When you start talking about a $400 to $600 difference in price, the mystique and perceived advantages of a brand and OS platform look a bit silly when they all run the same applications.
*Do you know what baffles me, the fact that you have a phone that operates at 4G but the person you're talking with only
"thinks" at half a "G" so what's the point?
*Do you know what baffles me, the fact that you have a phone that operates at 4G but the person you're talking with only
"thinks" at half a "G" so what's the point?
Interactive > https://tinyurl.com/ydxhznxc
Ah, that annual smartphone product refresh cycle.
We've managed to merge all of the worst aspects of a secular new year festival with the Super Bowl. We celebrate the bounty of product shipment in the arena of combat, where titans stack up their wares to be judged by the hungry masses and the always-snarky tech industry thought leaders.
The execution of this is practically Roman, with its bread and circuses approach to product release cycles. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Render unto the Twitter feeds. Hunger Games for the technorati.
The latest objects of our obsession are the Google Pixel 2, and the iPhone X.
And while this cycle is predictable, and the months of product leaks prior to the releases leave nothing to the imagination, some of us still look for innovation where it does not exist, only to find ourselves completely disappointed when the reality sets in.
With all this anticipation and pre-gaming of the product announcements, it's very hard, nay impossible, to live up to expectations year after year.
It isn't as if companies like Apple, Google, Samsung, and the others vying for our attention have not been expending resources and enduring long development cycles to make better products.
They have. There are key quantitative improvements in performance between this year's models and those of prior years. The benchmarks tell us this, as does the spec creep.
The problem is that the mobile technology has now matured to a certain level where every single product at every single price point is now more than good enough to address every consumers' key needs in almost every conceivable use-case scenario.
The hardware has now become completely commoditized, and the capabilities of these mobile chipsets and display technology have vastly outstripped the capabilities and functionality of the software applications that run on them.
tion, the $1,500 PC was overkill.
For the PC to advance to the next stage of its evolution, two things happened: one was mobility and the move to lightweight portable form factors like ultrabooks; the other was the rise of broadband and ubiquitous Wi-Fi. This allowed more processor- and media-intensive applications to become more commonplace, and the need for more sophisticated OSes to run those applications and make better use of the surplus resources on those PCs.
Something very similar is happening in the mobile industry right now. Everyone's phones are now so good that it's hard for a consumer to see real improvement over the models from the year or even two years prior.
My iPhone 6S that I handed down to my wife was already an incredibly powerful and responsive phone. It already did everything I wanted it to do, and so was the 6 Plus I had before it, as was arguably the 5S.
I upgraded to a 256GB iPhone 7 Plus last year and paid over $1,000 for it. My wife recently took possession of it. I am now using other devices while I wait to get a new iPhone X. More on that in a bit.
Complete article at > https://tinyurl.com/ydxhznxc
