Samsung sees 95% drop in profits for a second consecutive quarter::Today, Samsung posted its Q2 2023 financial results. The report says Samsung’s profits have dropped considerably compared to last year.
each new phone is more expensive, with less functionality.
hover on the touch screen? gone
iris scanner, gone
headphone jack? gone
air pressure sensor? gone
humidity sensor? gone
ir blaster, gone
meanwhile I get charged out the ass for storage space.
Why the fuck would I want a newer phone?
Don’t forget the SD card slot missing, S20 was the last one that had it. I still don’t know what to get after that, just because of the missing SD.
Internal storage on phones is over 200gb by now. I havent needed an SD for years. What the fuck do you store on your phone that could still need an SD? lmao
I have a young son and it was getting very irritating having to be selective recording my videos of him. I finally just paid $90 and added a 1TB premium sd card, and now I won’t have to worry about it at all & download all the videos I want for us.
Upgrading the internal storage to 1TB on a new phone costs several hundred dollars.
Record 1 minute video, how big is that file? 200 MB, 0.2 GB. 5 minutes and 1 GB is full. When something interesting happens, 5 minutes are recorded easy, obviously. 200 GB, nothing for apps, maps, downloads,… are enough to record 15 hours of video. Then that is it. How many moments can I capture with that? Enough for maybe 2 years? I don’t throw my memories away when I get a new phone. Instead, I just buy a new SD every few years and compress the video files every once in a while.
Mine is actually very easily removable. The device overheats so much, that it’s completely annihilated the glue, and now the back panel is only held down by the case c:
Wait air pressure sensor and humidity sensor? Are you talking about their watches?
Samsung Note 10 and others have a barometric sensor, though I’m not aware of any app using them. Which might explain their removal, sadly.
At least Samsung has proper video out through the USB port. Unlike the trash that Pixels depend on, such as Chromecast. What kind of GPU doesn’t have either HDMI or displayport (through USB-C like Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, Steamdeck, laptops, etc. ) out in this day and age?
Holding tight on to this Samsung Note 9 until it finally dies. Battery is still ‘ok’ for now, will last a full day.
Snapdragon, not that pos Exynos
Finger print reader on the back is the only way to do it. Wife has had several newer models with built in front side fingerprint reader and it has been ridiculously unreliable by comparison.
Iris Scan
Face Scan
Headphone jack
Micro-SD Card
USB-C
Wireless charging
NFC with payment support
And even the stupid pen thingy that I use maybe once a month.
Not 5G but the 4G LTE is usually more than fast enough even for streaming when using as a hotspot.
Pointless unintuitive feature that’s replaced with simple press and hold.
Unintuitive for you, perhaps. I found it more intuitive than the press and hold (until it became ubiquitous), since it made more sense for a preview. Press and hold, in my mind, is more for secondary menus and alternative options, like mass-selecting.
The air gestures were also nice if I had my hands full, since they worked without turning the screen on, and without touching it, although they leaned more heavily on the gimmick side of things.
Slow and unreliable compared to fingerprints. Anyone actually used it?
Yes. I use it a lot when I have my phone on a stand, or when I have gloves on. Fingerprint readers don’t work through gloves, for obvious reasons, and it’s less effort than having to fumble around with my phone and my gloves, especially when I will be putting the glove back on afterwards.
Since my phone also has the fingerprint reader on the back, rather than the front, it also makes it much easier to unlock my phone without picking it up, which is nice when it’s on its wireless charging pad, or I want to quickly check a notification or something, rather than needing to pick it up.
As for speed, I’ve not found it that much worse than the fingerprint, especially once the camera’s fired up. The hard part tends to be aligning yourself just right, and that you need to tap a “confirm” button compared to the one-click that fingerprint does.
Who needs these things? Weather apps work just fine. Rather use the space for battery.
The space won’t be used for battery. It’s a small chip on the PCB, and Samsung would either keep it around for other sensors, or would leave that space blank. Having a tiny battery protrusion like that is silly anyway. Having a little dingle like that would just make the battery more likely to be damaged and erupt into a violent conflagration.
I personally found it handy, even if it was underutilised. Sometimes you want information from within the house, not outside of it, and if your phone can fetch that information and present it, you don’t need to go and buy a separate hygrometer and air pressure sensor, and carry it around, or have to feed that information via an external service.
Unless you’re looking to vandalize public tvs, just replace it with any number of wifi/bluetooth remotes.
