A famous consultancy group has predicted the rise of $1,000 smartphones, is it right?
According to Deloitte, by 2023, one in ten phones sold will cost $1,000 or more.
Given that Apple announced the $1,000 plus (and indeed £1,000 plus) iPhone X last year, this prediction may not be quite so hard to believe. After-all, where Apple goes, others tend to follow.
Then again, if the forecast is proven right, smartphone prices will start going against the grain, because between 2012 and 2015 average prices fell, were static in 2016, but did rise modestly in 2017.
The average price of a smartphone in 2015, was just $305.
But is the $1,000 plus price justified?
Lets’s face the word phone is a bit of a misnomer. Our phones are so much more than devices for helping communication. In fact you could say our smartphones have become an extension of us.
Whether $1,000 plus is justified partly depends on what functions are offered, partly depends on how long they last.
But the cloud and possible death of Moore’s Law muddies the picture.
Moore’s Law (named after the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore) describes how computers double in speed every 18 months to two years, and goes a long way to explaining why we upgrade our computers and smartphones so regularly.
But it is generally agreed that Moore’s Law is coming to an end. This does not mean the end of faster processors, but a lot of the really clever stuff is set to occur somewhere else. Neural networks, for example, that are so fundamental to AI, can exist in the cloud.
With the rise of the Cloud, the processing power of our computer or smartphone becomes less important. The need to upgrade every two years diminishes. If we are going to upgrade less often, maybe the hardware companies have to charge more for phones to maintain profits.
So the pressure for $1,000 smartphones may relate to the end of Moore’s Law, but with the Cloud doing so much more heavy lifting, maybe our smart phones will simply become a very thin device designed to put us in touch with more powerful hardware. Do we really need to spend $1,000 to achieve that?
