I’ve had my Galaxy Note 8 for more than two years now, and though I’ve been tempted by new Pixels and OnePlus phones, I don’t think I’ll be updating any time soon. And according to market research, I’m not alone.
People are waiting longer and longer between big phone purchases, driven mostly by huge price increases at the top of the market. It’s having some interesting effects, as consumers themselves and the market in general start to feel the strain of purse strings. The takeaway is that it’s easier than ever to hang on to that phone for longer and longer.
Prices Are Soaring. . .
If you’ve shopped for any flagship phone in the last few years, you’ve noticed a rapid jump up in retail prices. Carriers and even manufacturers themselves have tried to disguise this, hiding behind easy-to-find financing options, but the jump is undeniable. The iPhone 7 started at $650 in 2016, with a fully-loaded 7 Plus version going for $950. Today the “budget” iPhone 11 starts at $700, with the top-of-the-line 11 Pro Max going for an astonishing $1,449.
Samsung and Google have made similar leaps at the top of the flagship space, with most other manufacturers trying to compete for those lucrative, high-margin sales following. Budget brands have been holdouts, with OnePlus, Blu, and Motorola offering more affordable options at predictably lower prices. But those phones don’t get the spots right by the door in Best Buy.
There haven’t been any massive increases in manufacturing costs: The phones are just getting more expensive because manufacturers want to charge more, and for the most part, customers are willing to pay more. At least enough of them are that it offsets any loss in sales those high prices might create.
. . . Value Isn’t
The thing is, with the notable exception of cameras, these fantastically-priced phones aren’t actually offering much more than they used to. Phone screens have gotten bigger, processors have gotten faster, storage has become more generous in general, but most of us are using the same old apps, browsers, and communication tools that we were before prices started to inflate.
Go into a carrier store and ask, “What will this new phone do better than my old one?” The first response you’ll hear is that the camera is better—and it is, undeniably. Camera upgrades, both in terms of the sensors and lenses of the hardware and the phenomenal image processing in the software, appears to be driving plenty of high-end phone sales. Apple and Google both ended their latest phone reveals talking almost exclusively about how wonderful their cameras are, and not unjustifiably so.
But if you don’t need a camera that blows your old phone out of the water, and you’re not looking for some specific and esoteric feature like Google’s questionably useful radar tech or OnePlus’s eye-catching pop-up selfie cam, it’s easy enough to just sit on the phone you have. Especially when you look at retail prices. It helps that, especially for phones from Android manufacturers like Google and Samsung, waiting a few months past launch means you can find triple-digit savings in sales.
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