Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

counterpointresearch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 339 posts

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#261

Post by BeetleB »

deelowe wrote: post #110
cabirum wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what EVs are for. Replace the battery every few years and replace your car whenever a new incompatible plug standard comes out.

Total cost of ownership for evs is vastly lower than ices. The number of mechanical parts is two orders of magnitude less for an ev.

Do you track your car expenses? I do. Here are numbers from 2011-2018 for a used 2003 car:

Gas: $7200 Maintenance/Repairs: $2300

Note that maintenance includes things you'd do for EVs as well (e.g. new tires).

That's $9500 in 7 years.

Total spent on the car (including purchase price): $18500.

The extra cost of a comparably sized EV is significantly more than my gas and repair costs.

The numbers for my other cars is similar.

Sorry, not buying the koolaid.

I haven't included insurance, which will be a lot cheaper as well. For context, for my older car I pay $700/year for insurance, and that's with many of the benefits maxed out - I simply can't get more expensive insurance! For my other (newer) car it's more like $1200/year.

Oh, and the TCO on Edmunds is full of $h*t.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#262

Post by poisonborz »

deelowe wrote: post #110
cabirum wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what EVs are for. Replace the battery every few years and replace your car whenever a new incompatible plug standard comes out.

Total cost of ownership for evs is vastly lower than ices. The number of mechanical parts is two orders of magnitude less for an ev.

Except no one knows in what shape batteries will be in 10 years (current 10yo evs are no comparison). Usually there is a 8y guarantee on battery packs but wonder what that covers. Replacing batteries will be overly costly, if you can even get the parts and a mechanic to do it for you.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#263

Post by prpl »

chx wrote: post #155
parl_match wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an iPhone 13 mini, the last <5" flagship phone you can buy. I'm not particularly tied to the iPhone ecosystem, but when this dies, I don't know what I'm going to do.

The smallest current vaguely mainstream phone IMO is the Asus Zenfone 10 at 146.5 x 68.1 x 9.4 mm. The iPhone 13 mini is 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.65mm. Then you have weird stuff: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2022&fDisplay... so perhaps by the time your phone dies the Cubot Pocket 4 or 5 will be your answer. Here's the Pocket 3: https://www.gsmarena.com/cubot_pocket_3-12314.php

The iPhone SE 3rd generation would be the smallest mainstream phone, seeing as it’s still sold, but might not meet your definition of “current”.

At this point I’d go back to iPhone 8 form factor if it gets an upgrade, but I’m on a 12 mini and it’s not a big step up

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#264

Post by BeetleB »

simmerup wrote: post #102
cabirum wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what EVs are for. Replace the battery every few years and replace your car whenever a new incompatible plug standard comes out.

Silly point when you consider that manufacturers love the fact that an ICE vehicle has to go into the garage for new parts every few months

As I posted elsewhere, I've always tracked my expenses. From 2011 to 2018, I spent about $2300 on maintenance and repairs. That's parts, labor and oil changes. And it was a 2003 car, so fairly old.

Look up reliable cars. Buy them used. It's much cheaper. I have the numbers going back to 2007.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#265

Post by ajross »

NeuNeurosis wrote: post #260
ajross wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't even customise the home screen as much ( Literally cannot remove a link to Chrome and other google apps ). Uh... I'm not following here. You definitely can. What are you trying to do, exactly? It's true you can't uninstall the apps, because they're in the ROM. But you can absolutely use whatever you want on your home page.

I have a pixe6 and the OEM launcher has a date at the top you can't remove or change and a google chrome search bar at the bottom that you cant remove. You have to install a 3rd party launcher to remove them. https://www.stuff.tv/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/07/Goog...

Well, OK. The Google launcher app has... a Google search bar. But again that's just an app, and you can change it. And have been able to for years and years. What's the actual complaint here? I mean, the original complaint was that you can't install your own apps on the home screen. So how is it wrong that the mechanism to do so is to... install your own app?

To be glib: The contention was that you can't change this stuff. And your response is "That's right, you can't change it! You have to CHANGE it to change it!". So... just change it?

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#266

Post by leptons »

timeon wrote: post #224
parl_match wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an iPhone 13 mini, the last <5" flagship phone you can buy. I'm not particularly tied to the iPhone ecosystem, but when this dies, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I'm starting to think about combination smart watches + dumb phone. But I have no clue how the smart watches actually are. But smartphone seems to be targeted for people that do not use laptop/desktop that much.

