Yeah, that's the trouble. On one hand, the consumer doesn't need to replace their entire phone as often. On the other, the consumer doesn't need to replace their entire phone as often. Plus all the headaches of compatible hardware, 3rd party knock-offs, and dysfunctional, proprietary drivers. I don't know if that's necessarily true of phones / tablets / laptops, but it definitely happened in the desktop market. I could build a fancy gaming computer now for less than my laptop costed in 2010.It'll take a company like Google or Amazon to do that, though, because in order to pursue this model you have to be hell-bent on annihilating your competition through forbearance of profit.
We've reached a point where the average consumer doesn't need all the goddamn horsepower you can buy anymore, either in a phone, or a desktop, or a laptop, or a tablet
Best phone I ever had was an iPhone 3G running iOS 3. That was pretty much the pinnacle of usability. Compared to my wife's hot-shit 5S, it didn't have: - a magic-ass fingerprint sensor not quite as good as the one I disabled on my Thinkpad in 2006 - a selfie camera - Facetime - a compass It did, however, have a maps app that would get you where you were going most of the time. Sure, no turn-by-turn but that's because Steve Jobs was often an ass. See also: Copy and Paste, which weren't available until this operating system. I've used the compass on my phone twice now. You can probably guess how much the selfie camera and Facetime get used. So really, in the six intervening years between then and now, the major improvement in my life is turn-by-turn, which I had on my HTC Harrier in 2004. I think we overestimate how badly we need our phones to be hot shit because the software bloats and bloats and bloats and bloats to the point where you need a 2GHz processor just to answer a goddamn phone call. iOS 5 was 750MB. Fuckin' iOS 7 is 3GB. Tomb Raider for the PS3 is 4. I really think we could get by with less.