Smartphone sales down 22 percent in Q2, the worst performance in a decade::North American sales are bad for everyone, except, miraculously, Google.
finally some positive news.
Well… do we all need to change our perfectly fine, advanced and fast pocket computer every year just to have always the latest -> IMO No.
Good for the environment that it’s a bad business year.
Two cents on the headphone jack issue folks bring up all the time. The convenience of 3.5 mm is great and valid. Totally agree.
However, I use and own a lot of wired higher end headphones and a dongle DAC is just better audio quality than the 3.5mm jack. Let me explain.
3.5mm jacks means the phone’s on board DAC is doing the work and outputting an analog stereo signal. You are stuck with whatever, typically sub-par, DAC is built into your phone. Yes, some phones have better DACs than others, but it is a challenge to sort out and is often not a priority for most manufacturers.
With type C dongle you can escape your phone’s limitations and use dongles with audio features like fully balanced audio because the signal stays digital from your phone to the dongle. Personally, I’m a fan of 4.4 mm balanced connection, as most of my headphones will run balanced. This is something I could never do with 3.5mm alone.
DDHifi, XDUOO, ifi, etc makes some great ‘audiophile’ - dumb title but you know what I mean - DACs.
I often don’t hear this side of the issue discussed.
The idea with the jack is convenience tho. Including the jack won’t take much space and it’s just convenient. You wanna take a quick phone call while doing stuff around the house, plug the headphones in and good to go, no worries about battery or connection loss. You still have the type C for the digital audio. A hybrid analog/SPDIF would be even cooler, some laptops and sound cards do it
I don’t get why everything has to be wireless these days. It becomes less convenient when we have yet another device to charge. Heck, remember when removable batteries used to be a convenience feature?
If it had 2 type c ports on the top and bottom I wouldn’t mind this. 1 port with a splitter is a nonstarter for me for basic audio and charging
That’s a great idea. I don’t know of any manufacturers floating this, but I really like the idea of two USB C ports.
Then you could also pretend their eyes and ask how your phones day was.
what dongles do yoy reocmmned and why, link them here
Cause they keep making them shittier and shittier. Like I can’t replace my battery like a fairphone, replace all the parts, have a microsd slot and fingerprint reader like the older phones. People complaining about size and weight. Check out the Samsung S5, what was fucking wrong with that? Worked fine and waterproof. Fucking bitchasses keep complaining about how it’s not possible when it’s been done for many years already.
Bad, non-consumer centric marketing forces poor changes. We could invest in all day battery life, or we could make the frame out of titanium. Titanium is easier, so boom, done! Do you want a headphone jack, or do you want a slide in the presentation that says the phone is 0.2mm thinner and 5g lighter? Done! Sleek, elegant, thin, sexy, but no headphone jack.
Nobody makes a phone with the consumer’s convenience and experience in mind anymore. They make things without microSD card slots to drive subscriptions to their cloud platform. Instead of selling me a $60 battery I can change myself, they parts lock all pieces of the phone. It’s totally anti-consumer, and I don’t understand why. If someone released a stylish flagship phone right now with headphones, microSD, good battery life, and snappy performance, they’d trade wireless earbud and cloud platform sales for straight market share. How is that not worth it?
Bad, non-consumer centric marketing forces poor changes.
I don’t think so, the companies (mostly Apple), are making these changes and twisting them to make it sound presentable, but in reality, they’re making it less usable for the consumer unless they pay more money. They continue to do this because people still support it by buying them each year. Plenty of people at my campus are Apple fanboys for life and upgrade to the newest releases each year. When Apple fucks their consumers and their consumers still purchase them, other technology companies follow behind because it’s proven success.
When companies fuck you over, don’t continue giving them money to fuck you again. This is easier said than done as it’s more of a societal shift but let’s say everybody holds off, or a good portion hold off and demand that the companies changes things up, then something may be done to get the point across.
This upcoming phone update I’m tempted to buy the fairphone 5 even if theres no upgradable sd slot or headphone jack because it’s not like the google pixel will introduce it. I just hope CalyxOS supports it soon.
https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/10489306843409-Install-a-Micro-SD-Card According to their site, you should still be able to upgrade storage space with a micro sd. Another recommendation is that if you do buy a fairphone dont buy the adapter from usb c to aux from them, ive bought 2 from them and they both broke within half a year.
That’s all actually very good news. I must’ve missed that in the specs sheet. I guess the only thing fairphone doesn’t have now is a headphone jack. I’m a bit more inclined to buy their products now. Really, the only thing that’s holding me back is CalyxOS support. I know it’s been supported on the FP4 and I hope it will be available for FP5 soon. I also live in the US of A so that adds additional complications.
The fp5 is looking good finally with an oled screen. That was the only thing keeping me from buying the fp4.
I’m not really surprised, smartphones kinda hit this point of “good enough for most people’s purposes” 3-4y ago and short of an actual reason to upgrade like the 4g-5g switchover there isn’t a lot of incentive for most people to throw down $400-1k for a new phone every couple of years.
I would have happily kept my OnePlus 7T for a few more years if the network switchover didn’t require new hardware.
Personally I don’t need a faster smartphone at this point, if anything motivates me to buy a new one it’s usually better radios, better battery runtime and better cameras. The rest of the gewgaws don’t matter much for daily use.
Agreed
This market stagnation was what got me to buy a Fold. Every 3-5 years of the same size slabs, just imperceptibly “faster”. Then came something new finally. Same as my pixel 2xl, I’ll have this till the battery or screen starts to go.
