iPhone14 series has received mixed reviews, but it is still welcomed by the market. Of course, only Pro and Promax, which have obvious upgrades, are popular. The basic model with toothpaste squeeze and the large-screen Plus model are both overturned. Since the departure of Jobs , the voices of badmouthing Apple and Cook are endless. Whenever Apple announces its results, these voices will be pulled out to "whip the corpse."
Is Cook better? The answer is in the eye of the beholder, But one thing is certain, that is, Jobs is still the symbol of Apple, and what supports all of this is the changes he brought to Apple and the mobile phone industry. This is also the reason why Cook was criticized. This problem also plagues other major mobile phone manufacturers.
The lack of innovation in mobile phones is also affecting the development trend of the industry. The shipment volume of the mobile phone industry has been showing a downward trend for many years.
From feature phones to smart phones, changes in mobile phones have had a huge impact on human society. What hinders the progress of mobile phones? Do mobile phones still have a future?
What are the mobile phones using this year?
In 2016, the global mobile phone industry’s shipments reached 1.471 billion units. Everyone thought this was the beginning of the industry reaching a higher level. Who would have thought that this would be the pinnacle of the industry.
During this period of decline in the industry, major mobile phone manufacturers did not lie down. Instead, they increased their investment in research and development. Almost every major manufacturer has several notable "projects" in the past two years. One of the most well-known projects is the chip , Xiaomi has the charging-oriented Penbai P1 chip, vivo has imaging ISP chips V1 and V2, OPPO has the self-developed imaging NPU chip Mariana X, and OPPO will also release its second self-developed chip on the 14th of this month.
vivo self-developed imaging chip V2 Source: official website
In addition to Honor , the first echelon members of the Chinese mobile phone market and the global mobile phone market are developing self-developed chips. Their ultimate goal is to gain exclusive advantages for their own mobile phones, just like Huawei and Apple.
But this does not happen overnight, and the probability of failure is high. "Get it from above, get it from it" is a more realistic route. Therefore, the self-developed chips of Xiaomi and OV essentially use plug-ins to enhance the performance of the main ISP chip, which is a "curve to save the country."
Mobile phone image processing goes through the process from camera to final storage. In this process, the image data must be processed through the RAW domain, RGB domain and YUV domain. Among them, RAW is the original data space, which provides all the lossless data of the CMOS sensor . After these data are "colored" in the RGB domain and converted into the format of the YUV domain, a photo we see will be generated.
However, inevitable losses will occur when these data run through this process. If data loss can be reduced, the final imaging effect will naturally be better.
Mariana X’s direction is optimized for this area. It relies on 18TOPS of computing power to advance image processing to the RAW domain, which can make the output photos closer to the original image information. The
plug-in chip solution can play the role of "icing on the cake", but it cannot provide "timely help", and the latter is exactly what the mobile phone manufacturers urgently need.
The feedback from the market says it all. According to Strategy Analytics, shipments in 2022 will drop 7.8% year-on-year to 1.25 billion units, which is 200 million+ units less than in 2016.
Another direction of efforts of major manufacturers is OS. The goal of this direction is similar to that of self-developed chips. In essence, they also want to improve the competitiveness of products in the face of serious homogeneity and lack of innovation.
OV, Xiaomi, Honor, Huawei, and Apple have all made great moves in this regard this year. The specific details will not be expanded one by one. They are all improving the system.
Regarding the systems of major manufacturers this year, the market has a very interesting point of view, that is, iOS is gradually becoming Android. For example, iOS 16 added a new screen display function, which has become a hot search, but this function has long been available in the Android camp. This just shows how involved the current mobile phone industry is, and even Apple is starting to lose strength.
It can be seen that the strategies of major mobile phone manufacturers are to parallel underlying technology and micro-innovation, and micro-innovation is close to "creation without innovation". In this way, the crux of the problem must be found in order to prescribe the right medicine.
is not innovative, whose fault is it?
In the bleak mobile phone market, Apple's iPhone 14 Pro series is surprisingly popular. It has been on sale for nearly two months and still has to wait 3-4 weeks. In the third quarter, Apple was the only brand with positive growth among the top five brands in the global market, with shipments of 53 million units and growth of 48% year-on-year.
This proves a somewhat embarrassing fact: small innovations can also sell well. Everyone talks about Apple’s lack of innovation, but they are very honest.
iPhone 14 Source: Apple’s official website
This cannot all be blamed on Apple. If a mobile phone brand with unlimited success wants to make breakthroughs in technology, it cannot do without the support of the upstream supply chain. Apple’s exclusive supply in the supply chain is the key to ensuring the competitiveness of its products. There are also companies in the "fruit chain" that have a strong voice.
