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I've been using the budget Moto G+ line for the past four years. I can upgrade my phone every year around Black Friday and get the latest model for sub $200. Th

I've been using the budget Moto G+ line for the past four years. I can upgrade my phone every year around Black Friday and get the latest model for sub $200. The older phones still work well and get handed down to my less tech savvy family members. I'm not really sure what people are paying for when they get those $800+ beasts for phones. When I use a friend's I can tell they are higher quality; either they feel more fancy or load apps more quickly. But it's marginal like the difference between a workstation and a gaming PC. I think more people should try out budget Android lines. One really nice benefit is they only contain the technologies that have proved themselves. This article focuses on headphone jacks but there's quite a lot of silly phone tech that comes and goes in the name of marketing showmanship.

feikname 7y ago
I use the moto G line myself and the only thing I am dissatisfied about is Motorola's constant refusal to make use of it's 64bit hardware, forcing the OS to run in 32-bit mode. Some games (Pokemon Masters for example) are simply unavailable because of this, and Google has already deprecated 32bit native code.
- SteveMoody73 7y ago
  I've been on the Moto G range for a couple of yeras now. I don't know if it's running on 32 bit or not as i don't use the phone for much more than messaging, browsing and some light gaming. As a budget phone i can't recommend the range enough. Been some solid phone and never had any issues with them
- abacadaba 7y ago
  Never noticed. Loyal Moto g due to chop for flashlight and minimal crapware. Headphone jack has failed on last on a d starting to on this one though.
hammock 7y ago
Pixel camera is pretty amazing/magical. How is the camera app on the Moto G+?
- bjoli 7y ago
  G6 plus' camera is not one of its selling points. It is OK for the price range, but not more than that. Older iPhones (as in iPhone 6) are better. Edit: but the camera on g7 is apparently better.
- tablethnuser 7y ago
  I've probably taken under 50 photos this year so I am not a good reference point for camera features. I haven't been disappointed with the photos but I also probably have no idea what I'm missing.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    You've taken about 10 times more than I!
- axaxs 7y ago
  The app itself is really nice. The pictures though, are not great. Don't expect anything close a pixel.
- mceachen 7y ago
  The G7 camera and app are serviceable. It's on par with my iPhone SE in speed, and bests it in low light. It has a reasonable portrait mode with effective background blur. In good lighting, landscape shots are indiscernible with my pixel 2. It doesn't have the magical night shot mode that the pixels have, though.
- DanTheManPR 7y ago
  The G series continues to have mediocre cameras. They have to make some sacrifices to deliver such a good value.
ebiester 7y ago
My apple phones have consistently been good for 3-4 years, making the yearly outlay similar. The differences aren't in the CPU features but rather the screen and camera features. The high end apple phone from two years ago still has a better screen than the budget android today and the camera is probably better as well - perhaps equal at worst. No, I don't have a headphone jack (and yes, it is annoying) but it isn't the only tradeoff. (For example, being left handed, my palm triggers the back button on many android phones when I reach for something on the screen.)
- Numberwang 7y ago
  Changing phone every year is kind of crazy though, so I'm not sure you are comparing with a normal user. I change maybe every five years. Always on the low end models and happy to do so.
- tablethnuser 7y ago
  I may revisit Apple devices once they're done with their headphone jack fiasco. I like their recent privacy focus. I had used them in the past and even tried to take them into their third and fourth years, but they felt sluggish and had more and more app crashes as I fell behind the adoption curve. At their price point I'm absolutely expecting a 4+ year lifespan. I think Apple has a different vision though and is aiming a little more upmarket than where I am.
  - jvagner 7y ago
    Not sure what you mean. Headphone jacks are never coming back to Apple devices, but Apple’s improvement of performance for older models has gotten better. iOS 13 will significantly benefit devices going back quite a few models. Latter stage CPUs in iOS devices hold up better than they tended to 5 years ago. I have an iPhone 8 in my house that gets used every day. Not a struggle.. I do remember when a 2 year old iPhone would feel crippingly slow around the time a new model was released. Not the experience these days.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    Apple is well known for removing things: floppy drives, optical drives, serviceable storage and RAM, serviceable batteries, F-key rows, FireWire ports, Ethernet ports, MagSafe, USB-A ports, matte-finish displays, etc. There’s always dissent. Yet they never reverse course.
interfixus 7y ago
Absolutely concur. And I'm only on a G6, a standard one I picked up some months ago at a clearance sale for ~nothing because Android was getting absurdly cranky about hardware limitations on my old phone. No idea why I would want a heftier model.
frgotmylogin 7y ago
I love sticking with budget phones, you can take risks on trying different manufacturers. My last two phones were a Nokia and a Xiaomi, both were good phones and I never would have tried them if they weren't ~$180.
ineedasername 7y ago
