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Why the Galaxy Fold will be a huge success even at $2,000 -- "[...] Samsung has effectively turned into the new Apple. They are the innovators. They are ahead of the game."
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- Title
- Why the Galaxy Fold Will Be a Huge Success Even at $2,000
- Word count
- 825 words
And here I am quite pleased with the phone I spent $300 on many years ago. Still does everything I want just fine.
The best thing about it? Even when it all slips through your fingers (literally), it's cheap as chips to repair an old phone DIY.
Odds are you dont even need any super fancy tools compared to the new phones needing heat guns/suction cups and whatnot.
Unfortunately my phone isn't trivial to fix (its not that old) but its not impossible like the latest phones. In the future I will only buy phones that highly prioritize repairability. I expect my phone to last about 7-8 years.
I currently run a degoogled android phone on lineageOS. Primarily I use it to take photos, IM, phone calls and web browsing. Thanks to firefox with ublock even web browsing runs buttery smooth on my phone. I'm not particularly interested in social media apps which seem to be the primary cause of phones slowing down and requiring better hardware every 2 years.
I just don't understand why people are spending so much on phones these days. I could drop $2000 on a new phone tomorrow and not think about it but it seems to provide absolutely no added value over what I have right now. I guess its more of a fashion statement to show off to friends than an actual practical tool.
First, 2000$ is a ridiculous amount to spend on a phone. It's what you pay for being on the bleeding edge of a new gimmick. Prices are supposed to be going down, not up.
That said, though...
Given you use your phone for so little, it's easy to see how you have trouble understanding why people pay so much more for phones. But if you use your device more (or a lot more), it becomes clear why folks value them so much. I use mine for all kinds of things, with things like phone calls actually toward the very bottom of the list and only invoked when absolutely necessary. It's a music player, a calendar, a file manager, a notepad, a health tracker (several different apps), a camera, an IM platform, a weather monitor, a delivery tracker, a web browser, a navigation aide, a mail client, a timezone converter, a calculator, a keys and wallet finder, and on and on and on. I don't do social networking (aside from tildes, which is very different IMO) because so much research shows it's toxic. I'm absolutely fine paying more than 200$ for something that's so flexible.
I upgrade mine regularly because I'm a tech enthusiast (like a lot of people here right now), not because I want to "show off". I don't have any friends to show off to.
There's a vast divide between playing $200+ and paying $1 000+, let alone $2 000. People don't cash out like this because of deific performance, or an incredible amount of features that it comes with. People cash out for stuff like this because it speaks loudly about their wealth and their geekness.
Neither is as grand as these folks would lead you to believe, but the show is more important than the substance to a non-zero-wide audience.
Still can't see a reason for spending $500 or more on a phone. I have a friend that changes phone often and is spending copious amounts. I just see him doing the same thing with every phone.
How much is a Redmi 5 Plus there? With a quick search it seems to be $190. Mine is this one and i do all the above.
I love tech, but not expensive tech. I love tinkering. That's why i love linux, bsds and rootable phones.
I actually use it a fair bit (more than I would like to tbh) but its just that modern phones reached an acceptable level of processing power long ago so the things we do on a phone run fast and there is no point upgrading hardware. The only reason I see for the need to upgrade is shitty devs get their hands on the latest phones and then write some absolute garbage code that can only just run on the latest hardware so everyone else is left with something incredibly slow. I have found that open source apps tend to not do this which is why my device runs super fast.
...none of these seem like they're particularly hardware-intensive?
Isn't the idea of a folding phone specifically to make things that are limited by screen real estate more attractive, not anything to do with processing power?
"We can run basically whatever we want now, so why not solve the other problems leftover for phones?" seems like exactly what this is going for.
Yeah, but he was making a general defence of upgrade culture from what I could tell, especially given his last line.
None of the tasks you mentioned require or even benefit from a new phone. Granted, you don't want a low end phone. Personally I do many of those tasks (and others that are more demanding on memory and CPU) and use an original Pixel XL. Cost me $200 a few months ago.
