Especially for older people that don't need $500+ flagships, a $150 Xiaomi is more than sufficient. I see them a lot nowadays.
Makes me wonder if it's sustainable.
While there are some suspicious of doggy accounting practice and also political investment, Xiaomi is actually a company listed in HKSE 1810.HK [1] with positive cash flow and operating income. Currently valued at around ~$90B USD.
Their phone are at a very low gross margin but their other products, or they call it the Xiaomi ecosystem is quite profitable. ( Comparatively Speaking ). And of course they earn most of their profits from selling Data and Ads. Which to be fair is similar to Google. ( Cough on the surface because we dont know how those Data are used Cough )
So to answer your question, it is sustainable. And they benefited most from the Huawei incident.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/1810.HK?p=1810.HK&.tsrc=fin-...
Does it really matter if it has 4x the cameras of a cheap Samsung if it sends all the photos to some server in China on the sneak?
or Telegram
Or Signal
And have nobody spy on you
"Trust me, I'm Italian."
Don't get me wrong, I like these free OS versions, but while I could teach my wife, my mother in law etc to manage Netguard, I couldn't teach them to handle Lineage, f-Droid all by themselves.
Is that part even made by Xiaomi?
Besides, one person's "targeted by interventionism" is another person's "liberated by democratic forces".
Does newspeaking it make it better?
And if one would look at the examples of "liberation by democratic forces" over the last decades I feel that it is somewhat difficult to find an instance that wasn't a prime example of securing natural ressources or ensuring of keeping the global power structure intact.
I might be naive (or even contrarian to the US policy) bbut wwere aare tthe purely humanistic examples of Uncle Sam mingling in foreign affairs?
Imho the US should keep their fingers out of others' proverbial cookie jars.
The difference in language is often just political rhetoric. The difference in substance became very clear to me talking to my grandfather who was liberated by democratic forces and would have been insulted by having that called "targeted by US interventionism".
There are good reasons for both sentiments based on actual, sometimes painful, experience. We should respect that.
It's a very complex and off-topic subject. That's why I'm not going into the details of the various conflicts in recent decades.
There are no easy answers.
But most current interventions as well as many historic ones were not motivated by ulterior motives but by economic ones and questions of power.
Coming from Germany and having studied history I must ask myself when did liberation turn to intervention because of political or economical gains? While keeping the rhetoric more or less the same.
There is imho a difference between WW II or Yugoslavia and Kuwait. Or Irak. Or even Afghanistan. Or Serbia. Or different South American states were intervention is often less militaristic.
I feel we need to have a way to differentiate and look closer to be able to discuss without falling back to ideology or "party lines".
I can't even begin to imagine how various groups of people (ethnic groups, women, young men, ...) or individuals in Afghanistan may feel about the various interventions during the past half century.
What use is it if a company knows everything about me when they can't use that information to sell me things?
That doesn't mean this is a worthless thing to run. Unless you are being specifically targeted, security measures that simply put you outside the main herd can still be effective.
Edit: Pixels
The pricing is now norm in Asia for last several years. In fact Xiaomi is not #1 in terms of quality or value for money. It's Oppo/Realme/OnePlus (all are same hardware). They do not have ads like Xiaomi and pretty much retail for the same price and ship millions of hardware. The quality is definitely higher with Oppo/Realme (budget options) having same quality as Oneplus (premium).
https://9to5google.com/2021/07/02/oneplus-android-update-sch...
Let me rephrase that for you: Especially for people who realise they don't need $500+ flagships, a $150 Xiaomi is more than sufficient.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with age, my 16yo daughter is more than satisfied with her Redmi Note 5 - she wanted one when she saw mine. Good battery life, good screen, more than fast enough and plenty of memory, 3.5mm jack, can take an SD card. Show me the "flagship" phone which offers this combination.
Phones have been fast enough for years now, screens, memory and storage have been big enough. Add LineageOS and you have a device which can easily last for 6 years, longer when you change the battery. I'm using a Samsung SIIIneo from 2014 with LineageOS 17.1 (Android 10) as a second device, it receives weekly OTA updates (which I generally do not install, but still - they're there). With a new battery it lasts for 2-3 days between charges when used for audio streaming through bluetooth or the speaker.