I generally go for the prior model flagship, which with some careful shopping can often be found for 30-40% of the original price. For example my current phone is a pixel 2xl I got for about $260. It's significantly better than newer budget models but for roughly the same price. I should note that this price decline is much less significant for iPhones though.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  IMO this is the best of both worlds. After Samsung released the S9 I was able to get my S8 for something like $250. And since it used to be a flagship I get a lot of the bells and whistles that budget phones often lack (water resistance, SD card slot, wireless charging, NFC, MST, good camera, etc).
wilsonnb3 7y ago
The biggest difference between budget and flagship is the camera, which is very important to a lot of people. There are a lot of people on hacker news (myself included) who hardly ever use their phone cameras and tend to forget that this is such a critical feature to so many people. My personal reason for using flagship devices is simply because I use my phone an absurd amount. If you're using something for hours every day, marginal speed and quality of life improvements add up.
- phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
  I'm on a second-hand Oneplus One, and I use it for a TOTP client and Firefox. The camera sucks. It's much worse than the Epson digital camera I bought 18 years ago. That said, it suits my uses absurdly well. I have no reason to replace it.
- davchana 7y ago
  Well I used $200 Honor 7 for 3 years, most of the regular non vacation days I didn't carry my Canon Canera, but used Honor phone camera only. Then because of battery degradation, I bought $200 RealMe Pro 2, again using its camera & phone for a year now. Saw an ad for UMIDIGI S3 Pro for $249 with NFC on Amazon, but camera is literally shit, with photos having water drop patches, so returned it.
  - hakfoo 7y ago
    Gotta say, that's been Umidigi's one weak point. I've got a F1 Play which hits most of my buttons-- cavernous battery, Micro-SD and 3.5mm sockets, and USB-C, but the camera has a distinct "We set the focus at one specific point about 2 metres away and nothing else is ever going to be sharp" compromise. I've tried Open Camera to no avail; perhaps it needs some sort of manual aperture control.
    - davchana 7y ago
      Yes, true that. I also used Open Camera too, focus was fine only if I breath in before pressing the shutter. Even then, there were marks on photo like wet water drops on a piece of paper.
lawn 7y ago
I've been using a G4 Play since... I can't remember. Many years ago. And now it's time to upgrade again, but I also don't see the reason to go for a high-end phone. With one exception: the software. I want updates as long as possible and I want no crapware, so I'm thinking a pure Android or something as close to it as possible.
- saltcured 7y ago
  I used a G4 Play for almost 3 years but got uncomfortable about the lack of further system updates. I am happy with a G7 Play now, which seems to have better radio and GPS performance and similar battery life. Prior to the G4 Play, I used pricier mid-range phones in the Nexus price bracket. I can see myself continuing with the Moto G Play series, if they don't mess them up. However, I won't replace them annually. I expect I'll similarly drag it out and skip a couple generations until lack of updates make me uncomfortable again, unless I drop it/break it first...
JohnFen 7y ago
> I think more people should try out budget Android lines. If I were willing to stay in the Android ecosystem, this is what I'd do. But I'm not (nor am I willing to go with iOS). It's just become too difficult, painful, and uncertain to secure them anymore. Instead, when I need to replace my current (ancient) smartphone, I'm falling back to a feature phone combined with carrying a pocket computer that just runs plain old Linux.
- Lio 7y ago
  I’d do the same or move to something like a Librem 5 except that my iphone is a useful platform for lots of little proprietary utility software. Eg Shimano have a utility for updating the firmware on my bike (oh what a time to be alive...) they have software for doing that from Linux. Keeping an old older iPhone around just to cover that is useful. Not sure what I’ll do when it dies or looses support.
chaostheory 7y ago
> I'm not really sure what people are paying for when they get those $800+ beasts for phones. The main reason for us is the camera. We do not own a separate standalone camera anymore. You're not going to be able to take a time machine to take better pictures of the past, which is also why we keep replacing our phones every year. Also I prefer Apple's walled garden especially for the less tech savvy members of my extended family. Tech support is much easier when you can point them to the Apple Store for one to one help and even free classes. Few people ever take into account Apple's physical stores when accounting for the price.
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >The main reason for us is the camera. We do not own a separate standalone camera anymore. The next question then, is: how good of a camera does the average person need? I'd fathom the vast majority of people viewing pictures are rapidly flipping through them on some app like Instagram. How much difference does the latest camera make for the average user, really?
  - tln 7y ago
    For low light situations, the latest phones can make a big difference over a budget phone like Moto G6. Faster photo taking, better stabilization, do make a difference when taking anything moving. FWIW I used Moto's for a couple of years and really like them. I used to get my wife's iphone for picture taking but now my pixel 2 is all I need.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      It's actually getting to the point where they are competitive with DLSRs in some situations. The processing really is doing some pretty amazing things.
  - baddox 7y ago
    It's unnecessarily tricky to talk about what an average person "needs." It's pretty tough to justify any cell phone features as a "need" except perhaps for emergency phone calls (and yet, 20 years ago it seems most people didn't "need" that either). High-end phone cameras are just really really nice, and they do tend to receive regular improvements that are noticeable to people who are interested in photography or just pay close attention. In 2006 I paid $325 for a Canon PowerShot SD870 IS that was pretty nice at the time, and almost any photo I took on that camera would look noticeably bad today compared to flagship smartphone cameras.