Assuming that your TV comes with support for those. If it doesn’t, such as if it’s an older television, then you would be out of luck.
Personally, I used mine a bunch back in the day, just because it was nice to be able to fire up the VCR, Amplifier, and TV all in one button, rather than a bundle of loose remotes, but that’s more of a first world problem, and less of an issue these days, since television is on the decline.
More importantly, though, the phones aren’t cheaper despite the loss of these features. The phones just get more expensive, even though they had fewer sensors and features like that.
The point is that technology isn’t supposed to get in the way of us doing things and that’s exactly what removing features that are useful to people does.
Usually there is a compromise somewhere though. If they could just add all the features without any downsides, they surely would (and demand a premium for it). Granted, sometimes it is just cheaper to get rid of it (and thus make more profit), but sometimes its just a decision to cater to a minority or provide a benefit for the majority of users.
Counterpoint: phones like Redmi 9T have it all. Headphone jack, expandable storage, IR blaster, NFC… Also manages to have an “okay” battery capacity that’s 6Ah.
The only problem is it costs too little so people don’t consider it.
First, even for Xiaomi that phone is crap with a myriad of software related complaints alone. On the hardware front its cheap because cheap in gets cheap out. Underpowered even for 2021.
When money is tight you might use your phone for a year or two longer. 1000 Euro phones also don’t help the matter.
While I don’t use a Samsung, I am over half way through my phones fifth year. Other than a battery replacement I’ve had literally no problems whatsoever.
If only lifespan and right to repair were written into law everywhere.
Developers require money, and software maintenance requires lots of developers, testers and other people.
It also seems like the whole you gotta upgrade every other month hype has long since died down. It’s not the exponential improvements that it was ten or twelve years ago.
I couldn’t agree more. I have a Zfold 2 that I’ve had since launch (3 years) and I look at the phones on offer now that I have an upgrade available and I see no reason to upgrade to a new phone for a marginally better camera and processor, there hasn’t been enough innovation in mobile tech in that time to warrant paying another £1000+ over another 3 years, I’ll rock this phone phone until it dies the same way I did my Note 9.
I’m in the same boat. I’ve still got an S10 from launch, although it’s noticeably wearing down in performance now. I’ll wait to the holiday season to see if I can get a deal on a new Samsung. At that point I’ll have used the s10 for almost 5 years. Used to get a new phone every other year but that’s not needed or wanted now.
Yeah, I’ve had my LG G8 for four years now and I’m just starting to look for replacements. Unfortunately the G8 is known for the battery being very hard to replace or I would be looking into a battery replacement service instead to get a couple more years of useful life.
Sorry. I’m just trying not to get evicted due to living in a country with the highest rent, internet, food, and data plan prices.
Seeing that you’re from Canada, why is this so? Why is living in Canada so expensive relative to elsewhere?
Government. Not liberals or conservatives, but the government as a whole. Canada has had many years where both liberal and conservatives were in charge, and nothing changed.
Canada doesn’t allow competition. We have 3 main internet providers, 3 main phone plan providers, like 2 grocery store chains, a couple airlines, etc.
When other companies attempt to come in to break up monopolies, they lobby, and get them shut down.
I mean where are we going to go? America isn’t really an alternative, as much as Americans think it is. Our healthcare, gun laws, etc are things that make Canada really good. We could move to some European or Scandinavian country, but that’s not as easy as it sounds, especially when you need to learn a new language, get accepted, move your entire life, and live in such a different culture.
So people in Canada just accept it. Maybe one day monopolies will be broken up, but there are no parties that are going to do that now. Left or right leaning.
Government. Not liberals or conservatives, but the government as a whole. Canada has had many years where both liberal and conservatives were in charge, and nothing changed.
Huh, it’s almost as if they don’t encompass as much of the political spectrum as they’d like us to believe.
I haven’t even seen a North American have a kind of acceptable political understanding in the 2020s until now.
The Economist explains it well in their article Australia and Canada are one economy—with one set of flaws. The competition regulators in both Australia and Canada aren’t doing their job, allowing oligopolies to form.
It’s a type of endemic corruption and Transparency International should start calling it out.
It’s big and cold. How much food do you think grows there? There’s actually plenty of cheap land but people like to live with other people.
If you don’t want modern conveniences, I bet it’s cheap. I bet you can live off of potatoes and chicken for like $0.
It’s not cheap. Buying a crack shack in a shitty province with basically no job opportunities costs more than a nice place in LA.
