The Trend For Increasingly Expensive Mobile Phones

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Ricardodaforce

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Last week Samsung announced the Samsung Galaxy Fold. Today Huawei announced the Mate X.

Both are folding mobiles that will cost over £2000. Would you consider spending that much on a mobile?

Yes, they are bringing something new to the market, but at such huge cost!
 
Not in a hundred years........ far too expensive. Function for functions sake. I grudgingly ordered an iPhone XR last year to replace my slowly dying iPhone 6S, it was a close run battle between the XR and iPhone 8 or a Huawei P20 Pro but I thought the residuals on the iPhone XR would be better. It helped I got a cheap 'black friday' deal with Vodafone.
 
broc said:
Not in a hundred years........ far too expensive. Function for functions sake. I grudgingly ordered an iPhone XR last year to replace my slowly dying iPhone 6S, it was a close run battle between the XR and iPhone 8 or a Huawei P20 Pro but I thought the residuals on the iPhone XR would be better. It helped I got a cheap 'black friday' deal with Vodafone.
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Not many people consider residual values, I’m impressed. I upgraded recently because the trade in value of my iPhone X was greater than the amount I owed on it.
 
Paid just over £600 for an iPhone 8 last May, thought I was mad paying so much for a handset but given what I'd save getting one on contract it was good purchase..

Having been an android user previously, and just given a Samsung A7 for work I have decided that android sets are overpriced and have a limited lifetime, the iphone still feels like new.

But would I pay more for my next handset? No.
 
In the past I have used the residual value of my handsets to cover (or contribute towards) any up-front cost associated with a new handset. I suspect like a lot of people I am suppressing the urge to change handsets for longer these days as there are fewer reasons to change. I am probably not a 'good' target customer for phone manufacturers because I use my phone to communicate with people and take the occasional photo. I am not into 'social media' or multimedia & I, like many others on this forum I have spent thousands (over the years) on camera kit which I enjoy using far more than the phone camera.
 
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No they are for people with high income.

That rules me out
 
£2,000 on a phone is reaching new levels of insanity.
I balked at buying a P20 at £400, but chose to as the battery and camera functionality are not found elsewhere, and that (as well as making the odd call) are what I needed.
I don't think I have a requirement for a dual screen.... Yet.
Defo not whilst it is that price point!
 
From the look of Apple's latest profit warning they hit a ceiling with the $1,000 version.
 
Not in a million years would I pay that for a phone.

The only way I can justify the cost of my current phone (iphone7) is the fact that I’m on it for a few hours per day (work and pleasure) so over the years it works out quite reasonable.
 
I don't think it's for masses and neither do they have a fan following like apple. I wonder if they got it out to make a point. It'll eventually come down in price.
 
Just spent £200 on a new Honor 8x and thought I was mad. Wanted the big screen though rather pleased with it. two grand on a phone, never!
 
I felt my last phone (iPhone 8+) was probably the peak I'm willing to pay for a mobile phone (c£1000 over the term), I'd like to see prices come down but we're being buffeted by so many other factors right now that I think its unlikely to happen.

The new £2000 devices from Samsung, etc won't be mainstream - there will be some nutters who ant to be on the bleeding edge but that's it.
That said- if it did give the capability to replace a phone and tablet then £2000 probably isn't far off the cost of the two separate devices.
 
Although I've said I wouldn't, if your seriously "into" your phone, is it any different to a hobby photographer splashing out on a £10k lens or a £5k body?
 
Spent about £100 on a moto G4 off eBay about 18 months ago. Can get it for less than that now. Can access e-mail (like an iPhone), internet (like an iPhone) - it can even ....... make phone calls. As for the notional £1900 that I saved in comparison to the Samsung, if I actually had that sort of money lying around, the last thing it would be used for is a phone that basically does all the same things as the one currently in use.
 
I bought a refurbished Honor 7X with a full 12 month warranty for £118.. really can't fault it.. good dual lens camera, 64Gb memory, 3Gb ram.. and if it breaks, its not mad money to replace it..
 
Better battery life is my main motive for upgrades. My 6s plus was down to about 2 days use. The 8 plus I have now lasts 5 days with the same use. It's so much better.

