Solved whats up with the life expectancy ?

[lucasarts]

I've seem to realize and look back on the phone changes and upgrades I have made over the last 6 years and is there any realization that the cell phones start to breakdown about 1.5 years to 2 years and that this seems to coincide with a re-up contract plan ?

 

[Jonny Kansas]

How else would you keep selling phones once the market got as saturated as it is...?

 

[lucasarts]

ok get that, so then its a misconception to the public that was not disclosed and even still going on. and as far as the saturation of the Market, I've seem to notice the less amount of phones available in the market place, leaving people with less choices to make, remember when it all started many years ago so many phone choices and commercial advertisements and now down to a select few and the commercials are of the account plans and not phone choices, of coarse if your phone model is not selling you pull the model and then becomes unavailable, definitely a different time now compared to a few years ago
and of coarse the big 3 now are speed, memory and battery life, before it was about features and apps.
on a separate note is it just me or you have a cell with much open memory and you start filling it up with apps but you still have a lot of memory left and the phone slows down, understand the apps you downloaded are active and using memory to operate but you would think with all the memory left over "free" it should still be enough to have a fast running phone with all the features useable and yet it slows down, heats up, starts to lock up and so on...thus you feel the phone is not designed as the manufacturer has intended and you feel unjust and look for a better model, quite the game these cell phone companies have together.

 

[Jonny Kansas]

It's all about the bottom line. They are corporations looking to make as much money as they can.

But at the same time, technology is changing at a rapid pace chips & other components are becoming smaller & cheaper all the time, & as better hardware comes out, software makers push the limits of the new stuff & the old stuff has trouble keeping up.

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[rosso]

It's all about the bottom line. They are corporations looking to make as much money as they can.

But at the same time, technology is changing at a rapid pace chips & other components are becoming smaller & cheaper all the time, & as better hardware comes out, software makers push the limits of the new stuff & the old stuff has trouble keeping up.

Sent from my Note 4 via Tapatalk

I agree that components are becoming smaller and cheaper not only for cell phones but loops as well. However where laptops now have tons of ram and terabytes of hdd space, and are half the cost of what they were a few years ago, the same doesn't apply to a cell phone. They still retail for well north of $400 and now the only choice seems to be to purchase out right or use an installment plan...the only difference is you no longer have a 2 year contract for service (just for for phone if you use installment).


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[Jonny Kansas]

I agree that components are becoming smaller and cheaper not only for cell phones but loops as well. However where laptops now have tons of ram and terabytes of hdd space, and are half the cost of what they were a few years ago, the same doesn't apply to a cell phone. They still retail for well north of $400 and now the only choice seems to be to purchase out right or use an installment plan...the only difference is you no longer have a 2 year contract for service (just for for phone if you use installment).


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They are constantly expanding the abilities of these phones, but you're right that the price doesn't reflect the ability to make them cheaper. However, its a supply & demand issue. Thanks to subsidies, people have been upgrading often. With those going away, it'll be interesting to see what happens to this market. Most people who've upgraded every time they could when the device cost them 100-200 will not do so when it's now 600+.

I think Moto sees the writing on the wall. Hence the new Moto x starting at 399 & not being tied to a carrier. They're ready to compete in this new market IMO. Others will have 5o follow suit or lose their footholds in the market.

Apple using components that we'd laugh at & still getting good performance from their iPhone will be able to drop price per phone & not feel it.

Samsung, constantly pushing their limits & putting ridiculous specs in their flagships, I think, will feel it more than most.

 

[TisMyDroid]

I also wonder how much the carriers have done to inflate the price of the phones you buy. Where you used to have to buy your phone through your carrier or when purchasing your phone, it had to be carrier specific, now they're unlocked. Why? Not because carriers wanted it that way. They were forced to by legislation. Interesting that the pay per month plans started evolving shortly after this new rule. So it seems that now that we have more choices of what we do with our phones and where and who we use them with, that it will be the manufacturers having more control over the price of their devices. Hopefully it will lead to a more competitive market and we'll see these phones go down in price.

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[FoxKat]

I think that @TisMyDroid hit the nail on the head with that one. As a matter fact before I read her post I was about to say almost exactly the same thing, although perhaps not so much related to inflating prices for offsetting of subsidies, but more because the technology advancing in the cellular industry keeps the manufacturers on their toes keep up with the increasing speed of the data.

In a nutshell, laptop prices have come down because they're not carrier specific devices. In fact most laptops don't even have any type of cellular capabilities. It's the cellular capabilities of the cell phones have prevented the prices from coming down as dramatically with each new iteration. Or perhaps better said , it's the cellular carriers that have made it more expensive to maintain compatibility with their networks at the higher and higher data speed levels , and so where there are savings as technology moves ahead with regard to processor speed and storage and graphics capabilities and video displays etc., a big part of these devices is that they are in fact a phone, and not just a phone but also a telecommunications device that transmits huge volumes of data.

So, in a nutshell if you were to take away the cellular radios from these devices you have nothing more that a pocket sized laptop, and the prices would drop precipitously as has happened with laptops, in my humble opinion.