Works of the New Eye Industry Group
The author | Liu Sixuan
Edited | Sang Mingqiang
The concept of flagships is being weakened.
At the end of last month, OPPO released the version of the annual flagship, the Find X5 Pro, followed by the Honor Magic 4 at the MWC venue in Barcelona. One is priced at 6799 yuan and the standard version is priced at 899 euros. Compared with the previous generation, the price increase of this generation of flagship machines has reached almost 30%.
This is not nothing, according to the new eyes incomplete statistics, 2022 so far, there have been at least 6 flagship machines released, and another Redmi K50 e-sports version in the previous days set to warm up, but in the fast-paced attack strategy, the camera switched to consumers, flagship machines set off splashes are not even as good as Apple's newly launched Cangling green color.
Joint top photography equipment manufacturers, self-developed chips, fast-charging batteries, full screens, curved screens, ceramics / plain leather / glass or bio-based fuselages, the flagship products of major brands seem to be various, most of them only slightly improved in a certain aspect, the value will easily rise by one hundred to one thousand yuan, and the price changes in the opposite direction, but it is the public's reduction of the freshness of the flagship machine.
The mobile phone industry believes in "flagship = high price", but many consumers do not buy it. In the context of the decline in domestic smartphone shipments for four consecutive years, how many stories can be told about the flagship machine is an urgent problem that many mobile phone manufacturers need to solve.
01
Once upon a time
The flagship machine officially entered the consumer vision and should start from 2010.
That year, the iPhone 4 came out. Metal frame, double-sided glass, right angle cut edge, 960 * 640 resolution Retina screen, from the visual experience alone, the new iPhone is enough to be refreshing. The released iOS 4 system with A4 processor far exceeded the Symbian of mainstream applications at that time in terms of operation experience, and the immature Android did not have the ability to match it.
The most eye-catching evolution is FaceTime. The 300,000-pixel front camera is not clear, but it has made the 3G video phone, a technology that has appeared for 10 years, land smoothly, triggering a large number of business people who have been traveling for many years. For the teen consumer group, the magic of mobile games such as Angry Birds, Temple Run, and Fruit Ninja is huge, and if someone can pull out an iPhone 4 dozen game during recess, it will definitely attract a group of classmates around.
Looking back at the 5G era, the iPhone 4 is still worthy of the title of "a generation of divine machines".
A year after the release of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 4S was released, carrying the A5 chip to take over the baton strongly. Antenna issues have been fixed, Siri has become a new hotspot, iCloud has built a cloud space, and a 64GB version expands memory. But even so, the iPhone 4's status as a divine machine was still unshaked, until September 2013, it was discontinued along with the 4S, becoming the longest online iPhone so far.
It was from the iPhone 4 that Apple sat firmly in the top spot of smartphones, leaving other brands far behind, and making a sample for the flagship machines that followed. Since then, Samsung has taken out the Galaxy to compete with it, Google launched the Pixel, the domestic Millet, Huawei, OPPO, vivo, Meizu also competed to debut, Mate, Note, X, M and other series are dazzling.
There are many talents among the successors, especially after Apple lost Jobs, began to "change the soup without changing the medicine" under the operation of the mystery, the quality of the flagship model has become the key to the foothold of each family. For example, the Mate 7 released by Huawei in 2014 reached million sales in only one month, and the 5 million pixel front camera not only led the country, but also hung the Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 released in the same year, advanced selfie artifacts.
"Once the sea was shipwrecked as water", this poem may represent the voice of today's smartphone enthusiasts. I believe that many people still remember the scene of the late night after spending a lot of money to buy the flagship machine, while studying the operation late at night, and it is difficult to forget the shock that rose in the heart when we first saw the iPhone 4. The flagship machine has really been brilliant, bringing the imagination of consumers to the future.
But it is also in contrast to past achievements that today's flagship machines appear lackluster.
02
Take the second flower bush
In 2017, the domestic smartphone market experienced an annual decline for the first time, with shipments falling by 4% year-on-year. At that time, some analysts pointed out that "a cold winter is coming", but no one thought that this decline would continue to this day.
In the downturn, the market began to shuffle. The former "king of functional machines" Gionee took the lead in leaving, leaving a high debt of more than 20 billion yuan; Meizu, which contributed to the "aura" several times, gradually declined, and the news of acquisitions rose and fell; electronic giant Samsung was negatively affected by the battery door, personally "blew up" a large piece of the market, and has not been able to take off the hat so far.
A large number of opponents have cleared, leaving a gap in the market, and the competition between head manufacturers has become more intense. In April 2018, Honor 10 took the lead in releasing, becoming the forerunner among several major domestic brands, equipped with HiSilicon Kirin 970 octa-core processor, resolution up to 2280 * 1080, the design of the special-shaped full screen achieved 79.92% of the screen ratio, 24 million + 16 million rear dual camera, 24 million front ai technology to be connected.
