Do you really need a flagship smartphone?
With every passing year, the upper limit of flagship smartphones is skyrocketing as the smartphone makers are adding more and more top-of-the-line features and justifying that elite price tag.
Like most of the trends in the smartphone market, this trend of overboard pricing of smartphone was started by Apple with the launch of the iPhone 7 which started at a price of $649, which was a $450 hike in price as compared to the base model of iPhone 6. Surely there was the iPhone 6s to fill the price gap which acted as a ladder for the price to avoid an abrupt bump, and when Apple gets away by doing something illogical or unexpected, other manufactures think that they can too. This trend continues with the removal of our beloved headphone jack and the lack of in-box power bricks.
There’s no denying the fact that smartphones nowadays do have become an exquisite piece of technology but some people feel that they really need that flagship phone with the best specs for a good experience but the fact is, the smartphones have become so good that for most of the people, even a midranger or a budget phone can easily do all they need if they don’t have a specific special requirement. Most people use their phone to check social media, browser the internet, make calls and snap photos. So, before buying a smartphone one should definitely consider these things. Yes, the new One Plus 9 will absolutely perform better than the Moto G9 in almost all aspects but do you really need that extra performance or features? Heck the Moto G9 may even beat the One Plus 9 in terms of battery life. Whether you buy a $900 phone or a $250 you are bound to upgrade after about 3 years(averagely) because of the battery issues no matter how powerful your processor may be.
Now you may be thinking I’m ranting about the flagship phones; no I’m not. It’s your money and you can spend it any way you want, why can’t you get a $900 phone if your pocket allows it, but most youth especially teenagers fall for this marketing trap and spend or to be more precise ask their parents to spend much more than their means for some extra performance. And in course of buying a new phone, what we tend to ignore is it’s repair cost. Hurray! You just bought the $799 phone you have been saving for so long, but is your pocket ready to take the hit in case its screen or back glass shatters or any other mishappen? The thumb rule to follow here is that we should not save for long for just buying a smartphone or get one on EMI, if we can easily buy it without much saving means we can easily pay for any future expenses regarding it.
We have now stopped looking at phones as just another item of expense. We would never go way over budget for buying a piece of furniture or an appliance because we know that by spending more the basic functionality of the furniture/appliance won’t change. Any fridge would keep the food cool and any sofa would serve to sit. In the same way, a $250 smartphone will do almost all the basic actions as a flagship therefore we should rethink that do we really need that expensive phone?
