The Death of the Affordable Flagship Phone

Before getting started, I have to make it clear that I am not an Apple fanboy. My daily driver is a Galaxy S10+ and I’ve been using Android for almost my entire life now. It’s kind of sad that I have to clarify this, but because of the ongoing war between furious fans defending their purchase decision this article probably makes a lot of people angry just by the title.

However, not even the most convinced fan can deny that the smartphone market has changed significantly over the last couple of years. Searching for the best possible phone because you are a smartphone enthusiast? Well, better be prepared to pay 1250€ for the iPhone 11 Pro Max with a mere 64Gb of storage, or 1420€ for the 256Gb variant. However, this is Apple and you can expect them to charge ridiculous prices for their products… so get a Samsung, right? Not exactly. For the recently released Galaxy S20 Ultra, the south Korean Giant will charge you 1350€, or 1550€ if you pick the 512Gb variant. But how did it come to all this; you might wonder. How can a slap of glass possibly be so valuable? To find out, let’s have a look at the market four years ago.

2016 was the year the iPhone 7 was released, and it was rightfully criticized for being too expensive while lacking essential features over the Android competition. The iPhone 7 started at 870€ (or 1009€ for the iPhone 7+) when opting for a sensible 128Gb of storage, and Apple somehow justified this price with a better Design and longevity, since the iPhone had a more capable processor and software support for five years. The purchase decision was a lot easier in general back than: If you wanted a feature-packed smartphone wireless charging, a headphone jack, expandable storage and a curved AMOLED-Display that was miles ahead of the competition, you would get a Galaxy S7 edge. It would have a bloated software, yes, but all those features that it had over the iPhone actually mattered to one audience or another, and it wouldn’t be very hard to justify saving 210€ over the iPhone 7+ by buying the Samsung. Or, you could miss out on all these exclusive features, and get an iPhone-like device with a metal unibody running Android and pay 480€ for a OnePlus 3T.

The real point is, people were complaining about the price of the iPhone, because they had a number of legitimate options that could do just as much, or more, while paying a lower price. However, if a person from four years ago found themselves upgrading to a device from today, they would be surprised how little difference they would feel: The exclusive Samsung features like wireless charging or water resistance would now be adopted by every flagship phone, some being able to reversely charge other devices. In a need for always-larger displays (with the same AMOLED technology and resolution from years ago), new biometric authentication methods like ultrasonic fingerprint readers would have to be invented. The phones are marginally snappier, have a little better battery life and are a lot more fragile because curved glass is now used on all sides of the device. Nice creature comforts, but how could a company like Samsung possibly justify charging 70% more for them, while the evolution of technology further helps them to reduce production cost?

The answer across all devices over the last two years has been the camera. And while it is undeniable that phone cameras have improved dramatically over the last four years, it still seems like manufacturers run out of ideas what to add to their flagships year after year, and the camera is the only solution to that. As a matter of fact, the average consumer simply doesn’t see any benefit in upgrading their phone every two years, because most Android versions are getting updated frequently and the chips in all phones are now so powerful that we aren’t able to tell the difference between a phone from now or two years ago. The easiest way to show how great your camera system is has been to simply add more cameras instead of improving the quality of the lenses (a method most frequently used by Chinese manufacturers). While the iPhone 7+ had to Cameras (one main sensor and one telephoto lens for better zoom shots), it is now common to find up to four cameras even in budget devices around the 300-400€ range. In my opinion, a triple camera setup like it can be found on my S10+ or the iPhone 11 Pro makes the most sense, and any additional cameras are just useless. It consists of an Ultra-wide-angle, a normal, and a telephoto sensor, and while the price of the S10+ is still hard to justify (especially since here in Europe it first only launched with 512Gb of internal storage, costing a whooping 1250€), this camera setup gives people a lot of flexibility in getting the right shot they want.

