111–120 of 126 posts
The $179 price is total bullshit. In Brazil, where the phone was actually launched (and being produced), the price is US$279 (8GB) and US$343 (16GB). Not that I, as a Brazilian consumer, am not used to getting dicked on hardware prices for everything. But reading $179 over and over again is kind of making me want to punch my screen.
How much are iPhone 5S, Nexus 5, HTC One, and Galaxy S4 in Brazil?
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But the iPhone 5s has a much more capable CPU, you can't compare both based purely on clock speeds. Each Cortex-A7 should be slower clock for clock than an Cortex-A9, so it should put the single threaded CPU performance between the iphone 4s and the iPhone 5, although it can maybe outperfom an iphone 5 in highly threaded tasks.
Apple still sells the 4s, which has half the RAM and a slower CPU. And I wouldn't call the 4s a low-end phone. Basically, the days when a <$200 Android was painful to use (click, wait for the UI to figure out what you just did) are past.
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It seems capable, but calling it "high end" is quite... generous. No LTE, 1.2 GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 8GB storage - they made some obvious compromises to hit this price point. I think it's probably a smart play for Moto/Goog to target this space, but "high end" it ain't.
Note that the iPhone 5s also has 1GB of RAM and has a similar CPU speed (1.3GHz). I feel you on the LTE portion, but much of the targeted market has no opportunity to use LTE. Maybe they could have a Moto G+ that costs $50-75 more and includes LTE.
It just has a similar clock speed. Not similar performance.
This is terriffic news! Smartphones are things that drop, that break, that fall into water and that get lost. Shelling out $500 for something this... ephemeral... always seemed absurd to me. Or maybe I am just clumsy.
Calculate the cost. If you destroy a phone on average once per year, then $500 equates to $1.37 per day.
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US advertised prices do not include sales/VAT taxes, which I gather are quite substantial in Brazil.
VAT in Brazil is lower than in the UK. It's not really substantial, not as to explain a 100 dollar increase in a product. There are other taxes that are levied on production and sale (the VAT equivalent is just one), but the complexity of the tributary system is used as an excuse by electronics producers for the increased prices. It's a huge effort in dark math to explain the prices these companies put up. There's a…
I've never understood why the good cell phones (unlocked) always cost something like 500, 600 euros. Glad to see someone trying to push the prices down, especially if it's not Samsung or Apple, to help keep some variety in presence. Seeing Motorola as "a Google company" is really weird to me.( https://www.moto-g.com/ ), for some reason it makes me feel like Google is going to become the next GE or something.
Regarding the latter part of your comment, it's actually interesting to compare GE to Google for several reasons. When GE was founded, it was a new kind of company for the time, and in the same way, Google is a new kind of company for our time, together with companies like Amazon -- their business model is built around leveraging the Internet, in the same way that GE was built around leveraging America's burgeoning i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realize that that's because of your government's extremely high incentives to manufacture in Brazil, right?
The Moto G is manufactured in Brazil and is priced as if it was imported. In fact, perhaps as a slap in the face of the consumer, it's priced exactly as if it was imported. There's a 60% importation tax, which means that importing a 179 dollar phone goes for exactly 650 reais, which is what they're pricing it. So, no, it's not because of taxes. Unless the cost of production in Brazil is precisely 60% the price of pro…
For instance, depending on how far along local production is, Motorola may well have imported launch stock. Or Motorola may be worried they'll end up stuck between importing stock or leaving sales on the table if they underestimated Brazilian demand. Or maybe there are issues with some imported parts or ...
Once they reach a steady-state where they can forecast demand and Brazil is comfortably a net exporter of Moto Gs, it should be different, but, in the short run, Motorola has sensible reasons to be cautious.
I wonder how much Motorola makes per handset at that price point, which could be slightly concerning for the business overall. Google can get away with tiny margins on their physical devices as they're about pushing traffic back to their services, making more money residually, but Motorola makes money by selling hardware for a profit. It's great for consumers when price comes down, but that could leave businesses fig…
The $179 price is total bullshit. In Brazil, where the phone was actually launched (and being produced), the price is US$279 (8GB) and US$343 (16GB). Not that I, as a Brazilian consumer, am not used to getting dicked on hardware prices for everything. But reading $179 over and over again is kind of making me want to punch my screen.