[Anonyneko]

"Hacker's choice" phones don't appear to sell enough to justify the costs, although they can be a decent strategy for building the initial brand awareness.

Financially speaking, OPPO was right to gut OnePlus all those years ago and streamline their production into selling the same models (with minor tweaks) under the brands that are more known in this or that region. Saves on hardware and software development costs a lot, and once OnePlus was a household brand among the general public it no longer had to appeal to the hacker crowd anyway.

Sad as it is. I bought the One when they were still invite-only and mained it for years, amazing device for the time. Went a bit full circle and using a Nord 3 right now, but I didn't get it because of the brand (just needed a basic secondary smartphone for traveling and got a good deal on it, it's clearly just a generic OPPO brick).

[freedomben]

You're probably right, but I would have been willing to tolerate price increases if they hadn't compromised all the other things though (especially factory images, which heavily chilled rooting/mods). I wonder what would have happened if they'd stuck with high end devices (with maybe a low-end line too) and not compromised on the hackability. For me at least I'd still be using them today as long as the price didn't get ridiculous (i.e. stayed in the ballpark with other flagships)

[ulimn]

Do these kinds of products have to sell as many units as a phone targeting the general population? I mean, most of the target audience will hear about a new release / iteration from blog posts, tech news sites, etc., so marketing doesn't need that much resources.

Other than that, I guess it's also not necessary to fill every casual store like MediaMarkts, etc. because unlike my grandma, tech savvy people can order online.

But I'm not knowledgable on these things, so it's mostly just me thinking out loud.

[soerxpso]

The overhead of designing the actual phone and then setting up manufacturing processes and supply chains is pretty big. You definitely need to sell a lot to break even on that, especially considering that the unit margins aren't crazy.

[try-working]

Absolutely not. OnePlus was more known and trusted outside China and should have been the flagship. OPPO has "the smell of factory girl" inside China and in SEA.