moftz 7y ago
I used to get the flagship phones just simply because I could. My parents were still footing the bill so it was never a problem. Turns out I don't really use that many resources on my phone. I browse reddit, take the occasional pic, watch youtube, and maybe play low resource games maybe once a week. My phone is 95% an internet machine. It also turns out flagship phones are expensive as hell when you are buying it yourself. I bought myself a $250 moto g7 power. My Nexus 6p broke at an inopportune time and a flagship wasn't going to fit my budget. It doesn't play 1080p video but the different is almost negligible on a small screen. The camera is decent and internet resources load just as quick as anything else. The massive battery is a really nice feature and will definitely be something I will put on my need list for when I'm looking for my next phone.
phreack 7y ago
My daily driver for years has been a Moto Z Play gen 1, with a battery mod. It's robust as hell, I have literally never had the battery run out, and I can go two days or sometimes three if I'm being careful without doing a full charge which is pretty much my top concern on phones. It has a good enough camera for my needs and a headphone jack. When it's time to change, I'm totally staying on this line.
IkmoIkmo 7y ago
Great points, although I would want to add a bit of nuance from my personal experience. One thing that often gets overlooked in pricing is depreciation. Flagship models tend to keep their value quite well, whereas budget models depreciate to next to nothing. Take the iPhone X, launched 2 years ago, used it's around $570 today, versus the $999 it launched at. Meanwhile, a $300 phone tends to drop down to $100 on the 2nd hand market two years later. It just doesn't hold value very well, for one because budget phones become so much better, and secondly because there's no marketing or natural demand for 2 year old budget phones, and stores themselves discount 1st hand versions of these phones to extreme extents 2 years later. Who here is googling to get a good deal on a second-hand Moto G5? A $300 phone 2.5yo phone that's $50 used today, and $150 new. So after depreciation, the difference between a $1000 flagship and a $300 budget model isn't $700, rather it's the cost of depreciation $430 vs $200 (or $230 more). That $220 isn't nothing, but it's $9.50 a month on a 2-year basis. If you compare that to say a Netflix account, a data plan, cloud storage subscription, Spotify, or two Starbucks coffees a month... $9.50 a month extra to carry a flagship phone is pretty doable for most people. And you get a top-notch flagship phone. Not saying everyone should skip budget phones, but it's not as painful a financial decision as it may seem.
- klodolph 7y ago
  I do think it would be nice to see this kind of accounting taught in high schools.
  - lazyguy2 7y ago
    I could imagine: Oh, shit.. I have "How to trick yourself into thinking overpriced prestige consumer goods are worth it: 101" with Mr. Conner. That guy is a pervert.
- secfirstmd 7y ago
  Also let's not forget security updates in relation to Android phones...A two year old phone today, two years down the line may well not be receiving them
Kiro 7y ago
I always buy budget Android phones the problem for me is the longevity. They simply start having lots of issues (both hardware and software) very fast. I haven't had a phone that has lasted more than a year.
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
My strategy is similar to yours and I buy a $400 phone every 2 years. In 2017 I got an LG G5, which served me well. This year I got a Google Pixel 3A, which has also been great. I tried phones in the $200 range, but the user experience wasn't quite as pleasant as I cared for.
eyegor 7y ago
> I'm not really sure what people are paying for when they get those $800+ beasts for phones As someone with a painfully expensive phone, for me it was mostly down to the combination: 1) full radio support for us carriers (which also pulls along a decent chunk of europe gsm), 2) SD card support, 3) a headphone jack, 4) some level of waterproofing, 5) enough popularity that I expect to be able to root and install patches once it stops getting official patches. In that order. That list narrowed me down to a very tiny selection of phones. Edit: There are now many more options (and cheaper) than when I bought my phone. :sadface:
RobertKerans 7y ago
Echoing sibling comments: camera, camera, camera. Anecdata as to whether it's really necessary to have a very good camera backed by powerful hard/software -- for me personally, camera quality became my #1 priority after having a baby, & exact same with everyone I know in similar position. But regardless of whether they have family or not, peeps seem to like being able to take good looking photos and videos, and the current manufacturer war over cameras means if you can afford to spend a bit more then the market is fantastic. Edit: also, acquisition of powerful status symbols via a monthly fee that is only slightly higher than the monthly fee for less powerful status symbols.
agumonkey 7y ago
I bought a few moto g since 1st gen. My moto G3 is still operating fine even after years of mild abuse (regular tiny drops, sometimes high drops, sand beaches, heat). Very high build quality considering the price even brand new. I even bought a 2nd hand G5+ because I thought the G3 was about to die.. but it didn't. I wonder if the 4, 5, 6 .. are as sturdy.
jessewmc 7y ago
I'm paying for a phone that lasts 4-5 years (I'm on my 3rd iphone since the original, probably not going to buy another this year) and is still way nicer to use than a moto g (which is admittedly a great budget phone).