I can't see why I'd want a folding phone yet.
 
I've never bought a phone outright. Always had contracts & done it that way. Never been into the latest phones either. I've had my current one nearly two years & my previous one about four years!!
 
With flexible displays you are paying for the technology, and when it's mass-produced it'll likely be a lot cheaper. Personally I think it's easier to justify the price-tag of the foldable phones than what it is to justify the £1000 iPhones and standard Galaxy phones.

Each to their own, I like the foldable phone concepts and maybe one day I'll have one, but with Xiaomi turning out fantastic phones in the £200-£500 range I'll keep looking at the foldables with my eyes not my wallet.

With regards to residual values, does that not go hand-in-hand with the price of the handset? If a handset has a new value of say £900 and a year later you can still get £600 for it, is that not the same as a £300 phone selling for £200 (Xiaomi and Huawei?).

As an example an iPhone Max 256Gb sells for £1249.00, on ebay they are currently selling for £830+, a listing that finished today sold for £870, a relative 30.3% decrease in value from it's purchase date which would be at a maximum 22 weeks and 2 days. The Xiaomi Mi Mix 3, sells for £537 from Amazon, a listing on ebay that finished today ended at £399 resulting in a 25% depreciation over 15 weeks.

The same is true for a lot of the vendors...
 
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It's much like any other commodity, some people will pay any price for the latest and greatest. Chances are that the technology from the newest phones will be passed down to lesser, cheaper versions which will probably benefit lots of others. I used to upgrade every 18 months, but the improvements no longer interest me. I am still using an iPhone 6+ and don't feel i am missing out on anything. I can't see the problem with these being produced, but they won't something I'll be buying anytime soon. I have far more extravagant things to waste money on :)
 
This price is just telling us they aren't ready to make these things in quantity for the mass market yet. They'll be put into the hands of 'influencers' who will be showing them off on Instagram, while demand will be built up and carefully measured as they gear up for mass production.
 
I think it's a ridiculous price - even though I've just (within the last few months) had to move to something newer.

I had an iPhone 6 (not even an S) that I was perfectly happy with. I'd had it long enough that I was off contract, so it was costing me around £13 a month.

Then I dropped it. And the screen was replaced. From that point on, I had no end of trouble. It would run out of charge within a few hours at most and some mornings was down to 30% by the time I got to work. I didn't arrange the screen replacement and didn't think anything of it, but I suspect that it was a power-draining non-oem screen.

To cut a long story short, I couldn't leave the house without a charger and/or power bank to make it through the day.

So I had the choice of getting a new battery and proper apple screen and spending around £175 on a phone when I knew they would stop supporting it soon, or upgrade.

In the end I upgraded to an XR, but it doesn't really do anything (for me) that my old phone didn't do and I begrudge being forced into having to upgrade. I did consider an iPhone 8, but it wasn't really that much cheaper and I wanted to future-proof this phone for as long as possible.

The plan is to keep this one beyond the contract and if I do drop it, then pay the money for the proper Apple screen.
 
I don't think it's a bad price for technology that is in its infancy. It's not meant to be a mass market phone, it's meant for people who must have the latest and greatest technology, who will pay through the nose to be Samsung and Huawei's beta testers. In a few years, if the whole foldable thing takes off then they will be the same price as a normal phone.

I notice a few people on this thread have bought iPhone XRs. Apple charging £750 for a phone with a laughably low resolution LCD screen is a completely ridiculous price, and makes £2k for a foldable dual screen phone look good value.
 
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I really don't understand the need to pay ridiculous amounts for a phone.
I paid about 60 quid for my last android, (new & unlocked) sim only contract £15 / month.
about 4 years later I was gutted when it died..

So I bought a similar, but newer model HTC this one was £85.99 .. bloody outrageous!
But at least by changing suppliers the sim only contact was 8 quid.
Unlimited texts Unlimited calls and 2 Gb data, which I never reach anyway.