I'm a sucker for big beautiful screens and the best camera possible in a phone. Phones have really advanced in these areas over the last decade, so I'll upgrade every two years or so.
Since I use my phone so frequently for so many things, I don't mind paying a fair bit for one. $2000 is not happening, but I might do up to $1200 for a flagship 5G phone that has all the features I want in an attractive form factor with good battery life.
My phone has a 1080p screen and I'm not really sure how it could get better than that, I can not see any pixels even up close. Its already a bit hard to reach all of it with my thumb.
I understand the camera point, those really do get a lot better each release but if I was super in to good photos I would just invest the money spent on new phones all the time on one killer camera that will still outperform phones in 5 years time.
I sort of took that approach a few years ago. The problem with the killer camera approach is that you never have it on you, or it's too inconvenient to take places. I shoot photographs as a hobby and have a pretty good DSLR with a few decent lenses. The setup is about 5 years old but I can still take better pictures with it than any phone I've ever used, but I just can't carry it around all the time because it's so inconvenient.
Looking back at the photos I took over the years I noticed that most of the ones I'd consider "memories" are taken by a phone camera. This year I finally bought a phone with a top of the line camera because I decided that I want my memorable photos to be high quality.
Having extra pixels allows text and images to be extra crisp, even if the difference is not always that noticeable. The reduction in bezel size also allows more screen for the same phone size. Top end displays are important to me, as also evidenced by my 45" 4K monitor and 65" 4K OLED TV.
I've probably got over $10k in DSLR camera lenses, bodies, and flash gear. Yeah, that's always going to be better than a phone, but it doesn't all fit in my pocket and travel everywhere with me.
I'll never forget accidentally using the wrong minuscule screw while replacing my iPhone 5s' screen and bricking the device. Apparently they run current through one of the screws to jump vertically between boards and if you use the wrong length screw you can cause all sorts of issues. It was a bad day.
"It's going to be a raging success" sounds like a gross overstatement. I don't think the folding mechanism is that big of a deal that people would rush in just to buy one (considering the phone's been reasonably underproduced, at 1M units total). Sure, some of the richer tech folks are gonna buy it and boast about it, but then...
I'm not seeing the massive appeal. It gives you 1½ of a phablet, and you can only use one side at a time? Come on. Is that what we're calling "innovation" nowadays? Gimmickry?
Also: weren't Samsung among the first major phone manufacturers to copy the notch?
I've said it before: I'm all for making newer, cooler gadgets. I'm a tech geek, without a doubt. I am, however, also more concerned with quality-of-life improvements over cool schticks that everybody's gonna forget about after a wave of overhype. Seamless wireless audioplay. On-board AI that collates your data for improvement suggestions. Efficient batteries.
Not that.
A little OT but you mean "also fail to solve the front camera problem"
Say what you like about Steve Jobs, he'd have never let that kind of nonsense out the door. He'd have shouted and screamed until his engineers did their jobs and produced a bezelless, notchless display like they should have done all along.
Wasn't it Samsung that presented the camera that sat behind the screen? It wasn't as big of a deal as it should've been, but that was the coolest solution to the problem I've seen so far.
I think that was Huawei but I'm not 100% sure. One of the Chinese companies, at least. I'd imagine if Samsung had done it their marketing would be very loud about how much better they are than Apple - like they did with the headphone jack thing (before dropping headphone jacks for their next design...)
Are you confusing Samsung with Google? Google advertised the headphone jack for the Pixel 2 and removed it with the next generation. Samsung's Galaxy S line still has the headphone jack.
Nope, definitely Samsung
Jobs would have had a prototype made up and likely decided, as most people who have a "notch" phone have, that it basically disappears after a couple days of use. It doesn't interfere with video, because the phone isn't at a resolution common for video, so they always fit just inside the notch. The only time it's even noticeable is in full-screen games, and then it's never been intrusive IME. They wanted the most secure mechanism for preventing unauthorized entry to the phone, thus Face ID, which required a suite of cameras on the front of the phone, and that's what they built.
