Why is the price of telephones in Italy, and in general worldwide, ever higher? Needless to go around it: some brands have made themselves known mainly thanks to their low cost products, to then raise the bar and try to compete with the most famous brands.
Let me be clear, the possibility of choice in terms of economic devices is certainly not lacking, but it is undeniable that, compared to a few years ago, the medium and high end of the market is more and more expensive. Less informed users blame the producers for everything: in reality, the current situation is much more complex than that and, for this reason, it is good to go and analyze it.
The rise in prices
On April 22, 2014 a Chinese entrepreneur named Pete Lau presented his world to the world way of understanding the smartphone, launching a device called OnePlus One and declaring it a "flagship killer", or rather a smartphone capable of competing with the top of the range in different aspects, but with a rather low price: 299 dollars (269 euros in Italy). The device was equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, announced in February of the same year and mounted by top of the range models such as Samsung Galaxy S5, which cost over 600 dollars (699 euros in Italy).
OnePlus One was the dream of many fans and from then on the Chinese company has had more and more success, up to the present day.
However, the recent launch of OnePlus 8 Pro has generated an interesting debate among users. In fact, given the price equal to 899 dollars (919 euros in Italy), many think that the company has made a leap towards the top of the range, abandoning the so-called "flagship killers", as the price is now too similar to that of high-end solutions.
OnePlus 7 Pro, released in the first half of 2019, had a starting price of 709 euros in our country. In short, the trend had already been evident for some time, but this year the jump was even more important than usual. That said, OnePlus is by no means the only brand that has seen a price increase of this type. Just think, for example, of Xiaomi, which sells its Mi 10 Pro for 999.90 euros in Italy.
The Huawei issue
But what is causing this general increase? First of all, we are experiencing a very particular moment, in which a giant of the caliber of Huawei, flanked by the "sister" Honor, is forced to not be able to use Google services on devices that have a renewed hardware. This is due to ban immediately from the United States of America, which is leading the Chinese company to review its strategies, trying to populate its proprietary App Gallery store as much as possible and focusing on HMS (Huawei Mobile Services).
Let's not forget also about HarmonyOS, which in the future could be a nice "surprise".
Huawei and Honor were achieving incredible results before the ban, so much so that, if it had not been there, it is likely that Huawei would have become the first smartphone manufacturer in the world in a short time.
These companies are at the top of the sector and it is clear that the other producers have every intention of trying to take their "slice". Here we begin to enter an interesting context: this is probably the right period in which companies like Xiaomi and OPPO they can try to acquire more and more market shares.
However, to aim to take what is from Huawei, these companies must try to give users high-end products, which can compete with solutions such as P40 Pro (price in Italy of 1049 euros), promoting them properly with large advertising investments , resulting in higher costs.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 and 5G
The explanation behind the price hike isn't even that simple. In fact, one of the biggest incentives for manufacturers to aim for the top of the top is called Qualcomm Snapdragon 865. Yes, we are referring to the processor officially announced in December 2019. The US company has decided to make the big step, using the SoC coupled with a Snapdragon X55 5G modem. For the uninitiated, the previous Snapdragon 855, announced in 2018, could be used together with the Snapdragon X50 external modem or Snapdragon X24 inside, which however was an LTE modem.
This is the reason why, during 2019, we saw top of the range with Snapdragon 855 that had 5G support (e.g. Huawei Mate 20 X 5G, 1099 euros in Italy) and others with the same SoC that did not support this connectivity (e.g. Huawei Mate 20, 799 euros).
Qualcomm has decided to make its processor compatible with 5G in all its embodiments and this increases costs, bringing them to the levels of the top-of-the-range devices that supported 5G in 2019. In short, the great leap was made towards the new era of connectivity and the manufacturers had to adapt, not having too many choices in the high end of the market. We can not know for sure the disbursement asked to the producers to take home this SoC, but it has been rumored for some time that it is one of the most expensive components in the smartphone field.
In this context, for a manufacturer the best solution can be to go "all-in", making top-of-the-range devices without any kind of compromise. It is therefore no coincidence that OnePlus 8 Pro has IP68 certification. Furthermore, it is impossible not to mention the LPDDR5 RAM, wireless charging and UFS 3.0 internal memory, also present on the Xiaomi Mi 10 range. They are all aspects that drive up costs and that come in a complex period, given the situation linked to the Coronavirus, which is creating many headaches for producers.
For the rest, there are countless issues to consider: there are more and more users who hold their smartphone for several years, the ambitions of the "new" companies are growing, who want to aim at large retailers (agreements with operators, sales in the larger by electronics chains and so on) and the evolution of technology leads to increasing production costs. Other than that, we can't forget the increasingly impressive marketing campaigns.
We will probably no longer drop to the prices of a few years ago at the top of the range level, but surely the market, as has already happened several times, will have to "undergo" various readjustments, once 5G has become a consolidated reality, that even companies more "new" will be well inserted in the large distribution and that the Coronavirus situation will have passed.
The world is changing and we live in a time when an iPhone (i.e. SE 2020) costs less than any recently launched OnePlus device. A few years ago we would have considered this situation impossible, but this is the reality and we will have to get used to it.