feikname 7y ago

I use the moto G line myself and the only thing I am dissatisfied about is Motorola's constant refusal to make use of it's 64bit hardware, forcing the OS to run in 32-bit mode. Some games (Pokemon Masters for example) are simply unavailable because of this, and Google has already deprecated 32bit native code.

SteveMoody73 7y ago
I've been on the Moto G range for a couple of yeras now. I don't know if it's running on 32 bit or not as i don't use the phone for much more than messaging, browsing and some light gaming. As a budget phone i can't recommend the range enough. Been some solid phone and never had any issues with them
abacadaba 7y ago
Never noticed. Loyal Moto g due to chop for flashlight and minimal crapware. Headphone jack has failed on last on a d starting to on this one though.

hammock 7y ago

Pixel camera is pretty amazing/magical. How is the camera app on the Moto G+?

bjoli 7y ago
G6 plus' camera is not one of its selling points. It is OK for the price range, but not more than that. Older iPhones (as in iPhone 6) are better. Edit: but the camera on g7 is apparently better.
tablethnuser 7y ago
I've probably taken under 50 photos this year so I am not a good reference point for camera features. I haven't been disappointed with the photos but I also probably have no idea what I'm missing.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  You've taken about 10 times more than I!
axaxs 7y ago
The app itself is really nice. The pictures though, are not great. Don't expect anything close a pixel.
mceachen 7y ago
The G7 camera and app are serviceable. It's on par with my iPhone SE in speed, and bests it in low light. It has a reasonable portrait mode with effective background blur. In good lighting, landscape shots are indiscernible with my pixel 2. It doesn't have the magical night shot mode that the pixels have, though.
DanTheManPR 7y ago
The G series continues to have mediocre cameras. They have to make some sacrifices to deliver such a good value.

ebiester 7y ago

My apple phones have consistently been good for 3-4 years, making the yearly outlay similar. The differences aren't in the CPU features but rather the screen and camera features. The high end apple phone from two years ago still has a better screen than the budget android today and the camera is probably better as well - perhaps equal at worst. No, I don't have a headphone jack (and yes, it is annoying) but it isn't the only tradeoff. (For example, being left handed, my palm triggers the back button on many android phones when I reach for something on the screen.)

