> It's less screen and less battery than a laptop,

Phones have higher resolution, higher refresh rate, and brighter screens at the price point vs a $1000 laptop. (Also higher density screens are harder to make, 12" 1080p panels cost nothing, phone screens are often bespoke resolutions.)

RAM is the same or higher at the $1k price point - 16GB.

Fewer ports sure, but most ports are USB-C anyway, the cost of the connector is not the expensive part.

The mechanical design I'll push back on as well, phones are expected to put up with a lot more physical abuse than laptops, and also be resistant to dust and water. You can dunk a pixel phone in 3 feet of water for half an hour, good luck doing that with a laptop. As someone who got to watch the ME's sitting next to my team work on making our product water resistant, that process sucks, it takes multiple iterations ($, and time) and it is non-trivial to get right.

Tear downs of the Pixel 10 are obv not available yet, but the estimated BOM for a Pixel 9 is ~$400 USD. Figure ongoing support (7 years!), all the cloud services that come with it, and all the other costs that went into making it (the army of engineers, an entire OS team, all the apps that come with it, etc), the $800 I paid for it isn't half bad.

Edit: Oh and phones also have a modern miracle of an RF stack in them. My phone can hold onto a BT connection across my yard and through 2 brick walls! And they do this with barely any space to but the antennas. Meanwhile laptops can run antennas willy-nilly with the absurd amount of volume they have to work with.

(Apple's Laptops also have really good wireless performance, but the base models aren't trying to support the three generations of cellular protocols and standard that phones do.)

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goyagoji 5 days ago | parent [-]

The high resolution is a waste of money. The camera is a waste of money. The number of buttons is small. The issues like a hinge are non existant. The ability to pop out the battery is the kind of complicated thing I would expect from someone competent like a laptop maker.. The lack of Ram slots and now other slots is simplifying.

Really Apple made the game field very simple and its no problem making a perfectly good $50 phone. Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems. Basically forcing you to buy a "middle level" phone that has all the pointless features only a teenager has time/eyes for to get the minimum security updates.

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com2kid 5 days ago | parent [-]

> The camera is a waste of money.

Camera is the main selling point for new phones. It may not be for you, but for most customers, camera performance is the key differentiator.

Modern smartphone camera modules are incredibly high bandwidth. They are hooked up to custom chips that handle everything from video encoding to the massive amount of post-processing it takes to make those tiny sensors output high quality images. Up until the last few years, cameras were regularly held back by the media processing ICs available.

I suggest you look at teardowns of a modern high performance phone. The telephoto lens alone are marvels of engineering that involve a large number of high precision parts, all of which have to stand up to years of horrible abuse unlike anything real professional gear would ever see.

Camera features are pretty much the sole reason why people pay extra for higher end phones.

> Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems.

Google has spent years putting systems in place to allow for longer support periods, they had to write a bunch of abstraction layers first, hardware abstraction not being something Linux is exactly famous for.

Also those small low cost phone manufacturers don't offer lifetime support because they cannot afford to keep engineers and engineering resources around for 7+ years. Have you ever worked on a team trying to support multiple builds of old hardware that use completely different driver stacks? I have, it sucks. After a year people just forget how to even setup a dev environment for the previous version, test hardware breaks down or just gets lost, tooling gets out of date and doesn't work anymore (or has conflicts with newer tooling installed on a dev machine).

Apple can do it because apple controls the entire stack from top to bottom, and because they have an army of engineers devoted to just one thing. Your average Kickstarter Boutique Phone Company has maybe a dozen engineers and they have almost no control over the underlying platform.

> The high resolution is a waste of money.

Once resolutions and refresh rates get higher you can start to do things that make readability better for everyone, but even ignoring those techniques, higher refresh rates feel better, and a wider color gamut makes everything look better.

> The number of buttons is small.

Try making a button survive water, sweat, sun screen (which royally messes up a lot of finishes) and pocket lint some time. Also it has to feel good to press even through a protective case, and it needs to be durable over 5+ years. Again, I've been on teams doing these things, it is not easy. The big phone makers have been doing it for decades now, and they are good at it, but "we've solved it" is also why you don't see large changes in button layouts, shapes, materials, etc, now days.

To give an example of just a volume button - You need to setup a robotic test fixture that presses the button thousands upon thousands of times. This needs to run on each of your engineering revisions that comes in. You hopefully run it on a decent sample size of devices (ideally ones you've sent engineers overseas to pull off the lines directly to avoid the factory choosing golden samples!). Spray the device down with a variety of substances, test again, and you'll need lab managers and engineers to program and run all the different robotic harness tests.

Making quality durable goods is hard. Making a $200 smart phone that'll fall apart in a couple years is easy.

(Now even with all of this, I've had 3 Google made/branded phones that failed due to wide spread hardware issues....)

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goyagoji 5 days ago | parent [-]

You are trying to twist if to their favor that the market and not Google specifically is known for hardware problems, recalls and making a camera that 95% of people don't have any use for. What they have is control of Android which allowed them to cancel Android One to build a larger market for the pricing they want using pressure.

Look at what a marvel we can force them to buy for no reason! 80% of them have never made a video intentionally. A great marketing segment.

I had a cemetery of working phones and broken laptops all through past decades. I used laptops for longer than 3 years but I also didn't put them through the pressure a student would and could usually replace parts.

The phone industry is now an oligarchy and prices (and forced feature combinations) are up.

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com2kid 5 days ago | parent [-]

Google's phones are a minor bit player in the market. They have an estimated 4% of US market share. OnePlus was kicking their butts until OnePlus decided to destroy their entire value prop and also laid off their much beloved software team.

But if you want a mid priced phone, go ahead and buy one. A CMF 2 pro has 6 years of security updates, it costs $279.

> 80% of them have never made a video intentionally.

I find that hard to believe. Nearly everyone I know uses their phone cameras heavily. Maybe the stat is true in some strange sense, but 80% of high end premium phone buyers? People paying an extra $200 just for a telephoto lens are never using the camera? The high end is all about camera performance.

> I had a cemetery of working phones and broken laptops all through past decades. I used laptops for longer than 3 years but I also didn't put them through the pressure a student would and could usually replace parts.

I have everything from a Motorola Q9m to an unreleased Windows Mobile 7 (not phone 7!) to an army of LG, Motorola, and Nexus devices.

Phone hardware is generally shite. Or in the case of my OnePlus, their updates added so much of their own shit to a once pure OS, that I could barely use the phone anymore due to running out of RAM. Great job OnePlus, great job.

	▲	goyagoji 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Or in the case of my OnePlus, their updates added so much of their own shit to a once pure OS Same situation on preinstalled laptops and Android. You are complaining about Google in relation to Microsoft. Android One was a correction to how their system should work and it wouldn't help their goals to sell $100 phones that are secure, all an older adult would typically want, not particularly engaging for marketers, competing with their flagship phones for people who will pay and accept any quality in pointless toys. Even their own A series has been a problem for them since it covers what any reasonable person would want (in a flagship eliminating way). So let's restrict the charging bellow the lowest industry standards, etc.