Also I would add inflation went up, prices jumped. Meaning not so much free spending cash any more. People might have previously had the cash to update phone, just for sake of update even without it being necessary. Now days? People have way more important things they have to spend more money on.
It seemed the last incentive they were trying to get people to upgrade was throwing as many cameras as possible on the back. Companies need to try and innovate again and the folding screens is at least one way of them trying something new. Prices have also climbed dramatically so I’m not surprised people are bothering to upgrade.
Which phone did you upgrade to? I also have the 7T and quite happy with it except for brightness outdoors
I hit fleaBay and bought a used 9 Pro. All I really wanted out of the upgrade were newer radios (5g + AX wifi) and better cameras. I think I paid around $350, if my track record holds I’ll keep it for 2-3 years then do the same again for the same reasons. I’ve been halfway looking at a 10 Pro/T or an 11 model for better battery runtime (Snapdragon 888 is a bit of a battery hog for the performance) but I don’t really have a reason to upgrade yet.
It’s more tied to the change of the business model.
Phones used to be subsided by the plan and the 2 year contract lock in, so if you didn’t upgrade every cycle you were effectively leaving money on the table.
This is why the market accelerated so quickly compared to any other class of hardware.
As the 2 year contract fell out of favor (thanks largely to T-Mobile), you had 2 year heavily discounted payment plans tied to device trade in that took their place, but these were opt-in as opposed to the previous model which was built in to every contract.
While the economy was strong, the depreciation on your current device and effectively FOMO on maximizing its trade in value kept the system driven at similar numbers.
But as purses have tightened, suddenly the outlay on increasingly expensive devices with lower trade in values for past devices is a racket people are opting out of.
It was never really about features as opposed to status and reup indicators. Most of the rest of the world has more like 3 year phone replacement cycles for the past decade, and have been fine with the same feature parity per model year as US phones.
I’m honestly surprised the 2 year thing kept going as long as it did.
Have they considered releasing another hard to hold glass slab exactly like the previous one?
it’s amazing that in capitalism a company has to always show numbers rising like there is no physical upper boundary. The most logical and efficient economic model
It drives me insane how many people turn a blind eye to the funny numbers needing to always go up. Every “investor” will tell me how the market has never not recovered; how I’m the fool and surely not them for trusting in the system.
I hate that my retirement depends on a 401k, or money that constantly depreciates.
Constant growth at all costs. In the short term at least. Whether that works out in the long run or not…
Partly because everybody’s finances are stretched pretty thin, but also partly because phones got Good Enough like 6 years ago and so at this point you basically replace one when it breaks and replacement cost exceeds repair costs unless you’re an enthusiast who demands the latest and greatest… which is why the lucrously short support window for security patches on most Android devices is obscene. I know the technical reasons for them, but they’re still unacceptable.
Blame greedflation. Phones should be cheaper now, not thousands of dollars.
You can still buy a Moto G for like $200 that is better than an old high-end phone in every way and runs Android like a champ. Only flaw is short support lifespan.
Exactly what I was coming to write. Who could have thought that rising notably the prices would have led to less sales?
WE ALL ALREADY HAVE ONE, STOP USING THIS AS SOME KIND OF MARKET BAROMETER
I miss my Samsung S4 so much. That thing was amazing. It lasted like, 8 years or something, the longest by far of any of my phones.
I’m using a Samsung Galaxy S10 for over three years now and I don’t see a reason why I should get a new one anytime soon.
Phones have provided nothing new in a decade exceot incremental upgrades and foldables are… fragile and expensive
My foldable has been much more robust and drop-resistant than a candy bar ever was.
Well… contract lengths are getting longer, what do they expect?
Also, one phone is very much like another these days. You don’t get a lot by upgrading.
I picked up a Pixel 6 for about three hundred. The last phone I had was a Moto One Action. I prefer the Moto for a lot of things but the irony is the final reason I had to get rid of it is the USB-C charging port was fucked. Of course the battery was very crap by then and the screen was cracked to hell too.
I really like that phone though. Lots of functions just by shaking it, like the flashlight came on when I tomahawk chopped it twice. Super handy. If I could have fixed it for a reasonable price I would have.
That USB-C thing made me laugh though. I’ve had to use iPhones for work a lot, and the one thing I really like was clicking in the lighting port to charge it. Never failed. On more than one android the USB-C gets wonky, where you have to tilt the cable to get the connectors to touch and stuff. Not bad, but not even as good as the old USB mini chargers.
I love Moto actions. The twist for camera, the shake for flashlight are both awesome. Too bad they don’t seem to use AMOLED screens anymore. I’m on Pixel 6, but held onto my Moto Z, first Gen, for as long as I could.
I’d like netbooks to come back. That was a good idea (and sufficiently popular, and probably slaughtered due to some backstage pressure from Microsoft, cause those were often used with Linux, I even remember that some were sold with Linux).
Chromebooks are decent depending on your needs.
my samsung has dex mode so I just plug that in to my monitor at work and use it to log in to my VM or just as is if its something that the mobile firefox browser can do. I even got a 70 dollar portable monitor that works great with it for camping trips or something
Netbooks were replaced by ultrabooks. Install Linux on one if you want.
… usually produced by something like Packard Bell, and though cheap, still too expensive for their build quality, and weaker than Raspberry Pi, and with problematic hardware (which matters for Linux use).
Still if not for the latter I’d buy one.
