Samsung may be bracing for first-ever annual loss in smartphone business
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What's absurd is that Samsung makes memory, and they chose to prioritize the AI grift instead of their own internal customers for chips, and they're just now realizing that doing that was robbing peter to pay paul?
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I'm increasingly considering the second-hand market for the time when my current phone dies.
The hardware has been good enough for a while now. I have not had to worry about battery, storage or RAM on my cheap 3-year-old phone.
OS updates are a lot better than they have been: a 2023 Pixel 8 which came out with Android 14 can be updated to Android 16 and should get updates up to Android 21.
I'll let the people who like shiny new things buy new.
The hardware has been good enough for a while now. I have not had to worry about battery, storage or RAM on my cheap 3-year-old phone.
OS updates are a lot better than they have been: a 2023 Pixel 8 which came out with Android 14 can be updated to Android 16 and should get updates up to Android 21.
I'll let the people who like shiny new things buy new.
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Exactly. As far as I'm aware, Samsung is the only company in the world that manufactures an SoC, DRAM, NAND, AMOLED screens, CMOS sensors, and batteries.
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I think part of it is that Samsung isn't as much of a single company as most Americans assume it is. The fab division is really more like a loosely related company for the mobile division than it is another division of the same company. The overall Samsung conglomerate is probably also making more money milking the AI crazy at the fabs and loosing money on the mobile division than propping up their mobile division by prioritizing supply or providing favorable pricing from the fabs.
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For Samsung the also memory manufacturer please welcome a violin the size of their smartphone division profits.
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They’re selling the A17 5G at $200. I’m prepared to believe there would be little margin for such device even without the AI bullshit.
If anyone needs to get their folks out of the iPhone ecosystem and they don’t have any phone requirements uncharacteristic of their age group, A17 is an easy recommendation.
If anyone needs to get their folks out of the iPhone ecosystem and they don’t have any phone requirements uncharacteristic of their age group, A17 is an easy recommendation.
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Samsung's revenue is 20% of Korea's GDP. Think about that for a minute. Walmart revenue is 2% of US GDP.
In Korea, Samsung is your landlord, your utilities, your bank, your grocery store, your food, your insurance, your transportation, your entertainment - your entire life.
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I’ve been eyeing a Pixel 8(a?) for GrapheneOS.
Learning some problematic things about GrapheneOS that have delayed that decision.
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Samsung "divisions" treat each other as strangers, they don't have the close interactions that you would expect from a similar company in the US or Europe.
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When are phone manufacturers going to bring back the microSD/TransFlash card slot?
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That probably takes a generation or two before they could make that pivot due to flash pricing. Design and manufacturing lead times are pretty long so maybe their 2027 lineup could change but could easily be their 2028 line up before it happens. Would depend on their exact lead times and when they made the decision. If they started working on it as soon as Dram and Flash prices started spiking 2027 is more likely but if they took more of wait and see, "it can't get that bad right?" approach it could easily be 2028. Then they have to decide if they think by 2028 it will still be the issue it is today or would they be investing in a feature people won't actually want/need as much by the time it gets out to them.
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I would heartily recommend this strategy. My last two phones have been refurbished ones.
No problems with either one, saved me money and besides some AI bullshit features that I wasn’t interested in anyways, they have been full featured in every way that matters.
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Yeah and entire country that is a company town. No wonder the birthrate is a catastrophic 0.7.
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They haven't given me a single reason to move from my S23 Ultra anyway, especially since they crippled the S Pen. New does not equal better. There is nothing I throw at my phone that doesn't run fast. They walled LOG behind software to force upgrades. A paid app does the same thing so I'll keep my paid off phone instead, thank you.
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There's no "need" to get elderly people "out of the iPhone ecosystem", there's only punishing them for past wrongdoings by subjecting them to Android. And I suppose if you're trying to do that, a $200 Samsung is "an easy recommendation".
Meanwhile, if you love your "folks", buy them iPhones. I can understand the arguments for younger, more tech-savvy users who might have a personal preference for Android, but it's not something that the majority of older people should have to deal with.
Seriously, access to FaceTime by itself is enough of a reason to give them an iPhone. You might hate everything Apple stands for while turning a blind eye to Google's many and storied sins, but that's not a reason to screw your Nana out of the ability to chat face-to-face with her friends whose children and grandchildren actually love them.
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Like Microsoft where no department ever talks to another. If they did their products would be about 1000x better.
I just updated my old SE2 to a refurb 16e. 400$ was my max for a phone.
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Now even companies are complaining about the high cost of RAM because of "AI".
Yet they keep embracing "AI".
Yet they keep embracing "AI".
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This can’t possibly be right, can it? Samsung semiconductor is making more in profit than Nvidia made in revenue (albeit nvidia in q4 25 since they haven’t had earnings yet).
I went to google this, and apparently it’s right. Holy crap that’s a lot of money. How is Samsung semiconductor making more profit than nvidia or tsmc make in revenue? Purely off of memory alone? The mind boggles.
