The TRUTH About Smartphones in 2018

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We are becoming controlled by the computers. Any danger of that happening
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It's a process of taking very centralized things and making them very democratic, if you will, very individualized
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to amplify a slightly different inherent ability that man has, the ability of a certain part of intelligence
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So I want to talk about smartphones, a major topic of conversation here on the channel
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The smartphone is this consolidation of tech. It's the thing that all of us have in our pockets
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It's like a million gadgets in one. It's your music player. It's your video player
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It's your communicator. It's how you interact with social media. It's really how you interact with the world now
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Some people choose iPhone. Some people choose Android. But recently, there's been some interesting developments in smartphone sales figures
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And it's kind of speaking to my own intuition about the space in general
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I've personally been a smartphone user going back to the original iPhone
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I remember Steve Jobs on stage. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along
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And being skeptical at that moment until eventually owning one and recognizing how magical the entire experience could be
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It's magical. Amazing. We're going to reinvent the phone. A revolutionary smart, advanced breakthrough
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Incredible. But this recent story that I bumped into is kind of bringing into question our overall appetite for smartphones See for a while now I been thinking a lot of what happening in the smartphone space has been strictly iterative
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A little improvement here, slightly better battery life, maybe the display is a little more vibrant
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But ultimately, as a whole, all smartphones seem to be pretty good
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You will regularly see people on the street using some older device
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and being completely satisfied with it. You eventually, you get to a point where there's kind of like a general standing
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where you can do most things. That core functionality seems to be met at this point
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So what's the outcome of that? Well, this article right here that I bumped into
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is talking specifically about Chinese smartphone shipments. And recently, in Q1 2018
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China saw its biggest decline in smartphone shipments ever. A 21% decline
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Putting the overall number of shipments in a quarter below 100 million
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Now, the last time that happened was all the way back in 2013. The decline of 20% might be evidence of a slightly different narrative
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Why that appetite might be going down a little bit. I think many of them are a little too similar
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The overall market dipped by roughly 20%. But some manufacturers including Samsung had an even bigger dip
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In China Samsung saw half as many sales in this quarter Q1 2018 As they had last year in the same quarter Last year Q1 they sold twice as many phones That a huge dip for them Almost every major manufacturer though dipped Huawei saw like a
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small increase of around 2%. Xiaomi was the biggest winner in terms of overall growth. It was like
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the only winner. They have a focus on sub $200 phones. So when you correlate that price with
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these shipment figures, it does seem that maybe it's not strictly an appetite thing, but also a
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price thing as well. Now, obviously this report is referring specifically to China, but I think it's
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indicative of an overall kind of smartphone fatigue that's happening. We get these new phones every
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year, slim improvements, and then these massive price tags. For the average customer, I don't think
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that these developments are compelling enough to justify the sort of yearly replacement of a
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$1,000 device. They're getting better results, cheaper price tags, and maybe they're just feeling less motivated, less of a need to step up to these bigger
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better, newer smartphones. Some things could influence that though. Take for example this mobile gaming situation that I referenced in a previous video. If all
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of a sudden people need this extreme horsepower to continue to play games with
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much higher graphical demands maybe that could act as an engine for this upgrade I don see it happening I don see it in the immediate future Take for example the notch It seems like every Android device that coming out has just adopted it See the risk factor there is that we just end up with all these various replicas and not a lot of identity
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around any of them. I think it creates a confusing scenario for a customer trying to figure out
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which one do I need. There's this abundance of choice now but not much of a reason to go pay
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attention to all of it. Now obviously there are other factors that could play a role in these
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kinds of numbers. Other economic factors that might affect a person's ability to go out and
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spend a bunch of money on a new smartphone. That's not the way I'm reading it. A lot of the stuff
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it comes in here and I'm looking and I'm examining. I'm trying to find those differences to see what's
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in there that matters, that's worth broadcasting to you. And truthfully, the overall characteristic
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that I'm seeing here is similarities, not differences. How much more can you do on your newest smartphone
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versus your last one, especially if you're upgrading every year? I got the second lens on the camera
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I don't know. I'm National Geographic now. No, I'm not. You might end up holding on to it a little bit longer
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Maybe you already are. The numbers don't lie. They're right there in front of us. The fatigue is real
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What's it gonna take for you? What do you need to see in a smartphone to stop you in your tracks where you're like
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look it, I wanna chuck this one in the garbage. That's the one for me. What's it gonna take

The TRUTH About Smartphones in 2018

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The TRUTH About Smartphones in 2018

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