Eli5: how did we get to the point where laptops and phones are in the same price range ?
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It is mostly because they are essentially the same product nowadays. A phone is just a smaller laptop with no keyboard. The only thing that really makes them a little bit more expensive than a laptop with the same power is the fact that they have to be so much smaller.
Phones are super cheap. You can even find smartphones for under 30 dollars/euro.
Portable high end computers that have a phone function on the other hand…
You are paying for the technology that was used to create the device. Rather than paying for the resources that it took to create the device.
Additionally the smaller a device the more technology must go into it to make it functional. Bigger devices are easier to make.
A laptop and smartphone have very similar functions. However they are very different sizes. To make the phone small enough to fit in the hand, a lot of modern technology goes into creating the parts.
Does this make sense? Do you have any further questions?
Making things small is expensive.
Making things fast is expensive.
So a small slower phone is same price as big fast laptop.
Let’s go back to 2005. Phones were fairly standard, very poor internet connectivity if any, and was mostly just for buying ringtones or games. Laptops at the time weren’t as advanced as they were now, but there was so much more you could do with a laptop than you could with any phone.
Over the years, when smart phones became a thing, the gap between laptops and phones became much less. We can now use our phones to do quite a lot that laptops allow us to do. While phones cannot replicate a laptop completely, they have the added benefit of portability.
That’s one side of the story, the other is brand loyalty and peer pressure. Today, you can get a perfectly good, midrange phone for less than €200. It won’t be a Samsung or iPhone, but it will absolutely do the job. So you can buy a phone for much less than a laptop which is relatively of the same quality. A laptop for less than €200 would absolutely not be anywhere close to one for €500 or more.
The issue is, everyone can see what phone we have, it’s almost as much a fashion accessory as it is a piece of tech. Laptops don’t have this issue, if my laptop is an old beaten up piece of crap, nobody will know. But if I dare to have an Android instead of the new iPhone, a lot of people see that as an excuse for mockery. People are willing to pay more for phones as it makes them seem better in the eyes of their peers. It’s like wearing expensive jewellery or designer clothes.
TLDR: Phones now replicate much of the functionality of laptops but also are seen as a status symbol, where previously they were not.
What? Are they? In my country, ordinary office laptops are like cca 4 times more expensive than ordinary office phones. Maybe high end super brand phone is the same price as shitty office laptop, but not when you compare the usual consumer grade.
One major component to this is supply and demand.
Let’s look at the three major computer forms these days.
1. Mobile phone that can do almost everything except hardcore data processing
2. Laptop that can do everything a phone can (except calls) with great data processing
3. desktop that does laptop with better processing and generally no portability
Most people who needed a computer for general life stuff all of a sudden were buying cheaper laptops with reduced processing ability, these laptop users have moved to mobile phones as it did everything they needed and was super portable, the desktop users stayed on desktops as they still needed the processing power. The laptop market kinda got wiped out.
Less demand + less supply = price increase
The same way we get to the reason everything is priced how it is: the price of a thing is set at the point where a sellers profit desire intersects with a customers willingness to pay.
Same reason, for identical specs, a laptop costs more than a desktop: you have to pay for miniaturization. The cost of the additional plastic materials for your laptop isn’t significant (especially considering most of the cost of a plastic component is in the amortized cost of the injection mold, not the actual plastic material).
Also one of the most expensive components in a smartphone is the cameras, and your laptop has a shitty webcam.
They’re not. Just from a quick look comparing high end phones with high end laptops, they’re somewhere around 3-5 times more expensive.
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