Numberwang 7y ago
Changing phone every year is kind of crazy though, so I'm not sure you are comparing with a normal user. I change maybe every five years. Always on the low end models and happy to do so.
tablethnuser 7y ago
I may revisit Apple devices once they're done with their headphone jack fiasco. I like their recent privacy focus. I had used them in the past and even tried to take them into their third and fourth years, but they felt sluggish and had more and more app crashes as I fell behind the adoption curve. At their price point I'm absolutely expecting a 4+ year lifespan. I think Apple has a different vision though and is aiming a little more upmarket than where I am.
- jvagner 7y ago
  Not sure what you mean. Headphone jacks are never coming back to Apple devices, but Apple’s improvement of performance for older models has gotten better. iOS 13 will significantly benefit devices going back quite a few models. Latter stage CPUs in iOS devices hold up better than they tended to 5 years ago. I have an iPhone 8 in my house that gets used every day. Not a struggle.. I do remember when a 2 year old iPhone would feel crippingly slow around the time a new model was released. Not the experience these days.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  Apple is well known for removing things: floppy drives, optical drives, serviceable storage and RAM, serviceable batteries, F-key rows, FireWire ports, Ethernet ports, MagSafe, USB-A ports, matte-finish displays, etc. There’s always dissent. Yet they never reverse course.

interfixus 7y ago

Absolutely concur. And I'm only on a G6, a standard one I picked up some months ago at a clearance sale for ~nothing because Android was getting absurdly cranky about hardware limitations on my old phone. No idea why I would want a heftier model.

frgotmylogin 7y ago

I love sticking with budget phones, you can take risks on trying different manufacturers. My last two phones were a Nokia and a Xiaomi, both were good phones and I never would have tried them if they weren't ~$180.

ineedasername 7y ago

I generally go for the prior model flagship, which with some careful shopping can often be found for 30-40% of the original price. For example my current phone is a pixel 2xl I got for about $260. It's significantly better than newer budget models but for roughly the same price. I should note that this price decline is much less significant for iPhones though.

Rebelgecko 7y ago
IMO this is the best of both worlds. After Samsung released the S9 I was able to get my S8 for something like $250. And since it used to be a flagship I get a lot of the bells and whistles that budget phones often lack (water resistance, SD card slot, wireless charging, NFC, MST, good camera, etc).

wilsonnb3 7y ago

The biggest difference between budget and flagship is the camera, which is very important to a lot of people. There are a lot of people on hacker news (myself included) who hardly ever use their phone cameras and tend to forget that this is such a critical feature to so many people. My personal reason for using flagship devices is simply because I use my phone an absurd amount. If you're using something for hours every day, marginal speed and quality of life improvements add up.

phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
I'm on a second-hand Oneplus One, and I use it for a TOTP client and Firefox. The camera sucks. It's much worse than the Epson digital camera I bought 18 years ago. That said, it suits my uses absurdly well. I have no reason to replace it.
davchana 7y ago
Well I used $200 Honor 7 for 3 years, most of the regular non vacation days I didn't carry my Canon Canera, but used Honor phone camera only. Then because of battery degradation, I bought $200 RealMe Pro 2, again using its camera & phone for a year now. Saw an ad for UMIDIGI S3 Pro for $249 with NFC on Amazon, but camera is literally shit, with photos having water drop patches, so returned it.
- hakfoo 7y ago
  Gotta say, that's been Umidigi's one weak point. I've got a F1 Play which hits most of my buttons-- cavernous battery, Micro-SD and 3.5mm sockets, and USB-C, but the camera has a distinct "We set the focus at one specific point about 2 metres away and nothing else is ever going to be sharp" compromise. I've tried Open Camera to no avail; perhaps it needs some sort of manual aperture control.
  - davchana 7y ago
    Yes, true that. I also used Open Camera too, focus was fine only if I breath in before pressing the shutter. Even then, there were marks on photo like wet water drops on a piece of paper.

