[12907835202]

No company will ever make a 5-8 year phone at that price. That's $47-76 a year.

People pay that amount or more for apps that help manage their fantasy football team...

Comparitively that would be an insane bargain for a phone and it's absurd for that to be your requirement.

I do wonder what the right price point would be for a subscription model. At the moment the average replacement time is every 2 years which would be the equivalent of $30 a month basic and $40 for pro.

Could they afford $30 a month sub but you got the yearly upgrades rather than every 2 years?

If the price of the parts is quite low compared to the R&D that could be feasible.

But I actually have no idea.

[plorkyeran]

The current iPhone SE starts at $430 and will (probably) get at least 5 years of updates. If budget phone makers can't do something cheaper than the iPhone SE then surely their entire business model is just fucked?

[Gigachad]

Economies of scale. The SE is basically the hand me downs from the mainline iphone and couldn't exist without it. It's not surprising that no name brands can't compete with the richest company in the world.

[LeifCarrotson]

Why would they not make a budget phone? It's not like the BOM + assembly for a touchscreen, first(!) battery, motherboard, and plastic case cost that much. Check out some of the public reports from counterpointresearch.com: the profit margin on flagships is often double the BOM cost, the profit margin on budget phones is a little tighter but still not bad. Who cares what the revenue is per year? What matters is how much it costs to make the thing. Most vendors are just tweaking reference designs anyways.

The Moto G Play is just $170 list, currently going for ~$110. It has a rather pathetic 3 years support, but that's $4.72 per month at list, or ~$3.95 at current list rates - assuming you throw it away when the support contract ends. The Samsung A14 5g is $200, and gets 4 years' support, which is $4.15/mo, again, assuming list price and discarding when security updates are over.

I'm currently typing from my Moto G6, which came out in April 2018. I bought in July of that year for $100 (it was a BOGO with a buddy's $400 Moto One Zoom, they were literally giving them away as a backup to promote their more expensive phone because the BOM cost was so cheap). I plug it in on my desk at work because the battery sucks now, but that's no great hardship. By that math, I've enjoyed the use of a smartphone for $1.62 per month (would be $3.25 at list). Yes, it's only running Android 9 and not getting "security updates" anymore, but I have my phone app, messaging app, a camera, and Firefox, and that's about all I need.

I think it would be ridiculous to spend $30 or $40 A MONTH for a smartphone. It doesn't matter what some people pay for a fantasy football team app, that has nothing to do with buying hardware. Other people are buying 3000 lbs used cars for the same price others are paying for a flagship 200g slab of glass!

[jfengel]

One of the OP's requirements was a vanilla Android. Vendor Android versions aren't features, they're profit centers.

I know the Samsung phones come with a fair bit of crapware, cuz I used to have one. How's the Moto?

[abdullahkhalids]

I have the Moto G4, which is on its last legs after 8 years.

It barely had any non-android, non-Google apps. If there were any, I uninstalled them all except one from the Apps list without having to root my phone or anything. The last one is called Moto, which is disabled (can't be uninstalled).

[alamortsubite]

Motorola is a lot better than Samsung on that front.

[eertami]

> No company will ever make a 5-8 year phone at that price

But they already do? I used my Oneplus X for 6 years and that was $249. Battery is the main reason I stopped using it. That's $3.50/month, maybe an outlier, but I wouldn't pay 10x that to check my messages and get directions.