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There were times when low-budget phones were looked down upon as laggy and stuttering devices when compared to flagship models. One vividly remembers cheap Android and Blackberry devices that offered the bare minimum of what constitutes a modern smartphone experience today. Unsurprisingly, the technology has grown at a stupendous pace over the years, and is still progressing.
Modern day smartphones from Apple and Android are akin to a portable PC rather than just a simple email-reading device of old. Today, they can do it all. If you need to navigate to a nearby restaurant, your smartphone will take you there. If booking tickets online for a journey is a priority, that too is easily accomplished with a smartphone.
People used to rely a lot on computers for the simplest of tasks. Now, with the advent of modern smartphones, only the most demanding or extensive work requires the power and flexibility of a workstation PC. This is precisely why, in the ever-inflating market, flagship phones make little to no sense for the average user. Let's look into this deeply.
The average user doesn't need the horsepower of a pricey flagship phone
The price-to-performance increment has started to stagnate
In the last 10 years, as chipmakers started adding more transistors to the APU die, the performance gains obtained were significant. Smartphone chips produced higher numbers at the benchmarks year after year, indicating vastly improved performance over the last generation.
But if the benchmarks of the last three years are considered, performance gains have started to slow down, and are barely noticeable for the average user in day-to-day tasks. All this while the flagship smartphone has slowly crept into four-digit price numbers.
It is interesting that OEMs still sell their flagship phones as the must-have, be-all, and end-all for any user. According to a Forbes survey, the top five most used apps in 2022 were Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Snapchat.
For the average user, the price paid for a flagship experience isn't justified for the kind of simple application use one has in mind. All of these applications run very well on even a mid-range phone today, which brings us to our next point.
Mid-range phones today are as powerful as flagship offerings of a few years ago
Mid-range phones today are capable of providing 5G connectivity with Wi-Fi 6 and beyond, coupled with Bluetooth 5 and above. These connectivity features are enough to run not just the five most popular applications, but hundreds of them easily.
For example, the Snapdragon 778 5G scores 2796 in multi-core and 725 in single core tests. Compare this with a two-year-old flagship phone like a OnePlus 8, whose scores were 3064 and 874 on multi-core and single-core tests. Moreover, it looks like one is far better off purchasing a value-for-money mid-range phone than an ultra-high-end flagship phone.
Most average consumers use their phones to check emails, listen to music, navigate, browse, and shop. The mid-range phone today is more than capable of delivering this with smooth performance. Unsurprisingly, they have also become very good gaming devices.
Couple this with the fact that mid-range phones have less powerful processors and more battery capacity in general, and one can easily expect more than a day's worth of battery life. One exception to this is the iPhones of late whose flagships offer a much better battery life than their mid-range offerings.
OEMs are starting to prioritize updates to mid-range phones as well
A good smartphone is one that makes you forget the interactions you have with it, because it just works. Not every day do we need to bring out that 100 megapixel camera for that one picture. We all need a phone to work consistently and reliably. Mid-range phones today achieve this just as well as a flagship phone.
Even the latest trends in the industry are suggesting that fewer and fewer users are upgrading to a new phone annually. People today prefer to stick with their phones for longer. OEMs like Samsung are even updating their mid-range phones promptly, not just their flagships.
For this reason, getting a mid-range phone with a large battery and capable processor ensures a long-lasting device in the long run.
Of course, for a power user who needs the most powerful device on the go with all the bells and whistles, a flagship phone makes sense. But for everyone else, a mid-range phone today will do the job just as well, while saving a substantial amount of money.
