I have a feeling that this 'allows' Bose and Sony to raise their prices causing everything to normalize around $500 price range. Remember the original pixel (or nexus)? they were priced around $350-$400 and look where they are now ($700).
Remember the Apple Watch Edition? The one with a gold case that cost 17 grand?
The point wasn't to sell it, although there's a stratum of customer who always get the most expensive version of whatever they're getting.
The point was to make the entry-level price look reasonable, and it worked.
IIRC most gold watches are 12-14k for durability.
I wouldn't trade any of my Pebbles for a Apple Watch.
Edit: what I mean is that I consider the Pebble far superior to the AW: customizable and easier to program, with a longer lasting battery and display always on.
Sure, but this argument can be easily taken to its logical absurdity. Someone who just needs a watch that shows the time & date and has a stopwatch can get a Casio which accurately does all this and has a battery that lasts years, in addition to an always-on display (note: for what it's worth, the Apple Watch also has an always-on display). From that perspective a Casio is vastly superior to both a Pebble and an Apple Watch ;-).
>Introduced in 1989, it is popular for its low price [$12.95] and long battery life. Annual production of the watch is 3 million units per year.
So I do get what you're saying, and you're kind of right, but there's absurdity here in both directions. A superior product is not necessarily just one that has a bunch of features crammed into it -- it's one that solves a lot of problems without introducing new problems. If you stick text notifications into my microwave, or a charging port onto my shoes, you haven't actually improved those products.
There's a little bit of irony in having this discussion about a company like Apple, which was lauded for a long time for building interfaces that were purposeful and simple. It was the Android crew ran around talking about how iPhone was behind the curve because it couldn't do multitasking or set up FTP servers, while Apple confidently asserted that building a good, focused device was better than trying to do literally everything everywhere.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that making a product more powerful or capable is orthogonal to making it superior/inferior, and trying to equate the two concepts in either direction can lead you to absurd conclusions. Of course, for many people, the Pebble watch would not be powerful enough; they want/need the extra features in the Apple Watch, just like many people wanted/needed the extra multitasking features in early Android devices. But for people who don't need those features, the Pebble was a superior product because it did its job better and didn't introduce distractions or compromises to accommodate unnecessary features.
It's good that powerful smartwatches exist, but it's unfortunate that there's now an unsatisfied niche of people who are left wanting a more elegant, purposefully designed device that costs less money. At least (thankfully for me) the Apple Watch didn't mean the end of good old-fashioned Casio and Timex watches, because for all of its power, the Apple Watch isn't capable of helping me with my ADHD. It's too complicated and has too many significant tradeoffs to be even useable as a daily driver the way I want to use it, regardless of how much it costs.
And the original Nexus was expensive. So was the original Pixel. You can't really draw any conclusions from Google's inconsistent smartphone lineup and pricing over the past decade.
Cheap Nexus phones: 4, 5, maybe the 5X if you waited a bit.
Expensive Nexus phones: 1, S, Galaxy, 6, 6P.
Expensive Pixel phones: all of them except the 'a' line, sometimes ridiculously so given the poor experience.
So they will launch a „new improved“ line to compete at the $500 price bracket.
Even the expensive pixels are cheap if you wait.
And I doubt this is just any special price. The XM3s were always below MSRP.
Not bothering to look up nexus phones because they're from a different lineage than pixels, hence the different branding.
You're just taking advantage of semantics then.
Anyone who's followed the Nexus line knows exactly what their wording meant, since Nexus devices did give way to the Pixel and did follow the price normalization this person mentions.
Iirc the Nexus 6 Or 6P was the start of rise in prices
They might be misremembering exact prices but I distinctly remember the backlash as Nexus devices went from strong values as dev phones to premium smartphones, then the Pixel dropped and solidified that
Which captures the original poster's point pretty perfectly: the Pixel line did completely abandon those value root until "budget flashship variant" recently became a thing throughout the industry...
which was mostly lead by Apple and the Xr
(and no, I'm not saying Apple made the first budget smartphone, they just popularized the idea of making a budget variant of a 12 hundred dollar phone and marketing them alongside one another)