Comment by mrandish
20 hours ago
The deep dive on memory market dynamics and the LLM bubble distortion is great. But another cause of declining smart phone sales is simply that the devices have matured and aren't improving at nearly the same rate.
From 2008 to around 2015, upgrading every two years could make a meaningful difference. From ~2015 to ~2020 upgrading every three years might be worth considering. I just upgraded my top of the line flagship after nearly six years. And I actually looked for compelling reasons to buy a new phone every year since 2023. There just weren't any.
Frankly, this latest flagship phone is pretty underwhelming. It's slightly faster at a few things. The battery lasts a little longer. The screen can get a little brighter. The camera is supposed to a little better. But those are just the claimed improvements. I haven't actually noticed any of them in daily use because they weren't issues with my 2020 flagship phone either. Otherwise, the new phone is almost exactly the same size, same weight, same resolution, same look and same capabilities. I only upgraded because I was long out of contract and it was a only a couple hundred bucks for a $1400 MSRP phone with a new contract and a trade-in of the old phone.
Yeah I'm still using an iPhone 12 from late 2020 and it's honestly still fine in terms of its processing power, cameras, features etc. for anything I use it for. It does need a new battery but even that has degraded way slower than earlier phones I've had.
I was using an iPad Pro from late 2018 (mostly just for casual web browsing, reading documents and watching video on, I still do all my real work on laptop/desktops) as well until this year, and would have kept using it if I hadn't accidentally dropped it in water. I don't really notice much difference at all between my old one (when it worked) and the new iPad Air I replaced it with, except for the battery being a little better and having a bit more ram being nice (websites in background tabs are less likely to be purged from memory when I come back to them).
Ever since I started working from home I barely use my phone, I just buy a mid range phone, and it seems just as capable as high range phone in most every practical way. The only real thing that seems a bit better is the camera, but I don't actually use it that often. The only thing I've really been a bit tempted by is Lidar on Apple, but more for dev fun that normal practical purposes.
> The only thing I've really been a bit tempted by is Lidar on Apple
Maybe in that vein, one thing I wish phones would do to differentiate themselves is just add more sensors. I want my phone to be the tricorder from star trek. iPhones should have first party support for generating point clouds and measuring distances using lidar. Their microphones are probably already calibrated, why not expose that as a decibel meter. Same for light sensors. Phones used to have IR emitters, why not add those back in?
Also the iPhone still only has 240fps slow motion, I've found samsung's 960fps really useful in capturing transient phenomenon or even measuring mundane things like LED flicker.
Conversely the Pixel seems to be the only one shipping with an IR thermometer, and they'll probably remove it given most people don't seem to care. That's something I would've found useful in ad-hoc situations where I've had to make do with the back of my hand.
Air quality detection (especially pm2.5, CO2, and CO levels) would be great but I don't know if those sensors can be miniaturized enough to fit.
They're out there. Caterpillar makes a smartphone with a FLIR camera.
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Yeah, I mostly upgraded to get the magnetic charger on the back of my iPhone. Weren't a lot of other compelling reasons - the already pretty great cameras improved a bit, the screen is a bit nicer, but otherwise its much the same slab of glass.
First, the iPhone 17 Pro is a huge improvement.
Second, the article doesn’t focus on phones we buy. There won’t be a shortage of those.
Improvement in what way and over what previous phone? The parent mentioned a number of metrics.
Near the end of the article it says:
> We’re already at the point where marginal buyers in the poor world are getting priced out of the smartphone market. We’re rapidly approaching the point where buyers in the rich world feel the same thing.
So it predicts that phones we buy are next.
What does it improve, in practice? For myself, I need my phone to make phone calls, take photos/videos, occasionally run apps, and to be a wifi hotspot. My iPhone 6S did all of these well enough that I only upgraded it recently because I dropped it and bent the power button. My new phone has a slightly nicer camera and better battery life, that’s about it.
I actually also do not find new phones that much of an improvement, but just to be a devil' advocate:
1. High-resolution screen, finally approaching paper (600dpi) 2. High-refresh rate screen, up to 240 fps. Once you see 60 fps, you are already hooked, and 240 is just mind-blowing. 3. High-resolution camera, 50 Mpx means that the camera actually starts to match paper (600dpi) 4. Slo-mo camera (240 fps) to match the screen. 5. Decent memory sizes. On my recent 24 Gb size memory I can actually run multiple apps in parallel, and they are not getting killed. You see, using all available memory is a competitive strategy for app developers -- when they use all the memory, their competitors are evicted from RAM and the user is less likely to receive notifications. 6. Decent sdcard size (1Tb). Same reason for the storage. App manufacturers are trying to use all available space, so that you would delete the competitor's apps in order to keep using theirs. 7. HDMI over USB -- finally you can connect a keyboard and a monitor, and get rid of your laptop, just use one device for everything.
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