Hacker News Reader

Comment by takeda | Hacker News Reader

Google and Apple are just milking it. Smart phones were introduced a decade ago. Flagship phones costed then around $500, now we got to the point that they costing $1,000+ like if mass producing wouldn't cut the cost down. On top of that making a battery be non removable and constantly over-volting the batteries to reduce their life. Ultimately phones become useless after 2 years, unless you replace batteries yourself or pay someone to do it for you.

View on HN

A few years ago, I got annoyed with a Google phone (Nexus something I think) that broke, given how expensive it was, and replaced it with a Motorola Android phone that was well under $100. I didn't really sacrifice the basic necessities - sure, the screen was small and side by side with a high end phone obviously less bright and lower resolution, but providing you didn't care about processor intensive apps/games, it served the same purpose.

Edit: Of course, I am assuming there wasn't a substantial subsidy from somewhere, but from my point of view, it didn't have a contract attached.

Another way of looking at things: Today’s phones are quite a bit more capable than the first generation of smartphones, and they only cost twice as much.

So tomorrow's smartphone will be 20 times faster and only cost 10 times as much?

No... that's pure hyperbole.

But 10x faster (or capable) and 2x the cost? That's not outrageous. BTW that's where we currently are.

10x faster and more capable at what? The tech in phones might be progressing but the use cases aren't. What most people do on their phones now is the same as they did 10 years ago. Eventually people will realise they don't need more speed, and the focus will switch to things like power effeciency and weight. Just like laptops.

Mostly photography gets noticeably better, but I still hope that at some point "convergence" becomes good enough. It has been tried again and again but always fell short due being not quite good or easy or convenient enough (getting docks, cables etc.). With usb-c/usb4 as a single connection and "good enough" processing and storage maybe in a few years?

https://maruos.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop

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

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

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum

> Eventually people will realise they don't need more speed, and the focus will switch to things like power effeciency and weight. Just like laptops.

Have you been in a coma for 5 years? That has already happened.

Not quite, new phones still go for higher performance as well as stronger power saving. That's because they do need to consume high end media - decode and encode high resolution video, perhaps play games, run complex algorithms to handle camera pictures. This has some obvious limits but we're not close to them.

The most power hungry component is the display... The technology there has not kept up, in fact they grow bigger and consume more power.

>Smart phones were introduced a decade ago. Flagship phones costed then around $500, now we got to the point that they costing $1,000+ like if mass producing wouldn't cut the cost down.

If making smartphones is really as easy as you make it out to be, and smartphone prices are rising, then why isn't that being captured in the global profit share? Considering that Androids are vastly more popular than iOS phones, there would be no reason why Apple's getting 62% of global profits.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/780367/global-mobile-han...

Can't view your link.

seems like you need a search engine referrer to unlock the paywall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com