why this is infuriating to others.

Because my use case for headphones very frequently coincides with the times the phone is charging - I cannot both charge and use the headphones at the same time with an adapter, unless there is some weird USB-C monstrosity that would enable this(without just implementing an internal sound card connected over USB).

Gotcha. Personally I never use wired headphones while charging after reading about a woman who electrocuted herself doing that a few years ago (due to a fake power supply).

Well now I have to carry this additional junk all time, plus this just create additional waste for no reason at all. as people will break and throw away them eventually

I just replaced the battery on my iPhone 6s [purchased in 2017]. Performance is snappy, and the new battery lasts an entire day of use without charging.

The next evolution will be foldable phones that can unfold into tablets. Smartphones in their current form have essentially peaked, I agree.

The ultrawide lens and night mode are significant in my view, if you don't already have them.

To me it seems the hardware innovation shifted from Apple to Google & Asia.

Google is hot with the ML train, they develop and release new state-of-the-art algorithms and improve all aspects of smartphone (videos, pictures, batteries, actions, gestures, keyboards, biometry, security, ...).

On the Asia side, companies are the first to release foldable phones. They are already acquiring user feedbacks and cost insights for the next generation of foldable phone, and Google is a supporting partner, with Android 10 embracing those new phones with new APIs.

I'm looking forward for foldable phones improvements and more Google magic

Regarding Asia, forcing unfinished bleeding edge features into products just to be able to say ”I was first” isn’t innovation, but greediness.

Apple is rarely first to put certain component or piece of technology into their products, but is usually first one to do it properly and create first actually usable product. That’s why pretty much every actual innovation only takes off after Apple has implemented it.

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