From a consumer’s perspective, Google’s Android operating system has been an exceedingly good thing. It’s the only viable competitor to have kept pace with Apple’s iPhone, and in its time it has stimulated grand battles between device manufacturers – first competing on specs, and now on price. All this competition has driven smartphone development forward at a blistering pace, and we’re all profiting from it now, but it has its downsides, too. Today is a fitting day to take a closer look at those.
Odd article. It argues that cheaper, low-cost Android devices are hurting consumers, which I find peculiar. People have a choice. Nobody is forcing you to buy any phone – you actively choose to get something cheap, risks included. These cheaper manufacturers – from shady ones all the way to by-now proven companies like OnePlus and OPPO – provide more choice, not less. Thanks to these companies, I get to choose between sending 40-50% free money profit margins to Apple or Samsung, or get a similarly specced phone of equal quality for a fraction of the price.
This is good. This is choice. I know a lot of people ascribe to the idea that you should not give people too much choice because their dainty, fragile little minds can’t comprehend it, but I disagree with that vehemently. More choice in the market is always better than less choice – and if that means companies like HTC have to crumble because they can’t keep up… Well, I just don’t care. They’ll make way for a dozen others.
That’s business.
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There is a loss to the customer in the respect of lack of high quality support being offered, but more concerning is the disposability of the current crop of phones. This is both cultural and also driven by the manufaturers.
When the screen cracks on your £100 phone, do you pay £60 to get it repaired or just buy a new one and chuck the old away (or ideally donate)?
The old comparison is true, the current crop would be lucky to outlive your contract. that old Nokia, those things would happily outlive You.
The really cheap (ZTE/Huawei) phones are generally very solid. They have plastic screens and polycarbonate bodies that don’t break when dropped.
I’m pretty sure the real victim is the environment. Cheap, and highly toxic both to make and discard.
And what about the employees of the factories ?
And what about exchangeable batteries and *-sd slots ? These two things should be obligatory on all phones. The lack of them hurt consumers and jeopardize the environment too.
What about the emplyees? Apple makes the most overpriced phones in the industry, but the Foxconn workers making those phones still get shafted.
Cool.
Who do you think are getting payed more to assemble phones? A worker at Foxconn assembling iPhones or one assembling $50 phones for a noname brand in China?
They’re both probably getting paid about the same amount of money, to be honest.
Exactly.
And both of them will very quickly be replaced by robots.
It isn’t only about the consumer, though — and that was the major thrust of the article as well.
What does it mean for workers and work? At the very least it’s complicated: opportunities for many, mounting drudgery for others, and plenty of insecurity all around.
I’m not sure the layoffs cited in the article mean much when balanced against the jobs the industry has created first, but to those thousands of people it’d hurt.
It just seems a bit one-sided to consider only consumer choice (more? less? the right choices?). Really, there are probably a few things far more important than consumer choice (livelihoods, social attitudes, lifestyles, environment), and they’re worth pausing for just to make sure they aren’t being trampled.
(As for whether it’s Meizu, Motorola or Google that crumbles in the end… it’s pretty meaningless.)
Edited 2015-08-14 11:26 UTC
Well, no, but I sort of get the point here.
You have Samsung and Apple developing high end phones, and pushing “innovation and technology”. There is a cost associated with that R&D. Sure, they are over-charging, but still.
You have these other companies that clone high end devices on the cheap, and sell them on the cheap. This cuts into the “bug guy’s” profits.
The point the article is alluding to is that over time, this will erode the big player’s business so much that they have to drop prices and stop innovating. Over time, this will lead to a stagnated market that can no longer afford to move forward. In a vacuum, this may be true, but I don’t see it ever happening. Plus, we live in the real world, not in a vacuum.
One wonders if this was written or paid for by one of the “big boys” who is looking to protect their profit margins.
And if this does happen? All this would say is the market wants cheap, decent phones that work and can be replaced. All these “new features” and “innovative design” are not what the people are asking for.
I am using a Galaxy S3 right now. It does everything I need it to. I know a lot of people who have upgraded to the S6, and they almost all have said “I should have just replaced the battery on my S3 / S4. The S6 is a bit better, but not $700 better.”
And there you go.
Aye, we have *always* had copying happening and it has never stopped innovation from happening, quite the reverse, in fact. It’s just when it comes to mobile devices that people are now painting it as something horrible and terrible and awful, but.. well, I do distinctly remember all the same flags being waved two decades ago wrt. PCs. Did the PC-market completely stagnate two decades ago? Did all the jobs and customers go to the players who don’t do any innovation at all? No? Well then!
I’m no historian, but I am quite certain you could find the same old story being told wrt. TVs, radios, newspapers, pretty much anything that is sold to consumers. The things where innovation truly died didn’t die because of competition from cheaper copies, they died because of superior alternatives.
yes it very much did… look around at the market today that has resulted from it. If you dont want an x86 box you have very little choice anymore. All the grey boxes simply rebuild what IBM PC offered and to a large extent the same is true today.
20 years ago we had Apple, Amiga, Acorn all with competing architectures as well as OS. Thats no longer the reality today.