I'm sure "they" do something absolutely bloody amazing, for the money, I have no idea what, "it" is and as I haven't had "it"
I'm sure as hell don't need "it" or miss "it"
 
I paid (IIRC) around £100 for my Nokia 625 (again, IIRC!). About £60 per year on PAYG. Don't use data, just WiFi and most of the expenditure is on texts. I'll need a fresh phone soon since MS is abandoning Windows mobile as far as security etc. goes so will have to go Android. Unfortunately, it'll probably be Mrs Nod's Samsung S6+ and it seems to be full of Samsung bloatware and is too clever for me by half!
 
Cobra said:
I really don't understand the need to pay ridiculous amounts for a phone.
I paid about 60 quid for my last android, (new & unlocked) sim only contract £15 / month.
about 4 years later I was gutted when it died..

So I bought a similar, but newer model HTC this one was £85.99 .. bloody outrageous!
But at least by changing suppliers the sim only contact was 8 quid.
Unlimited texts Unlimited calls and 2 Gb data, which I never reach anyway.

I'm sure "they" do something absolutely bloody amazing, for the money, I have no idea what, "it" is and as I haven't had "it"
I'm sure as hell don't need "it" or miss "it"
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how do you know you won't miss it if you have not tried it?
 
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RichardC27 said:
I notice a few people on this thread have bought iPhone XRs. Apple charging £750 for a phone with a laughably low resolution LCD screen is a completely ridiculous price, and makes £2k for a foldable dual screen phone look good value.
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Well, I was late to the Apple party as I couldn't see a need to move away from my then Nokia N95.

But back then, I had the N95, an iPod (since 2007) and a PAS camera. Obviously nowadays, most phones can do all of that, and I'm so tied in to iTunes I couldn't really not have an apple without having to reformat 12 years of accumulated music and carefully curated playlists.

I certainly use my phone more as a music player/video screen than as a phone. If someone releases an app that allowed an Android phone to sync with your iTunes library, I'd be happy to switch.
 
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nandbytes said:
how do you know you won't miss it if you have not tried it?
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Unless it cooks dinner and cleans the house, I have no need for anything other than texts, calls & whatsapp (y)
 
Screen resolution is not that important to me, I am not a pixel peeper. As I cannot see the pixels on an iPhone XR screen no matter how close I look , any higher resolution would be wasted on me. The deal I got on an XR was so close to what it would have cost me for an iPhone 7 or 8 it was a no-brainer decision. I got more storage, a better battery life and a bigger screen, all of which were important to me.
 
Most will buy it on a contract , I pay £50 a month for a note 9, unlimited texts and calls 100gb of data, Ist phone I bought in 1990 cost me £400 , it was £25 a month just to be on the network and 50p pence a minute for calls on top of that , if somebody rang you from a landline it was ££££

I got called from a phone box once , the guy was putting 10p's in , it was like this, hello, beep beep beep, hello, beep beep beep until he gave up and put 50p in to get a sentence out
 
Many here have no trouble spending £2K on an item that is half lifestyle accessory, half hobby, so why is purchasing a bleeding-edge mobile computing device so different?
 
ancient_mariner said:
Many here have no trouble spending £2K on an item that is half lifestyle accessory, half hobby, so why is purchasing a bleeding-edge mobile computing device so different?
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Depends on the mobile computing device. TBH if there was really a need or want for one I'd consider spending that much.
Also other issue is these devices you talk about loose their value very quickly unlike lenses. Even camera bodies hold their value rather well.
 
nandbytes said:
Depends on the mobile computing device. TBH if there was really a need or want for one I'd consider spending that much.
Also other issue is these devices you talk about loose their value very quickly unlike lenses. Even camera bodies hold their value rather well.
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True, but people who like tech stuff often don't mind spending over the odds for groundbreaking new stuff simply for the pleasure of ownership. How many bought early Macs, or more striking, the Apple LISA?
 
ancient_mariner said:
True, but people who like tech stuff often don't mind spending over the odds for groundbreaking new stuff simply for the pleasure of ownership. How many bought early Macs, or more striking, the Apple LISA?
Click to expand...

I used to be one of those people (still am in certain respects I guess) but you get disillusioned after sometime and urge to own latest and greatest disappears.
 
Prices like £500 or more are aimed at company employee phones where the employee doesn't pay. Or for people who are desperate to show off. I'm more than happy with my, non flagship, android phone for less than £200. The gimmicks are not worth paying TRIPLE the price.
 
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