Xiaomi, if you're listening, please continue to make at least one line of phone that has these features.
The market for cheap phones is much bigger than for the expensive ones and as you see from the Apple numbers: the expensive market is pretty much covered. Also covered in an separate environment form where those users are reluctant to switch because it's hard to learn again.
imho I think that fighting for the low budget Android market makes much more sense than for the high price Apple audience as "Apple" has become the "I can afford it"-message of prestige this group is looking for and therefore won't be replaced by anything else. Even if you buy the most expensive Samsung, you'd have to explain how expensive it was first to your audience. There is no need with Apple. Everybody knows you've spend a lot of money on it.
So it is a point ..
I think it’s sustainable considering the vast majority of the world can’t afford an iPhone or even a Samsung, so there’s a large market. Also, once someone has a phone that can run a web browser, have a camera, and use messaging apps, then that’s basically set for this target market.
There are others:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/12/not-all...
Been happy enough, so I bought a like new second gen iPhone SE for $250.
I am not so old, and I also have enough with a cheap smartphone. I just use mail, instant messaging, maps and government and bank apps. None of these need advanced graphics or fast CPUs. Interestingly I need access to Google Play as many official apps from the government are not available in alternative stores.
Said that, I got a Xiaomi cheap tablet and I had a bad experience as it was full of ad-ware and I was not able to install Google Play. The lack of official apps in the Xiaomi app store is not really their fault, but all the ad-ware is, I suspect, why the tablet was so extremely cheap. So, good enough hardware specifications, but somewhat disappointed at the software part.
I have a Xiaomi Mi 9 SE (had it almost 2 years now), and it's the best phone I've ever owned. Previously I'd owned flagship Samsungs and an iPhone 6.
It's powerful, the display is excellent, the battery lasts 2 days even with plenty use (unusual these days!), the cameras are excellent, and the device itself looks great. Oh, and it cost £340 at a time when flagship equivalents were around twice that - amazing value for money.
Service is great too - the phone stopped charging at some point, but it was fixed within a few days of initial contact, with no quibbling.
My only gripe is the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, but that's hardly a unique issue.
This kind of reads like your a person who hates the price of iPhones? Either that or I read like an Apple fan boy; However, I'm a pretty keen Linux / PC user and I don't think I'm that bias?
There are reasons why things are little bit more expensive to make. And those add up quickly. The flexible OLED panel is more than double the BOM cost of rigid OLED even at the scale of Apple. For Apple that is ~$150+ of RSP increase form a single component. It is not only just being rigid, but they are also a higher quality panel. People often only look at "spec" on the surface without actually going it into details. Add up the cost of iOS ( $10 on accounting basis or $30 for RSP ), Face ID etc you are looking at $200 RSP extra already without going into any many other differences. Of course the main thing being Apple has a gross product margin of 60% compared to Xiaomi at ~10%. ( I think they raised this to 15%+ due to operating cost being higher outside China )
It is also worth remembering. Hardware is insanely cheap. Comparatively speaking. We talk about moore's law ending because of higher cost of making chips, at the same time we keep making dozen of billions from stupid social network and ads. The number by comparison are often comical. The cost of a product are now mostly driven by software when Apple are still giving iOS update to a phone first released 6 years ago.
It might also be worth noting, the entry level iPhone, iPhone SE, has faster single thread performance ( Very important due to Amdahl's law ) than the best flagship Android Phone on the market. You have to price this in somewhere.
So while their software is basically adware and like all Chinese companies they are probably controlled by CCP, we must acknowledge that they also have some really bright engineers.
It's simply an anecdote from a random HN user who has a Xiaomi device, in a thread about Xiaomi; I figured they'd be relatively rare among HN users, and someone might appreciate a comment from an owner.
I don't hate iPhones, or the Samsung I've owned. They all have different attributes and values: the iPhone 6 was beautiful to look at, and the physical size was great; the last Galaxy I had was a great all-rounder; the Xiaomi I have now is a little larger than I'd like (though that's the way everyone has gone now), but otherwise it's very good in almost any regard. Is it better than an iPhone or the latest Galaxy? I'm not saying that - what I'm saying is that it does everything I need and more, and was half the price of flagships at the time. Way I see it, that's incredible value for an extremely capable device.