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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

OnePlus is one of the saddest stories out there. It was the hacker's choice for a while. It was originally the "Never Settle" phone that ran mostly stock android, had specs maxxed out, price was great, and bootloader was unlocked plus they provided factory images. Those were all reasons I bought a lot of OnePlus phones in the early years.

Then they flushed nearly all of it down the toilet. The day they stopped posting factory images was the day I saw the writing on the wall. Such a shame.

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> had specs maxxed out

Indeed, their 10 year old flagship has 6GB of RAM.

https://www.gsmarena.com/oneplus_3-7995.php

(for comparison, last year's iPhone 17 has just 8GB or RAM, 9 years later)

Yeah I remember buying a OnePlus 7 Pro with 12 GB (!) of RAM like 7 years ago. The processor was also bleeding edge and that sucker ripped. It combined with stuff like termux was so capable that I used it to run all kinds of stuff that makes little sense on a normal phone. The day that phone retired (from drop damage) was heartbreaking*.

* It actually ran even longer after that as various utilities but not a daily driver, but when I didn't have it with me all the time the convenience slowly waned and it got forgotten

That's the phone I was using too. Gave it to my wife a couple years ago and she used it until just a couple months ago when it too suffered a fatal drop. Very sad.

Good phone. I was worried about that pop up camera failing at some point, but it never did

Indeed, that pop up camera worried me too but was never an issue. It survived lots of pocket lint, and even beach sand and was always reliable. I'd easily trade the current "notch" approach on most phones for a pop up camera (assuming similar quality).

Same. Oneplus showed that the pop up camera was a perfectly workable approach for the front camera instead of using a notch.

Boy, do I miss the amount of diversity and innovation we used to have in cell phones. I remember having this phone [1] which put the camera on a little rotating thing so you could use the same one for front or back facing - obviously this either saves money or means they have twice the budget for the cameras as if they had two.

Obviously these cameras themselves were potato cameras compared to modern ones, but this design was still a great innovation and unique. We rarely get many design ideas that are that different today, as everyone mainly just wants to look like an iPhone, and Apple for its part only sits around obsessing on how they can make the iPhone's form more and more featureless and pure.

https://www.mobilecollectors.net/phone/6666/lg-vx-7000

I still daily drive a Oneplus 7T; for ~$350 in 2020, it's served me incredibly well, barely any performance drop over the years.

The battery has weakened ofc, the 2 day battery life has dropped to a measly 9 hours, but that's more than enough.

Not an apples to apples comparison#. iOS uses way less ram than android, plus has memory compression. That’s why Apple gets away with less ram and much smaller batteries with equal or better performance.

# pun intended

Regarding memory compression: isn't the use of `zswap` and `zram` commonplace on embedded Linux at this point?

Of course it's not an apple to apple comparison, the iPhone 7 from the same year was 50% more expensive and had only one third of the RAM (2 GB)

plus has memory compression.

FYI, Android has had zRAM support since KitKat, which is from (checking notes) 2013. Same year as iOS.

iOS uses way less ram than android

Common measurements I have seen is around 40%, I wouldn't say way less, but it is definitely less. Still, 3x more for a model in the same year is impressive (and more than needed to be competitive with iOS) and we should give OnePlus credit for it.

Sadly a lot of low-ish to midrange phones are going back or sticking to 6-8GB today, thanks to the RAM squeeze and the efficiency of iOS is certainly helping Apple here. Certainly nobody is going to complain about the performance of the iPhone 17, despite only having 8GB RAM.

In Android, Samsung doesn't seem to suffer as much. You can pick up an S26 here with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage for 623 Euro, which is a nice midrange price. I guess there are benefits if you can produce your own memory.

> 623 Euro, which is a nice midrange price [for a phone].

How did we get here?

Our central planners allocated all the RAM to AI and almost none to phones.

Apple is already past that, with the entry-level 17e starting at 700 Euro. The midrange regular 17 starts at 950 Euro. And according to rumors those prices are likely to increase in spring if not earlier.

> entry-level 17e starting at 700 Euro

Which is 30% less than the original iPhone accounting for inflation.

iPhone 1 launched at 649 Euros in France in 2007 money, or about 980 Euros today.

Given inflation and the increased utility of the smartphone, we're almost certainly at the lowest cost per hour of use ever for most people.

> for most people

For most people, salaries have not kept up with inflation

What's funny is that due in part to minimum wage laws (which caused some of the inflation) the lowest quintile is arguably the one who's kept up with inflation better than the rest, meaning there has been an improvement in the wealth inequality department. But nobody talks about it. Meanwhile I've lost like 20% of my buying power to inflation in the past 3-4 years even taking the meager raises into account.

> FYI, Android has had zRAM support since KitKat, which is from (checking notes) 2013. Same year as iOS.

iOS compresses regular pages, it doesn't need to go through the swap system to compress/decompress them.

This imho should end up having better savings and performance. zswap when it gains support for non-swap usage may close the gap.

Maybe it's not technically a "swap system" but I'll be shocked if they're not doing effectively the same thing. How could you avoid having active uncompressed pages and inactive compressed pages? The amount of tracking you'd need to do to use compressed pages directly seems like an impossible amount of overhead.

There are good articles that explain that and OP is right.

Can you link one? A quick search just showed me information about compressing inactive apps and that requires very bulky actions with a lot of overhead, much more than going per page. Plus information about compressing inactive pages in a way that's basically the same as swap. Is there a third method I'm not aware of?