And what that means ? People forget that the most important part of computers have been software for decades, and there is no shortage of it in the form of games and utilities. For large applications there is consolidation (OS, Office, etc.) but we don’t have too much trouble now even at this level, i.e., alternatives exist and they are usable.
The fact that you fail to see the innovation doesn’t mean it’s not there. We still have competing architectures with ARM and ~x86, we still have niches to fill and so on and so forth, but instead of innovating the whole box over and over and over again the innovation has moved more to the individual parts themselves. All these small, single-board computers, for example, are definitely a result of innovation, but you’re only looking at the big boxes.
The landscape has shifted from everyone pushing for more and more power to only some players pushing for more power, and others choosing to pursue other, more varied, needs.
I didn’t say there hasn’t been innovation in some areas, I said there has been stagnation in the PC market.
If I buy a PC from Dell or HP or Lenovo there is little to distinguish them.
This came about because it became impossible for smaller systems to compete with something new (eg Be and the BeBox or NeXT). These companies either went under or were bought out/merged until all that was left was a variation of the same thing. ie the Market became stagnant.
Apple’s profit margins are obscene. I am in Florida currently and it really bothers me to see low income people driving cars held together with duct tape talking on an iPhone. These people do not understand that they are paying $650 for those phones. If you ask them they think they cost $99.
Cheap Android phones are a good thing. They will push prices down everywhere. If you are bothered, buy one for $200 and send a check for $450 to those laid off workers. Note that Xiaomi has probably hired more than the other companies have laid off.
What we really need is for Google to take control of OTA updates for Tier 2/3 vendors. And if a Tier 1 vendor can’t get their act together demote them to Tier 2 and take over their OTA updates for them.
Google can achieve this by taking control of the Android ports used in the Tier 2/3 phones. This is manageable since there are less than ten CPU vendors making chips for this market. After it gets the phones sorted out, do this for tablets too.
For example I really hate how Allwinner practices “port and forget”. They release one version of Android for a processor and then drop it. So older processors are stuck on 4.2, newer on 4.4, newer on 5.0 and just released on 5.1. Google could stop this behavior and force a unified Android release across all CPUs.
There is a simple mechanism to force this – if the OS is not OTA supported, Google Play Services will refuse to run.
Really, it is super stupid the way we are using and then disposing a large quantity of resources. It has been this way for so long that people already forgot how things worked in the past (hint: we used to recycle almost everything, even rocks and bones).
Summarizing, I would like to see as mandatory:
– any device that can operate from batteries should obligatorily have user serviceable, exchangeable ones;
– any device capable of store consumer data should obligatorily accept *-sd cards (exception to those where this would be impractical or be a hazard);
– on any device that needs an OS, it should be obligatory to disclose the specs needed to build an OS and drivers one year after the device become unsupported by the manufacturer.
Hey, I am doing what little I can as a single person. I always tell people that I am willing to take broken/old computers and laptops so that I can repair them, polish them up and donate them onwards to other people. I do try to give any such computers to kids from poor families or to kids with special needs, if possible, just because I hope learning computing – skills as a kid will help them along as adults later on.
Aside from computers I do try to salvage what I can and what I can’t or what would require an unreasonable amount of work on my part I give to actual recycling facilities.
Cheap phones don’t have to be no-names with no support, I use a LG L90 on T-Mobile that I payed $50 cash for at a T-Mobile store. No subsidy, no contract, no payout. It’s one of the best phones I’ve ever owned even though it lacks refinements like an ambient light sensor. I would never even consider picking up a top-tier device at the higher price point because I simply will not pay for more than I need.
In my case I refuse to be the victim of handset extortion.
I think the price wars have been a wonderful thing. I am one of the few people I know that always buys his phones outright off contract. I recently had to switch carriers and after using a GS5 for a week I couldn’t justify the price to feature value versus a $200 phone. To me, phones at the $200 range have gotten good enough unless you want specific features like a premium camera or water resistance.
It depends on there being profit for
1) OS Developers
2) Component providers ( System on a chip vendors, flash, screens, battery, etc)
3) Mobile Operators.
As long as those continue to develop and have profitable companies, its probably okay if the designers and builders of the phones change. Its like the whitebox pc era. I don’t freaking care if dell stops making desktops, just as long as ausus makes motherboards, intel sells chips, Kingston still makes dram I’ll be ok.
Oh how wonderful the Android version of Choice is.
Over 14K Android based SKU’s was on the market last year. Up several of thousands the last two years. And still if you want a really high end but compact (Around 4 Inch) Android phone you have what? Three models to choose from? Two?
If Choice in the Android world worked as you all seem to think it works, there should be hundreds to choose from.
And then I’m not event touching on the complete nightmare for mere mortals to have even a small chance of actually knowing what the heck they are buying and if that particular SKU is something that the OEM will even care about in six months.
The cheap Android version of “support” is to just buy a new cheap phone (and throw the old one away) when it turns out that the OEM has deserted you. Because you know what? Decent support COST MONEY!
Nobody wants a very high end 4″ phone. Even Apple has give up on them.