12 thoughts on “Smartphone Subsidies”

1. I’m still very happy with the iPhone 4 I’ve had for 3.5 years, but I recently got the new iPad Mini and holy hell it’s fast! Benchmarks show it neck and neck with my 17″ MacBook Pro laptop computer (2.5 GHz core 2 duo) and real-world use bears that out. The new mini has pretty much taken over all casual web browsing and email and twitter and skype and facebook duties from a PC when I’m in the house, something which never happened with my older iPad.

   Yeah, that laptop is five years old now, but I’ve never upgraded it because it’s never felt slow for normal use (including programming — though I do have a 4.25 GHz quad core tower for really heavy lifting).

   The new iPad Mini cost one ninth what the laptop did, weighs one ninth as much, has three times the battery life, 36% more pixels (2048×1536 vs 1920×1200) and faster WIFI and GPU. The only thing it’s lacking is RAM (only 1 GB, though with twice the bandwidth) and a *nix command line (they haven’t worked out a JailBreak yet).

   Computers seem to have pretty much stopped getting faster, but they’re getting smaller and cheaper quickly!

   1. Computers seem to have pretty much stopped getting faster

      Not really true. Single-threaded performance has only been going up about 15% a year, but the number of threads has been increasing rapidly.

      We installed new communication systems last year, the same as the ones we installed in 2009, except the servers in the racks were obsolete so we had to replace them with the modern equivalent. They’re about four times faster; in fact, I don’t remember seeing the new ones get over 10% CPU usage at any time.

      What has happened is that slow CPUs like ARMs have caught up with the CPU requirements of most things most people want to do.

   2. Bruce, I don’t know what benchmarks you are using, but the iPad Mini (Retina) is about 4 times slower than the Core 2 Duo (itself a six year old chip) in your old MacBook Pro. Not only that, but your experience with the iPad Mini has NOTHING to do with this post, which is about cell phones!

      1. I think bruce is focusing on the concept of diversity in connectivity, which is really what smartphones are for anyways.

      2. There are plenty of benchmarks around, but I used GeekBench, which itself reports on a number of different tests, some of which the MacBookPro wins and some of which the iPad wins. Where there is a difference it is generally not large.

         The relevance, which in the end I didn’t actually include in the previous message, is that the iPhone 5s is essentially identical in computing power to the iPad Mini. They have the same components and same clock rate, though the iPhone has less cooling and will throttle the speed back sooner under continuous heavy load — around 5 seconds for the iPhone vs 10 seconds for the iPad Mini. Such sustained loads are rare on mobile devices. Unless you’re compressing video or mining bitcoins you’re not going to notice a difference.

         My MacBook Air, by the way, also throttles back after 10-15 seconds at maximum load. The MacBook Pro doesn’t, at least for many minutes.

2. Most people don’t really seem to shop around for their phone plan.. or consider buying the phone outright. It’s like learned helplessness.

   The best prepaid plan I’ve found for smartphones, in the US, is the $2/day infinite data plan from T-mobile. If anyone knows of anything similar, let me know.

   Anything in the US even remotely approaching these plans, the first of which I use at home, would be really nice.

   1. Trent, what I use is near, but not quite the same.

      A couple years ago I encountered Virgin Mobile at the local Best Buy. They offer no-contract plans wherein you buy your phone, then minutes/credits as you need them. I’m currently using the $35/month plan with “unlimited” bandwidth, 300 minutes talk, and unlimited text. I use quotes around unlimited because 6 months after I bought my phone they changed the plan to ~2.5 gigs/month bandwidth, after which you’re throttled down until the end of the month. Given my usage & needs that’s more than enough.

      They even offer no-contract iPhones. iPhone 4 8Gb goes for $199, and a “certified pre-owned” model goes for $149.99. Their price for a 4s 8Gb model isn’t too bad, given you’re not buying a contract. I’m not publishing it here because they’re doing the “add it to your cart to see” bit, and I don’t want to tick them off. 🙂 The 5c is $449.99 and the 5s is $549.99.

      That’s fine for me. Others -who live on, and by, their phones- my prefer something else. I just don’t see the point of spending $60-$80 or more every month for the latest & greatest.

   2. I’ll second what Casey said. I’m on VM’s $45/mo. 1200 minutes plan and I’m quite happy with it.

      I was with Verizon until I got fed up with them (in a rage, actually) after they had me running in circles after my phone broke. So much for the insurance I was paying for. And I was paying $135/mo. total for the pleasure.

      My phone with VM is a Kyocera Rise 3G slider running Ice Cream Sandwich, and I’m quite happy with it. It’s not as fast as a new iPhone but its fast enough to stream music and run CoPilot GPS simultaneously. And I paid only $80 at Amazon (currently $38.99) for it!

      VM offers a variety of iPhones and the Galaxy S III, with 4G LTE.

      Virgin Mobile is a subsidiary of Sprint and uses their network, in case that matters to anyone.

3. The DROID 2 is a nice phone, but you should definitely try out the Moto X and see just how far we’ve come with Android phones.

4. I don’t need my smart phone but because of the iffy weather around here, having it allows me to keep in contact very conveniently.

   I think providers should stop bundling their sales, and let the price be known outright, but I like having an extra computer on hand, when all things go flying wittershins.

5. Phone companies love the subsidized model because it lets them hide the true cost of the devices and especially the cost of financing. Consider that for a typical smartphone and a 2 year contract the effective APR ends up being about 100%. If people saw that printed out in front of them, and if they had other ways to pay they’d do that, because it doesn’t make financial sense otherwise.

   Plus, everyone pays into the subsidy whether people actually get new phones or not, so they’re making money hand over fist on people who are “saving” by not upgrading. It’s a huge win/win for them. And encourages people to upgrade faster than they might normally would. It would be much better for the consumer if they offered the unsubsidized price and had the option of financing with bundled payments (which some phone companies do already). That way you can see how much you’re actually spending devices.

   1. Every provider is required to offer the “unsubsidized price” for any bundle, here. The majority of people are still on plans, and typically don’t even compare the plans to each other. Learned helplessness.

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