2022 has been the year of incremental smartphone updates, more than any previous year. With the exception of a few standouts, this year’s biggest flagships followed a similar theme: if it works, don’t touch it. The end result is that we have an entire year of flagship smartphones that are just veneer to their previous generations.
With 2023, I expect OEMs to not only continue this, but double down. Before you use this opportunity to mourn the death of smartphone innovation, maybe that’s not a bad thing.
Phones have matured and they can only get better before they can no longer
The overall theme for hardware and software for this year has been maturity. The move from Android 12 to Android 13 was one of the most minor and annoying changes to the operating system in quite some time, unlike the move from Android 11 to Android 12 which brought drastic changes like Material You and the monet theme engine. Android 13’s big talking point was a new notification permission system, and that seems very minor considering the scale of Material You.
On the other side, the grass is a bit greener, with iOS 16 bringing more pronounced changes to the iPhone lock screen and the way notifications are displayed. But once you get past the lock screen, you’d be hard-pressed to find any changes (other than the battery percentage in the status bar – that’s just iOS catching up).
As far as hardware goes, we’ve had an exciting and boring year. The new phones have been great in their individual vacuums, but compare them to their predecessors, and you can’t help but feel like you’re being taken for a ride. Should you go for the latest and greatest, or just buy something a year older at a discount and get essentially the same phone?
Devices like the Samsung Galaxy S22 and Galaxy S22 Plus were uninspiring sidegrades to the Galaxy S21 series. The Galaxy S22 Ultra was an exciting phone in that it finally integrated the S Pen into the Note-esque chassis, but S Pen support was already present on the Galaxy S21 Ultra. What you got on the device was basically just integration and refinement on an unfinished experience.
The same story continued with foldables – a category that many here at XDA see as the future of smartphones. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4 were upgrades over the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3, respectively. And the company knew it, which is why it adopted generous trade-in offers to entice owners to upgrade to the latest generation and convince them of its foldable vision.
The same story continues with many other smartphones, especially those sold in Western markets. The OnePlus 10 Pro was a square sidegrade on the OnePlus 9 Pro. Google Pixel 7 and Google Pixel 7 Pro were also slight hardware upgrades from their predecessors, the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. The iPhone 13 to iPhone 14 is so tiny that most users should easily pick up the 13 over the 14 and get better value for money. The iPhone 13 Pro to iPhone 14 Pro is an exciting upgrade on paper, but realistically most users will turn off the distracting Always-On Display and not shoot enough RAW to notice the new one. camera equipment. All in all, if you bought a smartphone in 2021, then 2022 was boring.
We are reaching the limits of diminishing marginal utility of smartphones. The budget needed to get a good smartphone experience has dropped significantly over the past few years, with mid-range smartphones now fully capable of meeting the needs of the average user. Additionally, the general use cases for media consumption and communication are likely to remain the same: what are you doing differently on your phone today than you were doing five years ago?
There are not enough changes in our very needs and expectations to justify the risk of innovation.
Yes, we are now creating more content daily and consuming more vertically than horizontally. Yes, we now have 5G and super-fast data speeds everywhere, if the carriers are to be believed (they aren’t). But the pioneering idea of ββthe smartphone as the magical epicenter of a thousand technologies is now over a decade old. That vision materialized into a glass-slab smartphone that can do just about anything you can throw at it, the only variation being the degree of its skill.
The hardware has matured, the software has matured, and the only tangible gains left to be made are in the synergy between the two and the play of the ecosystem, areas that Apple recognized early on as its home ground. Whether this realization reaches all the other companies supposedly on their own or whether they try to emulate the multi-trillion dollar big business is a moot point. Of course, phone companies that can’t achieve this synergy and ecosystem are going to risk it with innovative puns like “blockchain” and “metaverse”, but it won’t take consumers too long to chase the vapors of what remains essentially a glass slab smartphone.
2023 is going to be more incremental upgrades for flagships
If you thought 2022 was boring, you’ll have to prepare for 2023. We’re going to see even more refinements and fewer wholesale changes in the name of “innovation”. Most OEMs will focus much more on end-user experience on their flagship products instead of any pure hardware upgrade. The hardware-software synergy that remains the quintessence of a smooth user experience requires more than a year and a product cycle to perfect. As Apple continues to chip away at the top end with its superior ecosystem game, OEMs have no choice but to redouble their efforts to create a consistent excellent user experience. This means that risks and “innovations” will stay away from top-tier consumer flagships – this is not the segment where the wheel needs to be reinvented.
Where you’ll see more experimentation is in the mid and premium-mid ranges, at least compared to the top tier. We saw Nothing challenge the status quo with the Nothing Phone 1, a phone that wasn’t meant to be a top-tier flagship. Additionally, devices like the Vivo V23 and V25 series feature color-changing rear panels, but the technology is still missing from the flagships.
We already see whispers of what to expect on key flagship ranges in 2023. I’d rather not get into specific leaks at this point – they are leaks, after all – but from what I can see in broad strokes, the idea that a flagship phone line will introduce changes drastic changes compared to its predecessor is long behind us. It’s a far cry from the early years of smartphones, where each new year brought a phone that had its own novelty. In the past, you’d get one of the following as a new “innovation” point: new display technology, higher resolution or refresh rate, fewer bezels, more high-end build materials. range, new design, better camera hardware, more camera hardware, faster charging, etc. Now all flagship phones have their baselines set, and OEMs are increasingly reluctant to stray too far and shock users to the extent that they can avoid it.
Featured products are not products, they are experiences. And that’s not going to change.
This quest for refinement also means phone OEMs will spend more time choosing individual hardware components with more room for YoY improvements, like what we see Google and Apple doing with their camera sensors. Apple even overhauled the internals of the iPhone 14 to make it more repairable, heralding a future where consumers will happily keep their phones longer. Software update promises add the layer of confidence consumers needed to have confidence in this longer-term vision, while incremental upgrades on upcoming releases become the final push needed for them to be able to not make the jump to a new phone.
I’m glad to see how boring smartphones have become
Again, listen to me on this. Phones have become boring, and that’s good. This indicates maturity and that the right technology has been democratized and made widely available to everyone. It also means that little distinguishes the $1,000 flagships from the $500 mid-range. It’s similar to what we see for devices like laptops, computers, cameras, etc. – tools that allow us to perform specific functions better. Most users rarely remember a specific laptop model, but instead attribute their goodwill and experience to a wider generation of releases, each incrementally better than the last. We see exactly that happening with phones, where what the Pixel 8 will bring individually becomes less important than what the Pixel 8 series will bring over the last few years of the consistent Google Pixel experience.
The quest for over-the-top “Ultra” smartphones and foldables will keep the fire burning for hardcore enthusiasts and those with deep pockets. But for the rest of the population? A Pixel 6a will do just as well. Either way, you never needed to update every year.
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