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The overall rate of growth declined, but from the article: "For the full year, smartphone sales increased 2.7 percent to 1.5 billion units" This really seems l
by michaelbuckbee 9y ago
The overall rate of growth declined, but from the article: "For the full year, smartphone sales increased 2.7 percent to 1.5 billion units"
This really seems like we're just hitting a saturation point in terms of physically putting these in people's hands. From that stat, we're talking about 20% of humans in the known universe getting a new smartphone in 2017. Some significant chunk of them probably handed their phone down to someone else (or sold it), some much smaller percentage went from a feature phone to a smartphone and a big chunk of people just held onto their current phone because it does what it needs to do and smartphones are becoming a mature market.
- WorldMaker 9y agoRelatedly, a lot of carrier-based phone subsidy systems seem to have expired in the last couple of years. At this point, consumers are (mostly) bearing the full brunt of direct device cost, and a lot more consumers are taking market costs into account with replacement timing. The 1-2 year replacement era seems to be at its end, and I think we're likely looking at a time where people replace phones more in line with desktop/laptop purchase cycles.