by com2kid | 2025-08-20 22:10:37+00:00
> 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how to even setup a dev environment for the previous version, test hardware breaks down or just gets lost, tooling gets out of date and doesn't work anymore (or has conflicts with newer tooling installed on a dev machine).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....)