If only this mobile phone came out that year, it may be called amazing, but 1 month later, Xiaomi 8 was released, the same equipped with a special-shaped full screen, not to mention, even the AI scene camera is the same, even if it is equipped with Snapdragon 845, but under the influence of the same glass material back cover, it is basically the same as the Heat Dissipation Performance of Honor 10.
Subsequently, major manufacturers have successively released Redmi 6, OPPO Find X, vivo X23, Huawei Mate 20 and other products, in terms of performance and main innovation points, almost all of them are reproducing the routines of the previous two, although the chip and camera are slightly different in parameters and prices, but from the perspective of getting started, it is really difficult to distinguish.
Not only can the "same year students" not open the gap, but the comparison of the two generations of flagship machines can not see much improvement. Take the iPhone 13 released last year and the iPhone 11 three years ago for example: the A15 chip computing power is indeed higher than the A13 equipped with the latter, but due to the use of the 5nm process that rolls over continuously, the heat dissipation problem is even worse; from the official data, the new iPhone endurance can support video playback for up to 19 hours, but according to the current consumer feedback, the problem of fast power failure has not been cured, and even a night standby power consumption of 40%.
Old problems cannot be changed, new advantages cannot be improved, and the differences between various families are also disappearing. Less than a decade after its rise, public enthusiasm for smartphones has fallen to an unprecedented low.
According to the report released by The China Mobile Terminal Laboratory, in 2020, the replacement cycle of mobile phone users in mainland China was extended again, with an average of 25.3 months, of which 78.6% of consumers belonged to the "passive replacement", because the mobile phone was damaged /stuck, the memory was not enough, the battery life was not enough, and other issues were replaced.
"Take the second flower bush lazy review", which is in line with the current weakness of the flagship machine market.
For the vast majority of low- and mid-end consumers, the current smartphone market is becoming more and more like a perfectly competitive market. A large number of homogeneous products flow freely in the market, price and supply and demand information is relatively complete, and the flagship machine that occupies the high-end market has little difference in performance from other models, but it is set at a higher price, which naturally loses its attractiveness to the largest number of consumers.
03
New story
A few days ago, the Redmi K50 e-sports edition announced that it was finalized. "The cold-blooded flagship of the whole line is full", this slogan is very millet, but the highest price is close to 4,000 yuan, but it is not very red rice.
Making the cake bigger is the skill, and knowing how to cut it at the right time is the eyesight. E-sports flagships, video flagships, music flagships, the single item to do fine, to obtain the "capital" asked in the niche market, flagship machines are trying to tell new stories.
In the face of a global mobile game market of nearly 100 billion US dollars, it is difficult for any digital electronics-related company not to be impressed. In the post-epidemic era, the entire game market has ushered in a short-term outbreak, but as work and life are back on the right track, terminal games and hosts are gradually cooling back, leaving only the mobile game market to maintain its growth momentum and ride the dust.
Chart: Global Gaming User Spending by Major Device Categories (Source: IGN)
From 2019 onwards, mainstream mobile phone manufacturers began to test the waters of this market segment. Vivo sub-brand iQOO's first product is accompanied by KPL (King of Glory Professional League), becoming an exclusive competition machine, the positioning of "top performance + top e-sports" is effectively different from other "big and complete" flagship machines on the market, which once attracted many e-sports enthusiasts to buy and taste it.
However, with the growing popularity of e-sports flagships, mobile phone manufacturers have gradually returned to the old road of high-end flagships.
The average price of 4,000 yuan has exceeded the expectations of most amateur game enthusiasts for e-sports machines, and sales have declined. The redmi K40 game enhanced version released last year has only shipped 600,000 units on JD.com, and the annual sales of the entire e-sports mobile phone market are only 1 million units. Standing at both ends of such a sluggish market, I don't know which one is more unacceptable than "making a mobile phone with shipments of no more than 1 million units" and "buying a mobile phone with the money to buy switch".
Pushed to the same height as esports performance is the image level. Huawei Leica, vivo Zeiss, OnePlus Hasselblad, mobile phone manufacturers and veteran camera manufacturers cooperation can be described as a wave higher than a wave, almost "inner volume". Compared with professional photographic equipment of tens of thousands of yuan, the image flagship mobile phone seems to be a good choice; but contrary to the slogan of "everyone is a creator" played by mobile phone manufacturers, people who really want to carry out image creation do not mind adding some money to buy an entry micro-single / SLR; and the consumer group that only stays in daily recording for mobile phone image performance is unwilling to pay for a high-level camera.
"Divided, but not completely divided", this is the current flagship machine market after trying to subdivide the scene. A number of mobile phone manufacturers have always scratched the itch of their boots, both reluctant to the profits brought by high pricing, and can not guess how to balance between "big and complete" and "small and beautiful"; the most important thing is that iterative more than a dozen models, "return is still a teenager", practical innovation has not seen a few, fancy function / appearance brought by the dark disease has added some. Today, when the flagship machine is gradually disappearing, the market is increasingly in need of a new generation of divine machines.