Actually.
Getting a piece of shit, run down, SHARED town house in Nova Scotia costs more than a decent house in LA.
At least you don’t live in the city with the highest rent prices. Our countries treated housing like and investment scheme which drives up local tax revenue resulting in reduction year in year of new developments (assuming Canada has the same supply Constraints as here) . The reduction is fueled by the tax revenue however also by the increasing amount of investors and owners who vote. They don’t want their asset values to decrease so it’s artificially kept high the value component of the assets left long ago, we are in fictional valuations now.
Regarding food, their is no other way around monopoly or duopoly other than supporting farmers markets. By supporting them they can grow their base and bring down prices. Not sure what else can be done here. It’s a real problem for us here.
Electricity prices are skyrocketing here and that’s squarely landed at the feet of poor renewables planning. Mandatory coal plant shutdowns without having replacement capacity in place is killing people when the elderly & vulnerable can’t afford AC during the heat waves.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
This is a sign of an upcoming recession if we aren’t already in one. People are starting to run out of their savings due to stagflation and are looking for areas to cut. Buying a new phone every year or every other year and replacing laptops every 5 years are among the first things to go in anyone’s budget.
So currently the only people refreshing their devices are the people who NEED new devices.
Capitalist economies always need spends out of desire and not just necessity.
Worst part is instead of reversing the gouging these companies will probably just go ham on the planned obsolescence.
Or simply that prices have become insane. Good phones used to be around 400, taking me a few days to think about it and say yes. Now they are beyond 1000, so I will do my best to avoid having to upgrade and go with custom ROMs again. In the meanwhile, we also lost exchangeable batteries, external SD cards, and microphone jack, and we gained more Google spyware and bloat.
Good phones are still $400. They just have this ridiculous tier now that is even higher
Good phones used to be around 400, taking me a few days to think about it and say yes. Now they are beyond 1000
I’m not sure what you mean by a “good” phone. Like yeah, they came up a bit. A Pixel 7a costs $499, and if one wants wireless charging and a better camera they can go with the Pixel 7 for $599. Regular non-Pro iPhones are around the same price.
Like yeah, folding phones are well over $1,000 in most cases, but personally I think that’s a gimmick, my hot take. But for me and 99% of the people I know, we’re sticking with our slab smartphones.
I bought a m52 a while ago on a black friday promotion or something like that for 280. It’s the most expensive phone I ever bought (usially i try to stay under 200). I know that for some that is peanuts, but I have it hard to justify spending so much money on a phone. 1000 for a phone is something I would never be able to do. The thing I do like about it is the quality of the photos and the ease to connect with my wireless buds.
The gouging is insane. £300+ for a tablet keyboard case for the s9 ultra.
I got one free as a preorder for the s8 ultra. No chance I am paying that much for a keyboard.
Even my iPad keyboard (the folio from Apple) “only” cost like £180. Samsung’s going nuts.
Samsung isn’t on planet earth with their prices. I was avoiding them anyway because I believe TouchWiz is an inferior interface than stock Android. Just way too much bloat.
Bloat is negligible. In fact it is their software that keeps me stuck with samsung. Its a total superior hardware and software experience.
Just wished they hadn’t gone down the Apple courage route and bumped the price and pimped the features.
You hit the nail on the head for me. I loved my Galaxy S9+ but it was over 4 years old and literally falling apart. I just replaced it with an S23…but also as others have said, I think the S9+ was better. I’m especially having issues with the camera (look up bananagate) and my old car doesn’t have Bluetooth so I have a USB C to Aux adapter that randomly cuts out sound so for a lot of drives I just put the sound up on my phone speakers and play directly.
Drops in profits can mean investments, new hires and a myriad of other stuff. No meaning in the headline whatsoever. Profits are not revenue.
Young people in Korea have switched over to iphones. iphone have like 60% marketshare now for that demographic
Dunno if you’re taking the piss but they’re not that bad. Have an iPhone mini 13 I bought for €450 2nd hand with 100% battery health. Decent upgrade from an Xperia XZ1 compact. Needed a pocketable phone & the Asus Zenfone was too expensive.
Have to say, having the call audio levels, proximity sensor & speakers properly tuned to the hardware, software/security updates without having to run a non-official build of Lineage OS and AltStore-Linux for side-loading has been sweet.
Do you have any sources for this? Afaik Samsung phones are still massively popular with young people in Korea.