lawn 7y ago

I've been using a G4 Play since... I can't remember. Many years ago. And now it's time to upgrade again, but I also don't see the reason to go for a high-end phone. With one exception: the software. I want updates as long as possible and I want no crapware, so I'm thinking a pure Android or something as close to it as possible.

saltcured 7y ago
I used a G4 Play for almost 3 years but got uncomfortable about the lack of further system updates. I am happy with a G7 Play now, which seems to have better radio and GPS performance and similar battery life. Prior to the G4 Play, I used pricier mid-range phones in the Nexus price bracket. I can see myself continuing with the Moto G Play series, if they don't mess them up. However, I won't replace them annually. I expect I'll similarly drag it out and skip a couple generations until lack of updates make me uncomfortable again, unless I drop it/break it first...

JohnFen 7y ago

> I think more people should try out budget Android lines. If I were willing to stay in the Android ecosystem, this is what I'd do. But I'm not (nor am I willing to go with iOS). It's just become too difficult, painful, and uncertain to secure them anymore. Instead, when I need to replace my current (ancient) smartphone, I'm falling back to a feature phone combined with carrying a pocket computer that just runs plain old Linux.

Lio 7y ago
I’d do the same or move to something like a Librem 5 except that my iphone is a useful platform for lots of little proprietary utility software. Eg Shimano have a utility for updating the firmware on my bike (oh what a time to be alive...) they have software for doing that from Linux. Keeping an old older iPhone around just to cover that is useful. Not sure what I’ll do when it dies or looses support.

chaostheory 7y ago

> I'm not really sure what people are paying for when they get those $800+ beasts for phones. The main reason for us is the camera. We do not own a separate standalone camera anymore. You're not going to be able to take a time machine to take better pictures of the past, which is also why we keep replacing our phones every year. Also I prefer Apple's walled garden especially for the less tech savvy members of my extended family. Tech support is much easier when you can point them to the Apple Store for one to one help and even free classes. Few people ever take into account Apple's physical stores when accounting for the price.

navigatesol 7y ago
>The main reason for us is the camera. We do not own a separate standalone camera anymore. The next question then, is: how good of a camera does the average person need? I'd fathom the vast majority of people viewing pictures are rapidly flipping through them on some app like Instagram. How much difference does the latest camera make for the average user, really?
- tln 7y ago
  For low light situations, the latest phones can make a big difference over a budget phone like Moto G6. Faster photo taking, better stabilization, do make a difference when taking anything moving. FWIW I used Moto's for a couple of years and really like them. I used to get my wife's iphone for picture taking but now my pixel 2 is all I need.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    It's actually getting to the point where they are competitive with DLSRs in some situations. The processing really is doing some pretty amazing things.
- baddox 7y ago
  It's unnecessarily tricky to talk about what an average person "needs." It's pretty tough to justify any cell phone features as a "need" except perhaps for emergency phone calls (and yet, 20 years ago it seems most people didn't "need" that either). High-end phone cameras are just really really nice, and they do tend to receive regular improvements that are noticeable to people who are interested in photography or just pay close attention. In 2006 I paid $325 for a Canon PowerShot SD870 IS that was pretty nice at the time, and almost any photo I took on that camera would look noticeably bad today compared to flagship smartphone cameras.

moftz 7y ago

I used to get the flagship phones just simply because I could. My parents were still footing the bill so it was never a problem. Turns out I don't really use that many resources on my phone. I browse reddit, take the occasional pic, watch youtube, and maybe play low resource games maybe once a week. My phone is 95% an internet machine. It also turns out flagship phones are expensive as hell when you are buying it yourself. I bought myself a $250 moto g7 power. My Nexus 6p broke at an inopportune time and a flagship wasn't going to fit my budget. It doesn't play 1080p video but the different is almost negligible on a small screen. The camera is decent and internet resources load just as quick as anything else. The massive battery is a really nice feature and will definitely be something I will put on my need list for when I'm looking for my next phone.

phreack 7y ago

My daily driver for years has been a Moto Z Play gen 1, with a battery mod. It's robust as hell, I have literally never had the battery run out, and I can go two days or sometimes three if I'm being careful without doing a full charge which is pretty much my top concern on phones. It has a good enough camera for my needs and a headphone jack. When it's time to change, I'm totally staying on this line.

