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Hardware

Smartphone Shipments Dropped 9% in Q2 (techcrunch.com) 37

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Bad news about smartphone shipments has become the norm, rather than the exception, in recent years. The trend pre-dates the pandemic, but has only accelerated during the pandemic, thanks to various economic and supply chain impacts. Even so, a high single-digit drop warrants examination and some difficult questions around the industry's health. New figures out this morning from Canalys show a 9% year-over-year drop for global smartphone shipments in Q2. The culprits are, well, pretty much everything you've been hearing about for the last couple of years. Consumers have broadly slowed down their upgrade cycles, as phones have gotten better and more robust. The phones themselves have grown more expensive in the process, adding an air of consumer caution amid economic uncertainty, including unemployment and inflation.
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Smartphone Shipments Dropped 9% in Q2 More

Smartphone Shipments Dropped 9% in Q2

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  • Phones last for years, the latest features aren't worth upgrading for.. and we can use the chip capacity to build other things that are backed up.

    Sounds like a win/win/win.

    • I remember when I got my first phone that did 90 hz on the display. I set it for 60, because it was "good enough" and I prefer a longer battery life. Went around showing it to coworkers...saying look how smooth it is at 90hz. Then, I showed them it was set for 60, changed it to 90 and they couldn't really tell a difference. Yeah, sometimes you might see a bit of a difference, but the point is, most of this is MARKETING..."more is better". People don't use probably 2/3 of the power of a smartphone.

      • That's ok. The various intelligence agencies and the telemetry uses the other third.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sd4f ( 1891894 )

        Nothing demonstrates stagnation, than all the tech websites that had lots of scoops about new phones and features. One's I follow have systematically all admitted that the whole industry has peaked long ago, and everything is boring.

        With that said, the websites that keep on making a big deal about such features like refresh rates, you can tell they're just regurgitating marketing points from the manufacturer, and don't want to make them upset, lest they stop giving them review samples.

        When I compared the hi

    • They last for years...and they would last longer it they made it easier to replace the battery on them.

  • I don't get it. Less phones are sold. Wasn't that expected? Why is it "bad" news? I understand phone makers are seeing a reduction in sales, and that's not good for their pockets, especially in a market where profits are razor-thin, and have been for quite a few years (even pre-pandemic times), but it's not the end of the world.

    • Still happy with my 2017 Samsung A5. Battery is starting to deteriorate but is still manageable. Speed is still great for what I use it for. Things seem to finally last a while.

    • I don't get it. Less phones are sold. Wasn't that expected? Why is it "bad" news? I understand phone makers are seeing a reduction in sales, and that's not good for their pockets, especially in a market where profits are razor-thin, and have been for quite a few years (even pre-pandemic times), but it's not the end of the world.

      It's bad for the phone manufacturers, and the vendors for those phone manufacturers. As a secondary effect, it's also bad for employees, stockholders, and others who depend financially on those companies. It's not necessarily bad or good for consumers.

      It'll be interesting to see the effect of the shrinking market on average and high-end prices. There are rumors of upcoming across-the-board $100 price hikes for the new iPhones. Can decreasing demand support price hikes?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        It's most definitely good for consumers that their phones are "good enough" to not need upgrades, just replacements for broken devices.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      It's bad news for the industry.

  • There are two ways to make money:
    1. From production .. that is, by making a product and then selling it to as many people as possible.
    2. From scarcity .. that is, monopolizing a resource, ideally one that is essential, or product and reducing access to it.

    For example real estate billionaires (scum like Trump), diamond merchants .. they make money off scarcity.
    Companies that make products *usually* make money off making as much product as possible and selling it at an accessible cost.

    But what's happening now

  • It's very simple (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday July 18, 2022 @04:32PM (#62713970)

    Prices went up, wages didn't. You can either have a new phone or food. Choose.

  • The smartphone market is dead... (Score:3)

    by genixia ( 220387 ) on Monday July 18, 2022 @06:16PM (#62714204)

    It just doesn't know it yet.

    On the one hand, most of the market is satisfied with the phones they have now. The vendors are chasing diminishing returns with incremental improvements. The only things I really want for now are a better camera (always, lol) and more storage.

    On the other hand, the future is smart watches with remote displays. Got a tablet? Display. Got a PC? Display? Near a TV? Display. Effectively the watch becomes the core hub of your personal communications and data storage and the display ancillary to it, a reversal of the current smart watch paradigm.

    The major missing link for this is the radio connection and protocol to the displays - it needs to be promiscuous enough such that it is easy to use, whilst maintaining privacy in use and preventing unauthorized connections or DOS attacks. A better bluetooth than bluetooth if you will. Everything else is just about there.

    • Phones still have quite some innovation to do, but they are stagnant. Battery life technology needs improvement, and also we need folding phones that don't have a noticeable crease down the middle after a few uses.

    • The only things I really want for now are a better camera (always, lol) and more storage.

      I don't care about the camera in my phone. When I want to get good pictures or video, I have other devices that do it as well as, or better than, my phone's camera. I use my phone camera occasionally, and to take practical photos (or video) that I discard shortly thereafter. I could do with some more storage, and with more memory, or better memory management: I always find it mystifying that one of my older Linux boxes, with 6 GB RAM, can deal without any problems with my desktop, video streaming, and a c

    • The missing link is power consumption, I don't think anyone wants a heater strapped to their wrist and that's before you look at the size of battery needed.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sd4f ( 1891894 )

        10 years ago, a smartphone had a 2000mAh battery. Now, they're easily more than twice the size (talking about android), however, daily charging is still necessary.

        It's my observation that the android phone industry just isn't interested in making phones that have longer battery lives. Apple seems to be the only company making hardware which genuinely tries to improve its performance and efficiency. Android phones appear to have taken on the huge phablet form factor, merely to cram in larger batteries to acc

    • Saturated, not dead. There's a difference. People will very much continue to buy smartphones. Just to replace broken devices rather than to do a meaningless upgrade.

  • ... slowed down their upgrade cycles ...

    There are a number of reasons and here's another: The cloud. With the bulk of processing done elsewhere, phones are now a smart terminal to a distant computer, so there's no need for more processing power. The exception is games but the slowness and imprecision of touch-screens also limits the complexity of games.

  • forced my hand. Or I would still be using 2021's phone.
  • Perhaps it was due to what Miamicanes described above, but I made a purchase I had not planned too a few years early as a result.
  • All the phones suck. No ody wants 21:9 aspect ratio. Nobody asked for curved edges. Iphones are stupid as fuck and haven't had any truly innovative shit in ages

  • The iPhone 6S was all the vast majority of people need from a phone. Everything since then has been unnecessary candy to get you to upgrade.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sd4f ( 1891894 )
      I felt that way with the Lumia 920 which I bought at the start of 2013. Software and lack of app support was its main problem, but putting that aside, the hardware hit this point of being "good enough" almost 10 years ago. With that said, today, it's lacking in storage, ram and the CPU isn't good enough, but for me it shows that smartphone functionality for the most part has stagnated for a very long time.
  • Since hardware features have been axed with regularity (becuz Samsung and Apple), I bought a Pinephone. It's not wonderful, but at the rate we're going, will be less gimped and underwhelming than alternatives. I hope I'm wrong. Frame.work should make a phone...

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