>But smartphone seems to be targeted for people that do not use laptop/desktop that much.

I'm a "power user", and I want a powerful device when I'm away from my laptop/desktop. Currently using the Samsung Fold 4, and loving it.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#267

Post by vel0city »

freedomben wrote: post #240
vasdae wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still with SD cards and headphone jacks? The world has moved on, my man.

Oh yeah, moved on to what? What has replaced those things and rendered them obsolete? On-board storage sure didn't, that's small and not portable, and we already had that. Bluetooth headphones didn't, those require special hardware, have to be charged (battery), have higher latency, reduced sound quality (lower fidelity), packet loss, and spyware built in, and DRM capable. Not even close to a replacement for analog h…

The storage on the device is portable when the device is portable. There are very few instances where I'd find an SD card acceptably portable but a phone not so.

Phones these days come in hundreds of gigs of storage. My current phone was a decently cheap one and had 128GB of storage, easily >100GB of usable space. On Android one can easily mount the storage as a USB drive and transfer data at high speeds. And given its a nearly permanently network device its pretty trivial to have it sync storage someplace else, including your own self-hosted infrastructure. I don't need to have my complete music library on my device everywhere I go, I just cache the playlists I'm in to at the moment and stream when I have network (which is the majority of the time). Same goes with consuming video content or listening to podcasts or whatever. Why save it locally when it can trivially be streamed? Why keep your entire photo and personal movie collection on your portable device which can get lost and broken when you can just connect back home and access even more storage with higher reliability anytime, anywhere?

Between on-board storage ballooning in size and network infrastructure making it pretty easy to access things over the net, for me and many others having SD cards is entirely obsolete.

I don't understand what you mean about "spyware built in" for Bluetooth headphones. All my Bluetooth devices do not have any other kinds of network connectivity, they don't phone home or anything like that. There's no app or anything like that needed for them.

There's also no "DRM" for Bluetooth, the output of the Bluetooth audio doesn't have some kind of macrovision or something preventing you from recording it or anything like that. I've got Bluetooth receivers which output to S/PDIF and analog RCA connectors, its not protected or anything like that.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#268

Post by leptons »

maxrecursion wrote: post #144
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #73

It's hard to feel positive about upgrading my phone when every new phone seems to remove things I want while adding stuff I don't care about. My S10e is a reasonable size in my pocket. It has a headphone jack. It has an SD card slot. Any new Samsung phone I buy will be missing these things, and I'll be forced to pay hundreds of dollars extra to increase the on-board storage that will still be far less than the 512GB…

Eventually you'll just have to upgrade because the phone is too slow. I had to upgrade from my galaxy S8 earlier this year because it slowed to a crawl, my wife commented on how slow it was every time she used it. I had it for 5 years. I still hate not having a headphone jack, but having 5G and an insanely fast phone made it worth it.

It's well known that the flash memory degrades and gets very much slower over time, and this is why smart phones get slower as they age. Can't replace the flash, so the phone is essentially unusable after a few years.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#269

Post by warner25 »

lkramer wrote: post #256

My Motorola G7 from 2018ish had not received a security update since 2021, and was feeling a bit sluggish. I considered upgrading, but I'm not keen on throwing away ~£2-300 when there is nothing technically wrong with the device, so I finally made the effort to wipe the stock android and install Lineage OS last week, and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. The only key thing which I almost messed up was t…

Interesting. I had a Moto G7 and I was happy with it for a year until I broke the screen and couldn't find anyone to repair it. I replaced it with a similar Moto G Power since the G7 was discontinued and I ended up in the same boat as you: Android security updates ended but it still works perfectly for my limited purposes. I can't stomach the idea of paying several hundred dollars for a new device when this one works and I use it so little. I started an "Ask HN" thread about it last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33197291). I was looking at the LineageOS route but I don't think it supports this device. I'm still just hanging onto this thing and trying not to worry about it.

Re: US Smartphone Shipments Decline 19% in Q3 2023 as More Americans Delay Upgrade

#270

Post by deafpolygon »

jghn wrote: post #254
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, the mini versions skimped on the camera. That’s the only reason I didn’t buy one. I preferred the small size but wanted the best camera offered.

Speaking of, I don't understand why camera quality is the selling point that so many people glom onto. I get why it's useful to some. But I have to imagine we've crossed the point where "better camera" stopped being noticeable to the masses?

I take lots of pictures, and cameras are expensive. So - upgrading my phone every 3-5 years is better if the camera gets a good improvement.
Post reply on HN