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Comment by Onavo | Hacker News Reader

Allegedly the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 (Oryon acquisition) Gen 6 SoC costs them $300 per device..

This ballpark has been the case since 8 gen 1 days and there were always OnePlus and Xiaomi undercutting everyone with their sub-1000 flagships. I got my OP15 for like 800 eur.

These prices are insane though. Just absurd.

Speaking of OnePlus, why do chinese brands not include cellular in their tablets? Very few chinese tablets (at least the global versions) have biometric fingerprint sensors or 5G.

The OnePlus tablet 4 would be amazing if not for the corners they cut..

Cellular modems are huge, complex, draw tons of power and have high price tags. In the market that is already cutthroat to the extreme I can 100% see why they'd skip it.

Bunch of fancy cameras (same as every other flagship smartphone) and following the unwritten "thou flagship shall be expensive" rule that has little to do with silly things like hardware cost.

Somewhat surprisingly, Lenovo/Motorola here has some of the more affordable mainstream phones (200€-ish for the G56), beating other Chinese brands that played around tiny margins and got hit even harder by memory prices now.

There will be more devices from Motorola providing official GrapheneOS support including budget devices. It has to start from the top down since Qualcomm currently only provides the security features we need for flagship Snapdragon. We also still need proper long term updates for budget devices.

Is there any possibility of Motorola pulling the rug from under GrapheneOS 7 year support? Like cutting down driver updates or anything else?

I'm currently using a Pixel 9 Pro with GrapheneOS and not in the market for the Signature 27 because of size and low RAM. But I'm definitely considering upcoming Motorola devices with GrapheneOS support.

We're more confident in our ability to properly support it long term than Pixels. Pixels did pull the rug out from under us and everyone else relying on them having AOSP support. We had to do a lot of work to keep supporting them, to add support for new Pixels and to keep up with new releases. We have to backport the drivers from QPR1 and QPR3 to the yearly and QPR2 releases on an ongoing basis along with much more. Motorola is doing more than we expected them to do. They're helping port and maintain GrapheneOS for their devices.

Presumably AI makes porting a lot easier now? It's a long way from the CyanogenMod days.

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