02-23-2018, 10:18 PM
https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/26448...-time-ever
Quote:Gartner reports smartphone sales fell 5.8 percent in Q4 2017 compared with Q4 2016. It’s tempting to write this off as ordinary variance, but when the market has shown no such variation in the past 51 quarters, it’s harder to hand-wave the figure. It’s especially more difficult because, in theory, we should still be seeing robust growth given that there are huge untapped markets for devices across India and China. Here’s Gartner’s explanation, per research director Anshul Gupta:
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That’s problematic for phone vendors, but not particularly surprising. Smartphone benchmark performance continues to rise year after year, but newer phones have more problems with throttling than older models did, and often can’t maintain their top frequencies for very long.
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Smartphone sales still rose on the full year, up 2 percent, but that’s a tiny gain compared with what we used to see. Investors and analysts will be watching to see if the Q4 2017 drop becomes a trend or if the market stabilizes. I imagine there’s a bit of schadenfreude from the PC market, given that manufacturers in that space have been struggling with exactly the same problem — how do you build features compelling enough to drive upgrade cycles when raw performance has largely stalled out?