Sadly, instead of trying to improve the quality of such a triple-camera setup, a setup has established over the last year: The typical camera now normally consists of a (fairly crappy) 8MP ultra-wide-angle, an unusable 2MP Macro lens and a 2MP “depth sensor”, which is supposed to improve portrait quality but in reality does nothing at all. I mean what? It’s 2020 and two of the four cameras come with a resolution that was used on phones ten years ago, and one of the only useful cameras, the telephoto lens which has been around since 2016 gets kicked out completely?

Speaking of resolution, these cost saving steps have been taken so that the manufacturers can afford one of the immensely overpriced ultra-high-resolution camera sensors for the main camera. There are currently models available with 48, 64 and 108 megapixels, the next big marketing number that is used to advocate the camera system. This whole setup is built so manufacturers can say they have a “revolutionary 64-MP quad camera system”, which in reality takes worse pictures than my S10+ from over a year ago (with a 12MP camera). Probably the funniest aspect about these high-resolution sensors is that pixels have to be “binned” together to form a 12MP image in the end, because they often produce way too dark images with a lack of dynamic range when used at their native resolution.

Devices like the S20 Ultra with its huge 108MP sensor have shown, that today software really is the key for getting better images. The iPhone 11 Pro and the Google Pixel 4 from last year are still the best overall phones for photography, the only area where Android manufacturers are still able to “innovate”, and this is purely because of software. If manufacturers really wanted to give customers a reason to upgrade, they would have to put a lot of effort and R&D into improving their software, rather than buying the same off-the-shelf components from other manufacturers over and over again and packing them together in a phone. Instead, one of the most affordable flagships of 2020, the Xiaomi Mi 10 is listed with exactly the same camera setup I described above for 900€, missing features like water resistance that the S7 edge had four years ago.

Sure, Apple raised the price of the iPhone as well, and of course their main selling point too has become the camera. But not even Apple would have been able to market a phone that starts at 1250€ if there was an alternative at almost a third of a price. The problem of the Android manufacturers is, that most of them either have spent all their efforts in creating gimmicks to differentiate themselves (Sony, LG, HTC, Google) or that they are just buying components built by other manufacturers and stick them together. The problem with the former method in the long term is that every company in the supply chain wants to make money, even forcing some manufacturers to bring out trash products for 900€. The Android community has made the wrong investments over the last years, and we, the customers have to stop buying their products for them to see it.

At this point, all we can do is to hope that Apple doesn’t raise their prices further, because like this the other phone brands can’t either. As crazy as it sounds, at the current prices Apples line-up is one of the most competitive on the market (which is a sad thing, considering the phones cost them a third of the price to make). The new iPhone SE is incredibly good value, with it’s A13 chip (at least as good as anything Android has to offer) probably lasting more than five years at “just” 480€. And for 850€, the iPhone 11 surely is a better buy than the Mi 10. If you want the best phone, you will have to buy an iPhone 11 Pro Max, which beats the overpriced S20 Ultra in Performance, Battery life and Camera. Honestly, the only Android phone I could recommend to a friend at this point is the new OnePlus 8 Pro, which can compete quite well with the iPhone 11 Pro Max, has by far the best Android skin and is 350€ cheaper. That said, I wouldn’t be so sure that OnePlus doesn’t go the same path as Samsung and within two years we will probably see the “OnePlus 10 Ultra” with an “all new” camera system for 1400€. Of course, many will point out that one doesn’t need a flagship phone and that a 300€ Galaxy A51 is sufficient for most users. However, that phone has a chip about four times weaker than a flagship, and hence might only last for the next 1-2 years, which is precisely what Samsung is counting on. Therefore, if you can’t afford the newest flagship you are better off with an old flagship in 99% of the cases.

For the record, I really don’t blame companies for running out of ideas on how to improve our phones. They’ve come a long way in the last 13 years and have been perfected in that time. I still remember unboxing the S10+ and thinking “wow, this phone is perfect. What could they possibly invent to make it better?” Well, as it turns out I have been right so far, because there hasn’t been any new gimmick that has convinced me to switch. If the only thing manufacturers can improve is to have a faster processor and more storage every year, I’m fine with that. But then please bring that same phone back for 400€ instead of 1400€ every year and spend your resources on developing the next revolutionary formfactor like foldable phones.