I agree. This design is not innovation, it's just invention. There's a difference between the two. This technology does not really change the way we interact with technology in any meaningful way.
I've said this before on other forums, but the strength of bendable screens is absolutely not the ability to flex them. In fact, that's it's worst property, especially in conjunction with touchscreens. The strength is the ability to curve it once to affix them to curved surfaces. It's a technology best used for rotating displays you can bend around a column. No matter how strong you make the display, flexing it will reduce it's lifespan. Logically, flexing a display is something you should specifically avoid.
No Samsung does not have any notches on its phones, though there is a rumor that one of their next budget phones will have a small notch.
Honestly the notch is not innovation. It's a quick fix to enable having an edge to edge screen with a front facing camera. Everyone was going toward edge to edge display before apple did and the notch was pretty much the last bit of real estate left to hand over to the screen. It was the natural evolution of the design and the first phone to feature it was the Essential PH-1 not the iPhone X.
I have a "notch-phone" and honestly it's a pain. Turns out my swiping motion naturally starts on where the notch is and I end up missing swipes now.
It's also a pain to develop for. I'm a web designer, and... let's just say the notch-bearing phones are prime donne: unless given their separate chunk of attention, they're gonna look all ugly when in one of their two states, and it's not good to give issues with most common web designs to flagship phone users.
You're right. Sure doesn't seem like they do, from the quick Google search. Whom was I thinking of, then?
I’m a little surprised at these comments, having an expandable phone certainly strongly appeals to me, primarily for reading books while on the go and depreciating the need for a tablet beside one’s phone.
I of course agree that $2000 is too rich for my blood, but I’m very much looking forward to the next one or two generations at which point it will be hopefully in my budget.
I imagine this will also appeal to people for whom their phone is their primary computing device, of whom I know quite a few. It makes the device more useful while preserving portability.
Yeah, I think they'll be more appealing after a couple generations of refinement. Cool idea, but I'm not interested in being on the cutting edge here.
Have a cheap ass phone. Does everything fine. I'd rather spend that 2k on a new gaming desktop
I honestly think these aren't going to do well for quite a while because they cost so much. We've already seen people upset that prices have been going up and I don't think the market segment that doesn't care about price is large enough to make the Fold (or any of these folding devices coming in 2019) a "huge success".
I think we are at the very beginning of this, when the first Note was released. It took a few versions for the line to take off but then everybody copied them.
There was a long period of time where I felt like the innovations in phone tech mirrored my personal needs. This isn't that time for me. This seems more like innovation for its own sake. I use my phone for work constantly and this is not something that helps me in the slightest. Is it cool that they can pull it off? Sure. Is it necessary? I doubt it very much.
This isn't even technically true. Folding phone is as much a gimmick as Huawei's 4 lens camera phone. We've already established the hardware is mostly set in its ways. People want a brick phone that is mostly screen, simple. The REAL innovation is software. With which Samsung has been pretty bad. Google is the big standout with a single lens camera that still performs better than Samsung's most of the time and a voice assistant that is better than Apple and Samsung by a significant margin. Also Apple is still the only one with the iMessage technology which Google has no reason not to add, seriously. Google needs to release their version of iMessage for Android NOW. So dumb to wait this long when you already have things like Google Hangouts and Allo/Duo etc.
tl;dr the future is software, not hardware (and staying under 1k will remain important, in fact staying under $500 will remain important just look at oneplus lol)
Hard disagree. Samsung is wet dreaming. Even Apple is coming to the realization that there is a ceiling.
iPhone SE represent.
I disagree with the general sentiment here, i.e. folding phones are not a positive step for tech. I am not going to buy a $2000 phone, but I am also not the target market. Wealthy geeks and influencers are the target. And every 1st gen tech is kinda buggy and over-priced; it is the iterative improvements that make it worthwhile in a few generations. One of the few benefits of wealthy status seekers is that they fund this process.