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China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

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Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#51

Post by moheeb »

klodolph wrote: post #27
bruceb wrote: post #15

Almost any $200+ phone made since 2015 has a pretty good camera, screen, speed for most people. Why upgrade when what you have is good enough? One used to check out gizmodo/engadget when a new phone came out but seems not anymore as "the new" is only incremental.

People upgrade because what they have becomes worse as time goes on. Maybe you don't get OS updates any more and you can't run apps you want, maybe you do get OS updates and your phone is now slower. Maybe your battery charge lasts less than a day and you don't know you can replace your battery or don't want to. Some people I know almost always end up with cracked screens and upgrade rather than repair, and some othe…

Those all seem like examples of the phone not being good enough.

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#52

Post by chrisper »

ProAm wrote: post #50
chrisper wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Samsung S9+ costs way more and so does the iPhone X.

Way more being around a hundred USD? Last I checked the P20 Pro was ~ $850 USD the Galaxy S9+ is $939 USD

It's at least 200 CHF difference here.

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#53

Post by seanmcdirmid »

adinobro wrote: post #33
genefriend wrote: post #13

China’s growth fueled by massive debt is over(350% to gdp, government + corporate + individuals). it’s barely returning one yuan for every yuan debt it takes on. The Chinese consumer is weighed down by housing debt and credit card debt. And the tariff is going to hit the consumers hard; soy prices increases already has Chinese consumers screaming.

Virtually no Chinese people have credit cards. Everything is prepaid apart from business loans, cars and house loans.

It used to be that even house loans were rare. Things have changed very rapidly in the last 10 years, and even credit card debt is a concern to the middle class now (if you can believe the Chinese press, see http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/hk20threturn/2017-04/24/c...).

Then there are the traditional loan sharks in china’s informal sector that have been around forever and don’t show up in official stats (not to mention less dangerous friend/family lending).

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#54

Post by ProAm »

chrisper wrote: post #52
ProAm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way more being around a hundred USD? Last I checked the P20 Pro was ~ $850 USD the Galaxy S9+ is $939 USD

It's at least 200 CHF difference here.

Ahh yeah makes sense. I wish it was closer to being the OnePlus5T range of being $500-600USD vs what its priced at. Then it's a no brainer to purchase but now being so expensive and untested on US LTE bands its too risky (and our government says not to by Huawei for national security reasons).

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#55

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

bilbo0s wrote: post #26
bruceb wrote: post #15

Almost any $200+ phone made since 2015 has a pretty good camera, screen, speed for most people. Why upgrade when what you have is good enough? One used to check out gizmodo/engadget when a new phone came out but seems not anymore as "the new" is only incremental.

It's interesting because, even though I make the conscious effort to keep my iPhone 5, I thought MOST people upgraded? Reading through a lot of these comments, it seems that's not the case. That's surprising but comforting. Having teenage daughters I really started to get a kind of inferiority complex. Thinking, "Man, am I being unreasonably stubborn here?" But it always just seemed like the phone worked, so why upgr…

In the past, new phones had great improvement, now it's more of a small incremental improvement.

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#56

Post by ahelwer »

tigershark wrote: post #35
sebasmurphy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. They only reason that I upgraded to the nexus 5x from the nexus 5 was that the modem in the 5x supported additional LTE bands. If there's no signficiant changes in the modem hardware you're just paying more money for a slightly better version of the phone you already have.

You went from the slowest and more bugged phone that I ever had to one that it’s even slightly slower... it’s not really a good upgrade choice to do after 3 years.

Yep, I just switched from the Nexus 5X to Moto X4. Nexus 5X only has 2 GB of RAM, which on recent versions of Android means apps are swapped out and shut down constantly. If you were browsing the internet and switched to a different app, you were guaranteed to have to reload the webpage from scratch if you didn't switch back to your browser within 5-10 seconds. Plus Snapchat was unusable due to camera lag and high memory requirements.

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#57

Post by graeme »

bilbo0s wrote: post #26
bruceb wrote: post #15

Almost any $200+ phone made since 2015 has a pretty good camera, screen, speed for most people. Why upgrade when what you have is good enough? One used to check out gizmodo/engadget when a new phone came out but seems not anymore as "the new" is only incremental.

It's interesting because, even though I make the conscious effort to keep my iPhone 5, I thought MOST people upgraded? Reading through a lot of these comments, it seems that's not the case. That's surprising but comforting. Having teenage daughters I really started to get a kind of inferiority complex. Thinking, "Man, am I being unreasonably stubborn here?" But it always just seemed like the phone worked, so why upgr…

I personally went from original in 2008, to iphone 4 in 2010, to iphone 6 in 2015, to iphone 8 in 2017.

I would have kept using the old phone in every case, but: they each became too slow with os updates.

In the case of the 6 I think it was exacerbated by battery issued. So probably you've taken better care of your battery? (Or stayed off ios 11)

But, if you look at that record, it is:

  1. Not an upgrade every to every model
  2. Still a fair number of sales for apple
I skipped the 3g, 4s, 5, 5s, 6s, 7

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#58

Post by nostalgeek »

gd2 wrote: post #47
klodolph wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People upgrade because what they have becomes worse as time goes on. Maybe you don't get OS updates any more and you can't run apps you want, maybe you do get OS updates and your phone is now slower. Maybe your battery charge lasts less than a day and you don't know you can replace your battery or don't want to. Some people I know almost always end up with cracked screens and upgrade rather than repair, and some othe…

Also apps do get updated, and when they do they sometimes grow by almost a 100 MB. Repeat that X times, and the RAM on the phone turns out to be insufficient for larger apps of the new now.

Facebook app was 600MB on my girlfriend's phone. Unbelievable. What the hell does Facebook need 600MB for? (granted it was the mostly the data but it made her phone run like crap because the data is stored in internal storage, not on SD card). I cleared the data and it was back to 150MB in less that an hour. So off course people feel like their phones run like crap with apps like that.

I mean even a $50 phone today is extremely powerful for its price, but developers have no consideration for mobile constraints (then blame web techs...).

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#60

Post by diminish »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #20
diminish wrote: post #5

After relentless growth we're about to arrive at a plateauing smartphone market. I wish I could read insights from experts on what to expect in coming years in smartphone market in light of similar markets which entered a no growth zone. Specifically what will happen to prices, market shares , unit sales, pace of innovation, competition, international growth, developer ecosystems. Anyone?

Dig up articles from about 5 years ago talking about the "post PC era". Replace all the references to PCs with smartphones, and you should have a good idea about what's in store for a "Post smartphone era".

Good idea but I see one big difference.

In the post-PC era we have the smartphone as a sort of replacement for a lot stuff that a PC does ( communication, web, sharing, photos, apps. ).

In the smartphone plateau we're maybe not in post-smartphone era as there's nothing yet to steal engagement from the smartphone ( watch, wearables, VR not yet..)

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