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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

#121

Post by _0w8t »

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…

Friend of mine and his wife also keep their iPhone 5 from 2012. Fro my impression going to few random sites they work nicely. They changed battery only once.

So I am really consider getting iPhone SE as my next phone when the current 2 years old Nexus 5 breaks or will not be supported...

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

#122

Post by seanmcdirmid »

supertrope wrote: post #116
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAM and flash are different things. More of the latter won’t hurt battery life very much.

I think parent poster is referring to DRAM. 8-16GB of NAND is low even for budget phones. Desktop-like docking implies the need for 64-bit worthy amounts of DRAM.

Considering that even the iPhone X comes with 3GB of RAM (the 8 only has 2), the other way doesn’t make much sense either.

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

#123

Post by Teever »

tlholaday wrote: post #101
joncrane wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the Pixel 2 get rid of the headphone jack?

The fashion is to externalize the headphone jack, not to get rid of it. https://store.google.com/us/product/usb_c_headphone_adapter

What a peculiar way to say that they got rid of the headphone jack.

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

#124

Post by pjmlp »

reaperducer wrote: post #42
cs702 wrote: post #16

Wow, a 21% year-over-year drop... and this makes the fourth consecutive quarter of annual declines (in the previous three quarters, shipments had dropped -3%, -5%, and -14% year-over-year). A hard landing indeed. The implications for phone makers are unpleasant: price competition is going to intensify and profit margins, which are already thin, will get squeezed even more and might even turn negative. (Only Apple, wh…

>Only Apple, which makes exclusively high-end devices for style-conscious, less-price-sensitive consumers, This is a very tired cliche, and untrue to anyone who's ever seen any of the hundreds of ads where new iPhones are available for $0 from most carriers.

That isn't like that in most countries.

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

#125

Post by stefan_ »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #103
kerng wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Apple is struggling on trying to figure out what the next big thing could be - its definitely not yet watch and wearables.

Cars. Absolutely no doubt they need to be in that industry.

Cars are pretty firmly in iPhone slow growth territory. If anything we expect to have less of them in the future.

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

#126

Post by melling »

bluGill wrote: post #114
melling wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking in generalizations. Got any data to back up your claims? The average selling price for iPhones keeps increasing, and it’s over $700. If you’re talking about global markets then of course, $200 phones have always been more common. That’s why Android has 80% market share.

The article backs them up. People in China are no longer seeing phone upgrades as worth it. At one time new hardware made your experience better. My last phone is a downgrade from the previous one (I physically broke my flagship just after the warranty expired so I got a mid range phone to save money), and I can't tell the difference.

There are 1.4 billion people in China with completely different income levels. The world is made up of many different markets.

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

#127

Post by jdietrich »

baldfat wrote: post #69
jdietrich wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese market is different. Chinese carriers offer minimal subsidies, so most customers are paying close to full retail for their phones and aren't tightly coupled to a two-year upgrade cycle. Used phones are a popular choice for value-oriented customers. Repair is the norm rather than the exception, so most customers will replace a cracked screen or a weak battery rather than just disposing of their phone. Labo…

> consumers are starting to wise-up to the benefits of paying cash for a mid-range device rather than taking the "free" upgrade when their contract expires. What "free phones" they are all leased now. There might not be a monthly fee but at the end of the lease their is a buy out to be paid. My wife's Essential phone (SHE HATES IT) is $6 a month for 24 months and then $430 if she want to keep this crash prone phone.

Sprint have switched to leases with an optional balloon payment; Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T offer 0% finance plans with no final payment to own the device.

Regardless, all the networks offer their customers a new device with no money up front and the same monthly payment as soon as their contract expires. It's good for retention, but it means that a lot of customers are largely oblivious to the actual cost of their phone.

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

#128

Post by woolvalley »

supertrope wrote: post #75
jdietrich wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese market is different. Chinese carriers offer minimal subsidies, so most customers are paying close to full retail for their phones and aren't tightly coupled to a two-year upgrade cycle. Used phones are a popular choice for value-oriented customers. Repair is the norm rather than the exception, so most customers will replace a cracked screen or a weak battery rather than just disposing of their phone. Labo…

IMO WeChat is bloated. While the app itself only uses n MB, it stores all chat history and embedded multimedia on the device itself. Eventually each group chat will hog >1GB. I uninstalled after they made the app refuse to run without constant GPS permission.

You can't clear chats? iMessage has a similar issue and you solve it by deleting the chat and then rejoining / continuing it again.

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

#129

Post by woolvalley »

fireattack wrote: post #111
jdietrich wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese market is different. Chinese carriers offer minimal subsidies, so most customers are paying close to full retail for their phones and aren't tightly coupled to a two-year upgrade cycle. Used phones are a popular choice for value-oriented customers. Repair is the norm rather than the exception, so most customers will replace a cracked screen or a weak battery rather than just disposing of their phone. Labo…

WeChat is 165MB (just the app, not including anything else) on my phone. Don't know where you get that 60MB number.

Android or iOS? APKs are compressed too

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

#130

Post by influx »

ajross wrote: post #100
Johnie wrote: post #90

See: * Bass Diffusion Model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_diffusion_model * Diffusion of Innovation Model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations These models have been fairly accurate in forecasting diffusion of innovation. While many of the innovators have started to exit and move on, this leaves the imitators around in a slowing market. Apple has been surprisingly good at being the forefront…

> Apple has already moved onto the next technological innovation: Apple Watch and wearables. Seriously? Are there any number at all to show that wearables are a growth bet at this point? The Apple Watch (which entered the market three years ago !) has had an uptake at least an order of magnitude lower than the iPad, the last "next technological innovation" that turned out not to be. Tablets were hot for a while, but…

The Apple Watch is probably a rounding error when compared to the iPhone, however:

"But the most interesting stuff came when Cook referred to the success of Apple Watch. The Watch sales are part of the wearables business which also includes headphones such as Beats and AirPods.

Last May, he said that business is approaching the size of a Fortune 500 company. More recently, last month, the size had crept up so it would fall in the top 400"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2018/02/15/apple-ce...

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