IkmoIkmo 7y ago

Great points, although I would want to add a bit of nuance from my personal experience. One thing that often gets overlooked in pricing is depreciation. Flagship models tend to keep their value quite well, whereas budget models depreciate to next to nothing. Take the iPhone X, launched 2 years ago, used it's around $570 today, versus the $999 it launched at. Meanwhile, a $300 phone tends to drop down to $100 on the 2nd hand market two years later. It just doesn't hold value very well, for one because budget phones become so much better, and secondly because there's no marketing or natural demand for 2 year old budget phones, and stores themselves discount 1st hand versions of these phones to extreme extents 2 years later. Who here is googling to get a good deal on a second-hand Moto G5? A $300 phone 2.5yo phone that's $50 used today, and $150 new. So after depreciation, the difference between a $1000 flagship and a $300 budget model isn't $700, rather it's the cost of depreciation $430 vs $200 (or $230 more). That $220 isn't nothing, but it's $9.50 a month on a 2-year basis. If you compare that to say a Netflix account, a data plan, cloud storage subscription, Spotify, or two Starbucks coffees a month... $9.50 a month extra to carry a flagship phone is pretty doable for most people. And you get a top-notch flagship phone. Not saying everyone should skip budget phones, but it's not as painful a financial decision as it may seem.

klodolph 7y ago
I do think it would be nice to see this kind of accounting taught in high schools.
- lazyguy2 7y ago
  I could imagine: Oh, shit.. I have "How to trick yourself into thinking overpriced prestige consumer goods are worth it: 101" with Mr. Conner. That guy is a pervert.
secfirstmd 7y ago
Also let's not forget security updates in relation to Android phones...A two year old phone today, two years down the line may well not be receiving them

Kiro 7y ago

I always buy budget Android phones the problem for me is the longevity. They simply start having lots of issues (both hardware and software) very fast. I haven't had a phone that has lasted more than a year.

PopeDotNinja 7y ago

My strategy is similar to yours and I buy a $400 phone every 2 years. In 2017 I got an LG G5, which served me well. This year I got a Google Pixel 3A, which has also been great. I tried phones in the $200 range, but the user experience wasn't quite as pleasant as I cared for.

eyegor 7y ago

> I'm not really sure what people are paying for when they get those $800+ beasts for phones As someone with a painfully expensive phone, for me it was mostly down to the combination: 1) full radio support for us carriers (which also pulls along a decent chunk of europe gsm), 2) SD card support, 3) a headphone jack, 4) some level of waterproofing, 5) enough popularity that I expect to be able to root and install patches once it stops getting official patches. In that order. That list narrowed me down to a very tiny selection of phones. Edit: There are now many more options (and cheaper) than when I bought my phone. :sadface:

RobertKerans 7y ago

Echoing sibling comments: camera, camera, camera. Anecdata as to whether it's really necessary to have a very good camera backed by powerful hard/software -- for me personally, camera quality became my #1 priority after having a baby, & exact same with everyone I know in similar position. But regardless of whether they have family or not, peeps seem to like being able to take good looking photos and videos, and the current manufacturer war over cameras means if you can afford to spend a bit more then the market is fantastic. Edit: also, acquisition of powerful status symbols via a monthly fee that is only slightly higher than the monthly fee for less powerful status symbols.

agumonkey 7y ago

I bought a few moto g since 1st gen. My moto G3 is still operating fine even after years of mild abuse (regular tiny drops, sometimes high drops, sand beaches, heat). Very high build quality considering the price even brand new. I even bought a 2nd hand G5+ because I thought the G3 was about to die.. but it didn't. I wonder if the 4, 5, 6 .. are as sturdy.

jessewmc 7y ago

I'm paying for a phone that lasts 4-5 years (I'm on my 3rd iphone since the original, probably not going to buy another this year) and is still way nicer to use than a moto g (which is admittedly a great budget phone).