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I'm never sure what people mean by statements like this:
Supply and demand curves intersect at a single point, the quantity produced/delivered at a certain price. Does it mean that prices are just higher than what people want them to be?
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Such as... ? The last thing for me to be completely done with Google is Android. GrapheneOS was going to be my next attempt but now you've got me worried.
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By "losing" money, I can't help but think here what Samsung really means is "making less profit", not actually losing money.
Because if Samsung mobile phones division is paying Samsung memory division more money for the memory in their phones, it's one hand paying the other.
Although Samsung phones face the very real prospect of market share decline/fewer units sold, if their phones are too expensive, and people cut back buying new phones and tablets, and keep using devices a year or two longer.
But the Samsung Board of Directors might decide that they make more money selling memory to AI companies than they lose on mobile phones. Especially if they lay off a bunch of workers in the mobile phone division so they don't have to keep paying them while mobile phone sales are down.
In general, companies/investors want to allocate their money and other resources where it's most profitable, even if that means axing other products or services that are profitable but less profitable.
However this can also long term hurt the bottom line, because, for example, if you largely abandon the mobile phone market for a couple years, by the time you come back, you might find that other competitors have stepped in and long-term taken that market away from you and it's hard to get back.
Sometimes, though, as markets mature and commodify, companies decide to just permanently leave them. Take for example IBM selling their desktop/laptop PC division to Lenovo.
PCs had become quite commodified with lots of cheap competition. IBM decided they had other more profitable lines of business and it was just time to leave the PC market. Plus by selling to Lenovo, they got a one-time final cash infusion from the PC line of business, which they could invest in their other products and services.
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It means that they think that if there were more production, they could sell 40% more. But because production capacity is finite, they aren't selling as many units of the product as "The Market" wants to buy at that time.
They could try to expand their production capacity, but that usually takes lots of money and several years of time, and if the increase in demand is a temporary blip, that wouldn't pay off, as the increased demand might be gone by the time you increase production. So now you are selling the same or reduced units after spending a bunch of money to be able to manufacturer more units that you can't sell.
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I literally did this today. My new Pixel 8, which is as capable a phone as I'n likely to want, arrived from the reseller this morning. A 1 year warranty and software updates for the next 4 years, for a fraction of the price of the latest model.
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pixithacat
Smack-Fu Master, in training
do they do not understand, if you cannot access AI (due to a lack of RAM), you cannot use it?
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About the same time $5,000 new convertables hit the streets and Singer sells more sewing machines than Apple sells iPhones. I am as big a proponent of removable storage as anyone, but it is long past time to face reality. SD card slots are simply NEVER coming back. It has been 6 years since Samsung had a major phone with one and over a decade at this point for some other brands.
It is just way past the point of accepting it.
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I recently set up a Galaxy A16 (which has the same chip set/SoC/RAM as the A17) as a backup/emergency device for my mom. It's noticably slower, both in benchmarks and actual usage, than my FIL's iPhone 8 from 2017.
Access to cloud service AIs (the potential money maker) is not dependent on the amount of RAM in the client device.
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Samsung Group is a chaebol, not a company.
That's 63 individual sub-companies, each with their own board of directors. There may be a lot of directors serving on more than one board, and some pressure to keep projects within the group, but one has little incentive to give another preferential pricing.
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Might be a slightly different packaging spec, but yes, it is the same fundamental memory technology and fab wafers split between mobile, high end servers, and mid-high end desktop. It's LPDDR5X in one way or another throughout. We'll probably see Apple and Nvidia trying to shift to LPDDR6 relatively shortly with the standard released last year and the form factors for CAMM2 launching recently. Other phone SOCs and processor SOCs are probably in development for 6 as well. Good luck with the memory fab transition, though!
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OS updates aside from the battery nuking haven't hampered my 6A experience. On 16 now. So I second this.
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By curiosity, I was looking at the S26 and S Pen reviews. Due to the minor changes of making the phones slim, the S Pen's are quite brittle and break easily after suffering a minor drop. That extra $60ish after taxes isn't appealing since the change. when the Ultra phone base is nearly $1.3K US.
Limited discounts too.
Limited discounts too.
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What? My S25 from less than two years ago has one. Admittedly, it is shared with the SIM 2 slot (one tray for SIM 1 and SIM 2 / SD card), but it is present and currently in use. Where did you get the 6‑year number from?
Edit: Maybe I'm confused. I'll check it later.
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S10 series was the last microSD-supporting flagship. Maybe some versions of later Galaxy S series flagship phones support dual SIM trays, but I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a microSD option since. Yes, I paid them more to upgrade because I couldn't keep my portable, local media collection on the same card.
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Just add more cameras or arbitrary customizations, particularly if you tell folks they’re limited run models.
Folks fell for that en masse pre-smartphone.
“Oooh your Moto has three colour screen. You must be a devil with the ladies.”
Folks fell for that en masse pre-smartphone.
“Oooh your Moto has three colour screen. You must be a devil with the ladies.”
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When I bought my S25 ultra last fall, SD cards weren't supported, so I paid extra for the 1TB model.
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