> iOS uses way less ram than android, plus has memory compression. That’s why Apple gets away with less ram and much smaller batteries with equal or better performance.

Yeah, by aggressively purging all my Safari tabs (and Apps) unexpectedly, during the most convenient times, like when I'm going through a tunnel on the train and my cellular connection is at its best. Still infuriatingly common on my 17 Pro with 12GB of RAM.

Akshully

iPhones from that era constantly booted apps out of RAM when you toggled between them, making it really slow to have more than a few apps open at the same time.

These issues pretty much never happened with these big RAM android phones.

I know because I had both and it was night and day. Like going from a netbook to a desktop machine.

Careful. If you acknowledge this provable fact you just invite hordes of specs-table-rotted gigahertz-chasers to post replies that completely miss the point.

Phones are skimping on RAM lately because of the price spikes due to the AI boom. Phones and laptops are sometimes debuting with less RAM than their predecessors of the same brand.

Turns out the Wife and I finally upgrading late last year was a brilliant move. Have locked in the RAM advantage for a few years ahead even if personally I don't really need it.

"Hacker's choice" phones don't appear to sell enough to justify the costs, although they can be a decent strategy for building the initial brand awareness.

Financially speaking, OPPO was right to gut OnePlus all those years ago and streamline their production into selling the same models (with minor tweaks) under the brands that are more known in this or that region. Saves on hardware and software development costs a lot, and once OnePlus was a household brand among the general public it no longer had to appeal to the hacker crowd anyway.

Sad as it is. I bought the One when they were still invite-only and mained it for years, amazing device for the time. Went a bit full circle and using a Nord 3 right now, but I didn't get it because of the brand (just needed a basic secondary smartphone for traveling and got a good deal on it, it's clearly just a generic OPPO brick).

You're probably right, but I would have been willing to tolerate price increases if they hadn't compromised all the other things though (especially factory images, which heavily chilled rooting/mods). I wonder what would have happened if they'd stuck with high end devices (with maybe a low-end line too) and not compromised on the hackability. For me at least I'd still be using them today as long as the price didn't get ridiculous (i.e. stayed in the ballpark with other flagships)

Do these kinds of products have to sell as many units as a phone targeting the general population? I mean, most of the target audience will hear about a new release / iteration from blog posts, tech news sites, etc., so marketing doesn't need that much resources.

Other than that, I guess it's also not necessary to fill every casual store like MediaMarkts, etc. because unlike my grandma, tech savvy people can order online.

But I'm not knowledgable on these things, so it's mostly just me thinking out loud.

The overhead of designing the actual phone and then setting up manufacturing processes and supply chains is pretty big. You definitely need to sell a lot to break even on that, especially considering that the unit margins aren't crazy.

Absolutely not. OnePlus was more known and trusted outside China and should have been the flagship. OPPO has "the smell of factory girl" inside China and in SEA.

> Then they flushed nearly all of it down the toilet. The day they stopped posting factory images was the day I saw the writing on the wall.

For me, it was when the killed the headphone jack with the OnePlus 6T. Around the time OP6 was released, the then CEO Carl Pei posted a poll around the headphone jack - a overwhelming majority of users said they used/wanted the jack - something like 80%+). Then they go ahead and release the 6T (and subsequent models) with no jack. At this point most of the OG fans (including myself) felt incredibly betrayed and vowed to never buy another OnePlus again. And soon, Carl Pei himself left the company and it's been downhill ever since.

The OP6 was their last good phone which actually lived up to their "flagship killer" premise without compromising on features.

Their move to ColorOS away from the fully customized stock Android experience with OxygenOS was the nail in the coffin for me.

The overall experience turned terrible, and so many aspects of the OS were changed or worsened for all the wrong reasons. Everything from pulling the notification drawer and managing notifications, to the castrated home screen functionality, was such a disappointment.

I know HN doesn't like vids for obvious reasons but Marques summed it pretty well IMO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZdbbN3FCzE

OnePlus starting out: "We’re going to build the ultimate, cheap, bloatware-free phone directly for tech nerds by cutting out carriers, ads, and useless features."

OnePlus scaling up: "Nerds don't buy enough phones to keep us alive, and they'll leave the second someone else is $10 cheaper. We have to sell to normal people."

OnePlus today: To survive, they had to raise prices, buy ads, partner with carriers, and merge with a generic parent company.

I still remember the wait lists for OP1, 2 and 3. OnePlusX was the sexiest looking phone anyone ever released, before and since.

what makes the OnePlusX look good to you? Just looked it up, it has the standard smartphone look

it was a seamless sandwich of glass on both sides - no camera tumour. The metal band around it felt solid (likely stainless steel) and had nicely masked antenna cuts. The phone felt both very light and very solid at the same time.

The motorola razr was the sexiest phone ever

And they had actual community! Never have I been frequent on any manufacture's discussion forum, but with OnePlus, I was. It was wild to see a manufacturer helping you with rooting their device.

Then I saw the announcement that they'll be merging the bloatware Chinese version of their OS and that was the last day I held my OnePlus phone.

Had they not taken that path, I'd likely have bought at least 3 of their phones since then.

Really a shame. I had a original 1 (flagship killer) a 3t, a 6t, a 7t a 9 something..I now own a nothing phone.

Sounds like the story of Mozilla/Firefox on the software side.

25% and rising market share, wonderful extension ecosystem.

Nope, gotta copy Chrome. With expected results.

This is exactly it. Every competitive advantage they had against larger brands was removed.

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