The Downfall of Affordable Smartphones

[Kyle Crane]

3 Years ago i bought my mom a Realme GT Neo 3T (128gb UFS 3.1, 8GB LPDDR4x, Snapdragon 870, 120Hz Amoled) All of this for just 20,118Rs

Cut to 2026 and the phone market is in absolute hell. I wanted to get her a new phone now and options i have is just a straight up downgrade.

90% of the phones for 20k sold today include (unless some random brand i have never heard of)
1. UFS 2 or UFS 2.1 for storage
2. 6GB or worse 4GB ram option
3. LCD screens
4. tear drop screens
5. weak processor

Example of phones currently sold around 20,000INR

Such a sad state of this industry. The RAM Cartel really hated everything getting cheap and now prices are back to 2016 or 2011 levels i guess

 

[_rajat]

Pray for the AI bubble to burst soon, that is the only hope left. Otherwise we have to accept the current prices which will increase more in the coming future.
Leave 20k, I couldn't even find a decent phone under 35k which I can recommend to my family and friends. Pixel is the only choice with decent hardware and extremely good software but prices have skyrocketed. Brands like Nothing and Motorola which were supposed to have "clean" OS have started adding bloatware with software updates. GeekyRanjit made a video about this recently.
Given the current state of tech industry, it's best to use the current device till its end of life and buy new only when the current one completely stops working.

 

[Kyle Crane]

AI bubble probably wont burst

Notice how the talks of bubble bursting has reduced significantly

 

[_rajat]

I guess it will plateau pretty soon. There is a lot of funding and will be there for the next 2 years, after that things might go down depending on model intelligence. Currently there are no significant improvements in subsequent models from anthropic, google or OpenAI.
Most of the hype is around tooling and harness which will die out eventually as the models become more capable.

 

[Kyle Crane]

man imagine 2gb ram smartphones making a comeback

 

[Sushubh]

google would have to redevelop android go for that to happen.

 

[_rajat]

Before 2020, apps and OS used to be lighter on storage and RAM yet so functional and bug free. Now they are huge and full of glitches. Web/App development peaked somewhere in 2016-2017 when react was widely adapted, after that it's downhill.

Imagine having 12GB of RAM just to load AI trash on phone that is not even optimised for good UX.

I miss the tight integration and bug free experience that I had while using software before covid. Most of the AI powered stuff that OS and apps bundle these days are of no use to me and they just keep shoving it in every update.

 

[Kyle Crane]

@_rajat this reminds me when i was using an iPhone 7 from Dec 2019 till Oct 2022 and besides battery issues the software experience itself was really smooth actually. Not to mention iPhone 7 had a 2016 processor + 2GB ram

iOS 13/14 and 15 (last iOS update) pretty much all of them had no performance issues

After that i upgraded to iPhone 11 and that worked pretty well on the software side but bugs started appearing with iOS 16 (as it had tons of customization options)

eventually with iOS 18 it got more bugs due to more features never seen on iOS and lastly the worst performing version ie iOS 26.

My current 15Plus has 6gb ram but the software experience is terrible IMO, Apps dying in the back for no reason or random stutters while scrolling through menus.