Smartphones are getting more expensive but are they really overpriced?

I agree, but it's sad it had to come to that. To me it means they were like, "Let's just giving them more of the same because they're going to buy it regardless."

I guess you don't understand how inflation works or the cost of import tax, marketing, materials used, manufacturing, logistics or paying your workers. If businesses follow your rules, they would all be bankrupt after 1 month.

I guess you are the one behind in the business model, all of the marketing costs are cut out from taxes!

200 is including manufacturing, materials and costs that foxconn charges, and now Apple is slowly moving production to India which is cheaper!

Logistics/shipping, they pay per container not per device!

Considering I can wait 6 months and get the same flagship smartphone at 1/2 price, confirms they are overpriced.

I'm not for all the commie rants about excess profits and such. Considering they're all publicly traded companies the vast majority of the shareholder are the average person in mutual funds thru IRAs, 401Ks and such, I want them to do well so my portfolio does well.

That said, I think phones are overpriced and have been for a while. However, a phone (or anything else) is worth what people are willing to pay for it. If required people pay $1300 for the latest top end phone, and to do the same for each person in the family, they wouldn't go for it. $5200 to get a family of 4 phones. They'd tell you to pound sand. But charge that same family of 4 $144 a month for 3 years and people see that as much more reasonable.

Apple and Samsung are marketing geniuses. They've convinced people that they need these high end phones. Apple has convinced the nation's teens that they all need iPhones to the point that they're made fun of and called poor if they use any other device. Samsung's marketing is pretty much the same on the Android. I don't begrudge them making money off that and the profits that come with them. If people are willing to pay those kind of prices, why wouldn't you charge that? Charging less is leaving money on the table. And you'd know Motorola and the others would charge those prices if they could get them too.

I don't think even the "corporations bad, profits bad, greedy rich" people would sell something for less if they know they could get more.

Truth be told that the vast majority of people could buy a quality midrange phone from either Apple or Android and they wouldn't know the difference. As long as it doesn't lag or stutter, and it does what they need it to do, they'll be happy.

Most of what people care about, like iMessage balloon color, is software anyway. As long as the phone provides a good experience, the hardware matters a lot less.

I think the OP12 and their other flagships have generally been priced right, and their cheaper models still give a pretty good value without sacrificing too much. I think they hit the right price point. And even Samsung and Apple have some good value models that don't sacrifice much but are much better priced than their high end counterparts.

So for me, the bottom line is this: yes, phones in general are way overpriced. However, that is a function of marketing and what people are willing to pay. As long as people are willing to pay those prices they will keep charging them and increasing them.

Don't blame the companies, blame the people willing to pay those prices. We're a consumer driven society and as long as there's demand for something, someone will fill it and make money. The moment people stop paying them is the moment the prices drop.

Here is one way you could look at it.

Portable computers are more expensive than stationary ones. Making chips smaller makes manufacturing harder and thus drives up costs.

Even though laptop over the years have dropped significantly in price (except for Macs), in general they still cost more than a desktop configured with similar hardware capability. Even if a laptop and desktop use the exact same CPU and GPU, the laptop will tend to cost most.

Now you have to make the chips even smaller to fit into a portable device that fits in your pocket will also add to cost.

But when I compare today's Samsung Galaxy S24U to earlier Note devices I've bought in the past, other than faster SoC, faster ram and better camera sensors, nothing much else has changed about the device itself.

When you consider these phones are being sold in very large quantities, which should drive down costs; I think oems simply raised the price most because they see others do it.

Samsung for one should never have increased the price of the Note above $800. Today's Note doesn't do anything thr last Note devices did.

Qualcomm chips cost more than the exynos which surely creates costs. Programming software to support so many accessories, also brings some cost.

But to me today's Galaxy Ultra device should cost more than $999 at the most and that should come with 512GB of storage.

When you consider the removal of headphones which were cheap anf cheesy and only worth about $20 and the $10 charger, for phones to cost what they do now is frikkin crazy and is nothing more than greed.

Apple can do whatever because they have zero competition, but Samsung if they had kept the Galaxy S starting at rought $650/700 and the plus at $750/800 and the Ultra at $950/1099 tbey would still sell plenty volume to speed the price over.

But increase prices led to less sales and this less devices to spread the cost to make over.

When you consider it costs Samsung about $550 to make the Ultra, to sell it for $1300 when mist of the parts are manufactured by them is crazy.

Apple really gets parts cheap because they are 3rd party. 1st party parts will cost more do to having your own factories. But Apple charge 3x their cost is bithing more than greed and fleecing idiots.

At least Samsung fans have shown they don't like the costs. The S4 was the top selling S even at 70M and since then they have fallen all the way down to between 10-18M devices. This should be a wake up call to them but it isn't.

Well, only the components cost of most of the flagship phones are in the $450 range with the iPhone 15 Pro Max reaching to over $550. That’s before considering the cost of labor, shipping, packaging, taxes and everything else a manufacturer must pay to make a phone turn from an idea to a product for millions. So, no, the cost is definitely not $200, even if you firmly believe these companies don’t deserve to make any profit.

However, is $200 the value you get off of your smartphone?

You are calculating the cost of individual component of the shelf, not buying in bulk! That's a different price when buying in the thousands.

As stated before, after 6-8 months most of the flagships can be bought around 50-60% the original price! How do you explain that?

who is making $400 profit on midranged models?

I don't think they're overpriced as such, just overspecced.

I highly doubt even 10% of the people buying a flagship for status use anywhere near all the features.

I was going to get rid of my S22 Ultra recently, actually to sell and then "downgrade" to a Pixel 7a or similar. Downgrade as in get a new phone that's not quite flagship, but incrementally better all the same whilst being cheaper.

Its actually still worth about the cost of the 7a and, well, I just like it. So instead I have started making a point of finding stuff it's missing and so far all I can find is that the camera is no good for anything much more than point-click, just like all phones, and the audio codecs available are a bit dated (the latest is a qualcomm thing I think) but that just means earbuds are cheaper for a still-good pair as opposed to those supporting standards which again, the status chasers won't even care about.