Are we past peak-smartphone or is this just noise from model release schedules?
It took PCs 20+ years to get good enough, smartphones managed the same in much less than 10 it seems.
It took PCs 20+ years to get good enough, smartphones managed the same in much less than 10 it seems.
The only issue is that phone manufacturers have even more of an incentive to bloat the OS more and more (and make it slower and slower on old models) and to deprecate it faster (on older models) so they can sell more hardware if people want to get the latest security fixes / software
Other than that the major change on the horizon that would drive mass upgrades is any advancement in battery tech.
another big pain point is battery (and battery consumption). still waiting on hardware (and software in conjunction) to get more efficient. you'll remember how power hungry PCs were in the beginning and how much better they are now (laptops notably).
feels to me like we still have many years to go, and many more "big" technology investments.
True, but you could easily make it less of a pain point by making the device 1mm thicker ;-)
Furthermore, my phone supports Qualcomm's Quick Charge tech which means plugging in the phone for a few minutes gives it a lot more charge.
Between these two points; my phone very very rarely runs out of battery. When I was on iOS it'd be almost every day.
One of many high end buyer guides one could reference. http://www.anandtech.com/show/538/17
I'd say that computers have come down in price.
You couldn't get $2,300 for a 33MHz machine now, just like you can't sell a Galaxy S1 for a $700.
$1500 in 1995 is about $2300 today. A $1500 computer today is ~35% cheaper than the "same price" computer from before.
Having been a gaming rig builder since around that time, high-end performance desktops have gotten way cheaper, with more realistic performance tiers to boot.
High-end PCs at that time were Compaq computers. Not cheap knockoffs that were made by no-name brands. The Compaq 386 had a launch price of $6500 to $10,000+
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/10/business/the-executive-com...
The "Jade" PC you see in that image is probably more comparable to "Gateway" brand now-a-days.
Computers are a hell-of-a-lot cheaper today than in the past.
EDIT: I looked it up, and I can't believe I forgot about this. Back then, every mom-and-pop store was able to build their own brand of PCs. The clone wars were unstoppable I tell you! Jade Computers was apparently a small business with just a few retail locations running out of California.
Compaq's pricing was clever. If you bought one, everyone knew you bought it because it was better, not because it was cheaper than the IBM model. (And it was better because Compaq was shipping 386 machines when the IBM PC AT still had a crappy 286.)
In real terms, that means the cost of a PC has been reduced quite a bit (because of inflation: http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=10... )