LG has decided to pull out of the smartphone business | Hacker News Reader

LG has decided to pull out of the smartphone business

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44 pointsofftop532 comments

That's a huge bummer. They were the last manufacterer to care about audio quality. I'd love to not have to buy a dedicated audio player to listen to my music.

Yup. After I had a G6, I couldn't go back to anything less. Now using a G8. If you know/find a good successor would love to hear about it.

Edit: Hmm, checking my statement.. Yeah, that's my experience, nothing to change.

I'm a bit split here, I've never had a good experience with an LG phone. At the same time there aren't all that many oems left, so with everyone that's lost, that's less from.

Apple doesn't care about audio quality?

They sell Beats, no?

That should tell you everything you need to know about whether they care about audio quality.

Hint: They don't. Obviously Apple doesn't want to make audio complete garbage, but any audio quality you get from Apple is a secondary consideration to pretty much any other criteria--design, form factor, fashion, etc.

LG sell fridges, that should tell you everything you need to know about whether they care about audio quality.

I gave you an example of an Apple product with known garbage audio quality.

And you compared it to a refrigerator.

Sorry. My brain is clearly insufficient to understand your hyper-advanced reasoning.

My fridge has garbage audio quality. It’s made by LG. Therefore LG doesn’t care about audio quality.

It’s not hard to understand. It’s your argument after all.

I would actually counter that with the fact that a fridge has audio at all, already places it ahead of most products it its category in terms of audio quality.

On the other hand maybe silence is superior.

I think my point was that a fridge is as much targeted towards audiophiles as Beats headphones are. Maybe a microwave would have been a better example.

What are you talking about.

If anything, if you have such disdain for Beats, you should applaud Apple, since they killed the product.

Apple acquihired Beats to build Apple Music with the industry connections, and since then, Dr. Dre left the company to do whatever, and they have completely neglected Beats as a brand for headphones.

Now it's in some weird place where the AirPods are the premium brand and Beats are this weird, budget athleisure brand that they never advertise and will probably kill soon.

They sell Beats? What? It’s like judging McDonalds from a vegan burger made by Beyond Meat. You should try a stereo paired homepods and then judge Apple sound quality..... Hint: it’s very good.

Apple's not a smartphone manufacturer it is a lifestyle brand. If you aren't buying the lifestyle you're not their customer.

Which is most people.

Ok sure but they are also one of the major smartphone manufacturers

That's not the point.

The point is people who don't buy into the Apple brand don't even consider it as an option.

Not the way someone looking for a phone will consider the options between Motorola, LG, Samsung, etc.

The fact that Apple manufactures Apple products is much more important than what those products are.

Ok sure but when you open with “one of the largest smartphone manufacturers is actually not a smartphone manufacturer” its kind of hard to hear anything else you’re saying.

so do they care about audio quality or not?

I made it this far in the thread and keep reading irrelevant deflections

I honestly just wear my AirPods Max as a lifestyle choice. /s

Yes, the audio quality is better than my AudioTechnica and Sony cans, and it integrates super well with all my Apple devices.

Totally a lifestyle choice to wear them in my home office where no one can see them!

Ah yes, because it integrates with your Apple IPad(tm) and your Apple Smart Watch(tm) and Apple TV(tm) and all of your Apple (tm) smart home products, but it's totally not a lifestyle choice.

Sure thing.

It works whether you do that or not though, and the audio quality is reportedly decent or very good.

LG G4 was a game changer (but not in a good way): mine and wife's stopped working 2 months after warranty expired. After lots of complaining that it was a worldwide known manufacturing failure, got a new one that lasted 6 months.

It was the best and the worst phone that I owned. But it's always a pity to lose another option...

Same experience. Loved the G4, then it got caught in a boot loop.

My wife got it and made a whole bunch of photos before it started to boot loop making it impossible to transfer photos from phone.

Solution was to freeze phone and then power it up and quickly transfer photos outside. (bootloop was because high speed/power cores were going to overdrive and overheat what was causing phone to reboot)

I'll join on the 18mo G4 bootloop bandwagon as well. It really turned me off of LG in general. I'd like to say it was just an issue with that model, but they had several generations of phones with similar issues. Some of their earlier phone (G2X, I think?) had even more extreme problems.

Hope they provide the keys to unlock bootloaders to all their devices on the way out. Otherwise we'll probably end up with a bunch more ewaste. Have a few LG devices I wish I could put a custom rom on but alas, locked bootloaders.

OT: I felt old for perhaps the second time in my life today as I was wondering if there are any phones on the market today with 3,5mm and no front camera.

Here's a search on GSMArena for releases 2019-present with 3.5 and no camera. They're all feature phones.

https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2019&nCamSecM...

Alternatively, some brands did motorized pop-up cameras for a while, so at least it can't see you while it's closed. The Chinese brands tend to have bad reputations for their UIs, but there's also a Motorola in there.

https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?chkFrontPopup=selected...

Same. I need a good DAC with 3.5 mm. I don't want to be locked into more proprietary garbage

A shame, I loved their V30 immensely, it was a fantastic phone. I'm on a Pixel now and I miss it sometimes.

LG had removable batteries which was great, but it was clear that they had poor brand recognition in the west.

I had two LGs (LG Nexus 4, LG G3) and both failed during the second year.

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