I will say however, that I expect the biggest confounder is the expense to tool and maintain a niche phone makes it less feasible given the limited demand. It nonetheless does exist, and I hope that such costs can be reduced so the market can diversify its offerings and I can have another XZ1c experience.
USB port = Mandated in the EU by end of 2024. Replaceable battery = Mandated in EU by 2027. Dual sim cards = common in the global south. Headphone jack = wanted by everyone not a youtube influencer.
Compromise: I'll accept TWO USB-C ports in exchange for the headphone jack. Usb to 3.5mm adapter wires cost maybe 6$ on amazon.
I'm not kidding when I say I recently saw someone on a plane using a wireless charging station. They had wrapped tape around the phone to hold it on the charger. Progress!
I've been using the same $9 Apple one for 3+ years at this point. There have been times when I've pulled it out of my bag and saved the day. Young people are amazed that it just works (microphone and all), Mac or Windows, computer or tablet. Ain't progress wonderful?
> It's going into a protective case anyway.
With that in mind, it seems it's not really customers that want ever thinner, ever more sealed and port-free phones. The very first purchase they make after buying a new phone already defeats the purported benefits of those design choices.
I maintain this market is supplier-driven, and customer preferences have near-zero bearing on how phones look like today.
While protective cases make the phones marginally thicker they don't make them less water proof. Which is in my opinion the purpose of making phones sealed and as port-free as possible.
And even with the protective case my current phone is much thinner than any phone I had with a user replaceable battery.
BTW, Samsung Galaxy S5 had all those features, even replaceable battery and was still waterproof.
Like forever, some of the smartest people around admitted that they did not know. They created the entire field of market research. Today I think that is dead. In the past decade we moved to an entirely different model of force-fed consumerism, which is driven, as you say, entirely by the supply side. Oddly the near communist era uniformity we see goes against our stated beliefs in data-driven, targeted markets.
A whole other layer is how we increasingly project our own desires onto others and assume they must be crazy not to want the exact same thing as ourselves. Where does that come from? Here on HN I get tired of hearing these very strident, cock-sure remarks about "what people want is...". Let's just admit we don't have much idea about what other people want. There's nowt as queer as folk. And some of the most interesting markets may in fact be marginal. Smaller markets do not mean unprofitable ones.
I definitely do, to some extent. More sealed is good, I don't want water and dust inside my phone. The thinner the phone the thicker and more protective the case you can apply before it gets too thick. Or you could stick a battery in the case, or a USB hub, SD reader, etc. What stops this case from existing right now?
Evidence?
> Sure you'll get cheered on by some small group of people that wouldn't actually buy this phone either
So all the people who say they want a phone like that are lying?
This suggests that however genuine the desire is, it’s just not widely shared enough to actually constitute a viable market – somewhere below the level of, say, manual transmissions on cars.
I do have a phone that is about two years old that has a headphone jack.
Replaceable batteries and lack of SD card slots is essential deliberately shortening the life of phones to get people to upgrade sooner.
The main use of user replaceable batteries for me was always when my phone only lasted a few hours so I had to swap another one. My Samsung Blackjack with 3G would die in like an hour if I was actively using the 3g connection lol. G1 and HTC Evo also didn't last a whole shift at work.
> Replaceable batteries and lack of SD card slots is essential deliberately shortening the life of phones to get people to upgrade sooner.
Phone batteries are replaceable, but most people do not want to do it themselves so they go to the mall and pay someone else $50 - it’s still much cheaper than a new phone. The flip side, of course, is that sealed phones are far more durable so instead of the over-simplified narrative about planned obsolescence we have a more nuanced trade off where something adds desirable traits (smaller, cheaper, waterproof, more durable) at the expense of a feature few buyers used. I wouldn’t fault you for being on the other side of that decision but I just don’t think there are that many people who look for that when phone shopping. An iPhone easily lasts 5 years and is probably getting replaced for something like a broken screen, not a battery.
SD cards are similar: yes, the extra storage is nice if you don’t use cloud storage but most people do, and those people avoid the data loss which many SD card users have been hit by and have smaller, more durable phones in exchange. Again, I think both preferences are reasonable but one of them is a niche.
They are not lying. Just there aren't enough of them to make such a phone worth producing.
There's phones with dual usb ports already, do they own one? If not, then it's not as important a feature as they are implying. And that goes for pretty much everything on the list.
> Evidence?
Asus ROG phone sales numbers? The fact that people keep complaining phones don't have whatever feature instead of just buying one?
It doesn't help when a very large number of phone users only care about one thing: it being an Apple phone. They will lap up anything Apple gives them every single time. It doesn't matter what the features are.
Or, Apple actually makes well made good phones which people find desirable?
I understand it is popular to talk trash about them, but maybe their popularity is not all just a product of misguided masses?
What is more likely: that millions of people spend money on something they use constantly without caring whether it’s actually good, or that your emotional attachment to Android has caused you not to reconsider whether your tastes are in fact universally shared?
Any time you see billions of dollars changing hands for years in a competitive market but don’t understand why, the answer is always to learn more about it.
And yet every post about phones there's people acting like no phones that meet their requirements exist. They definitely exist. I think what they really intend to say is "Why doesn't Samsung put these exact features I want on the Galaxy S Whatever"
Almost nobody wants this phone. Sure you'll get cheered on by some small group of people that wouldn't actually buy this phone either, but it just wouldn't sell well enough to justify its existence. There's probably already a phone with most of these features.