Comment by charlie-83 5 days ago
Not that I'm trying to justify the prices, but I'm interested by the take that a phone should cost less than a computer. To me, the phone has an actual camera and is significantly smaller (and, if you are talking desktop, has a screen) so should cost more for the same sort of power. Of course, there are phones and computers at all different prices so it's hard to compare.
> It's smaller, so it should cost less
That is... not how the physical world works. The laws of physics hate the large and the small. Or perhaps less glibly parameters do not scale equally. Making a phone is more difficult and expensive than making a laptop for the same reason a 30ft tall human would break their own legs attempting to walk.
To put it another way: A thread rolling screw machine can churn out 12mm/0.5" bolts all day long for a penny each. But if you want to make tiny screws for small pocket watches you're going to pay more (relatively) even though that tiny screw contains way less metal than the larger bolt and the operation is similar. A .00001" error in the larger bolt threads doesn't matter. That much error makes the tiny screw completely unusable. Making a thread-forming die with less than .00001" error is very difficult and expensive and the one for smaller screws accumulates error faster relative to allowable error so must be replaced more often. The steel is just as hard in both bolts but the form of the tiny one is proportionally much thinner.
And similarly if you want a 6m/12ft long bolt you are going to pay a lot more than just the proportional cost of the extra metal because finding machines that can even put that much tool pressure on the dies is not easy. It has to be lifted with a crane. It is just more difficult in every way.
Miniaturization is more expensive. Water and dust proofing is more expensive.
For most things there is a sweet range where cost is lowest and utility highest. Prices go up on either end of that middle ground.
By this logic a Ferrari should cost less than a Toyota Camry because it has less seats and luggage space.
I.e. you’re conveniently leaving out the _entire_ set of reasons this isn’t the case.
As a side note, computers DO cost more than phones, in general. You can barely get a graphics card for that price these days, so you’re not really comparing apples to apples if your computer is that cheap.
> I.e. you’re conveniently leaving out the _entire_ set of reasons this isn’t the case.
Would you like to list those for the phone? I don't think your analogy is fair at all.
Well, considering I also made the point that computers range (very roughly, work with me here) from $500 - $3500 depending on how upmarket they are, and phones range from $100 - $1500 depending on how upmarket they are, I can’t make an argument for why they’re more expensive, because they’re not.
I can list a _few_ EXAMPLE reasons for why they cost what they cost though, even if that’s higher than you expect them to cost, but this list is by no means exhaustive so don’t attempt to break them apart detail by detail. Just get the essence of my opinion from these. There’s incredible engineering and design challenges in the competitive market of smart phones, typically making electronics smaller (such as the motherboard) makes them more expensive, not less. Their cameras on phones are FAR better than any on laptops, and my phone has 4 lenses where my laptop has 1. Camera lenses and sensors at the higher end are _expensive_ in a way a laptop keyboard component or other example is not. Phones support many features computers do not (like in the Ferrari example, Toyota corollas don’t have race mode), qi charging, 5G modem, touch screen (some laptops have this but many computers don’t), etc to name a few. Phones these days also tend to be waterproof in a way computers aren’t, another design challenge. The screens need to be way tougher to survive breakage, etc, etc, there’s just so many things that you have to design for in phones that you don’t for computers.
I hope that gives you some idea, and as a side note, it worries me slightly that some of these weren’t at least a little obvious to you. Or maybe they were, and you just wanted to hear my take, and I shouldn’t assume things so uncharitably. Either way, hope that helps.
While I mostly agree with you that it is counterintuitive to have mobile costlier than laptop, this year's Pixel Pro models have 16GB RAM. That is better than most entry level laptops on the market right now.
The Pro having more ram than the average entry level laptop doesn't imply very much.
When I search '16gb laptop' on Amazon the first result is $320 and the third result is $220. The first one also has 512GB of storage, and I can upgrade to 24GB of ram and 1TB of storage for only $50. And it has a plenty good CPU with two fast cores and four slow cores.
The upgrade part is especially nasty for phones. Laptops and phones use the same production lines for ram and flash chips, so no price excuses there. And you can fit 2TB into a microSD these days. But if I want 1TB on my Pixel I have to start with a Pro and then add an extra $450.
> 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.)
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.
> 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....)
Also Google stuff always lacks SD card slots and have tiny storage. The $250 Motorola can add a $50 1 TB SD Card, which is enough to fit your entire music collection, all of wikipedia, and an offline ad-free routable map of the world from OSM, and still have probably like 700 GB left over for photos/videos. Google meanwhile charges $100 for a 128 GB storage upgrade. Probably because they want to funnel you into their cloud storage, want you to use their online maps/music services, etc.
Phone cameras are also absolute trash anyway, and pulling up some comparisons in Google Photos right now, I'm fairly certain that my Pixel 6a takes obviously worse photos than my Nexus 5x did 10 years ago, even comparing high light for the 6a to low light for the 5x. I'll probably buy a Motorola when my current phone dies because the only ostensible reason to buy a Pixel is the camera. Or I suspect the real big-brained solution lives in the handheld gaming PC space.
It's smaller, so it should cost less, not more. It's 2025, miniaturization isn't that expensive. It's less screen and less battery than a laptop, cooling the CPU can be done passively because it's so low-powered, it has less RAM and less flash and fewer ports and a simpler mechanical design, no keyboard or touchpad... it's a slab of glass with a plastic/aluminum case containing a PCB, battery, and camera.
Written on my $250 Motorola