For example, in the chip field where the Android camp is making efforts, Apple's chips have always been ahead of Qualcomm and MediaTek . This is inseparable from the contribution of TSMC. Apple's first generation iPhone used a glass screen developed by Corning Company . At that time, the mainstream on the market was plastic screens, which made Apple become a globally recognized technology company. The relationship between Corning and Apple is very close. Apple has invested in Corning many times to help it develop screens for Apple.
In other words, when we complain about the lack of innovation of major mobile phone manufacturers, we should also realize that in the mobile phone industry, "innovation" involves multiple links, and the mobile phone brand should not be blamed "one person".
At the same time, in view of the highly convergent characteristics of the mobile phone industry supply chain, the factors restricting innovation must be highly versatile and basic.
Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Pan Jianwei has mentioned this issue. He said in a previous speech that a mobile phone uses at least eight Nobel Prize results, which condenses many basic physics and basic chemistry technologies, and they are all research results decades ago. For example, semiconductor imaging devices are derived from the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics , and integrated circuits are derived from the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In other words, basic research has not made major breakthroughs for a long time, which is the key reason restricting innovation in the mobile phone industry.
"iPhone changed mobile phones, iPhone4 defined iPhone." iPhone4 is an epoch-making product in the history of smartphones. Even with the existence of "antenna gate", it can still sell well. This is the same as the iPhone14 series, which obviously lacks innovation but can still sell well. What is different from
is that iPhone4 has made some innovations at the basic level. For example, it introduced gyroscope on the mobile phone for the first time. A gyroscope is an instrument that can accurately determine the orientation of a moving object. It is an inertial navigation instrument widely used in the modern aerospace and defense industries. Its principle is the "Foucault Pendulum" of the 19th century.
When Jobs released the iPhone 4, in order to demonstrate the usefulness of the gyroscope, Jobs used iPhone 4 to run a small game on the spot. When Jobs turned around, the objects on the iPhone 4 screen would rotate with his body. The gyroscope combined with gravity sensing and acceleration sensing devices can provide an unprecedented gaming experience for iPhone 4, which also stimulated the development of a mobile application ecosystem that was not yet rich at the time.
Looking at the innovations in the mobile phone market in recent years, it exactly reflects this situation.
The biggest innovation in the mobile phone industry in recent years is the folding screen, which breaks through the limitations of traditional mobile phones in terms of physical structure. However, compared with traditional straight screens and curved screens, folding screens still have some shortcomings that cannot be ignored.
The creases of the folding screen are still relatively obvious. The high process cost leads to a higher selling price. At the same time, the after-sales maintenance cost is also high. These three are the main reasons that hinder the popularity of folding screens. According to the forecast of consulting firm Trend Force, the penetration rate of OLED folding mobile phone will reach 1.1% in 2022. Even by 2026, the penetration rate will be less than 4%, and it will not become the mainstream of the industry in a short time.
If basic research is the basic condition for mobile phone innovation, then the cost issue is the basis for the commercialization of research results. In other words, innovation in the mobile phone industry requires two thresholds: breakthroughs in basic research and large-scale commercialization. Can
still break through the bottleneck?
In " Trisolaran ", in order to deal with the blockade of human scientific research by sophon , the earth civilization formulated the Wallfacer plan, and the Trisolaran civilization developed the Wallbreaker to crack this plan. Today's mobile phone industry is in urgent need of finding "wall-breakers" in the industry.
Unfortunately, the Nobel Prize can no longer guide the industry. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to three scientists who have made outstanding contributions in the field of quantum information, and the theories verified by them have been proposed for nearly 60 years.
So, can industrial companies take over the baton of basic research?
In fact, in addition to the well-known chips, major mobile phone manufacturers have been trying to break through technical difficulties. Memory, charging, imaging, etc. are all within range.
Taking memory as an example, mobile phone memory is divided into two types: RAM (running memory) and ROM ( read-only memory ). RAM is also called system memory. Its function is the same as the memory stick in a PC. The larger the memory capacity, the theoretically the phone can run more software at the same time. ROM is responsible for writing information. Once the information is written, it will not be lost.
Source: Yangtze Memory official website
When a brand releases a new product, mobile phone memory is usually called the "three-piece mobile phone set" together with chips and flash memory, which shows its importance. It is precisely because it is important enough that many major manufacturers have developed memory fusion technology, expanding RAM from 1G to 10G+, providing space for increasingly bloated software applications.
In terms of charging, compared with Apple’s 5V1A, the Android camp has made leaps and bounds. The charging power has been increased to 210W and the charging time has been shortened to less than 10 minutes. However, it is a pity that the Android camp has not made a major breakthrough in batteries. The current battery in mobile phones is lithium-ion battery , which was used in mobile phones in the late 1990s. In recent years, major manufacturers have only increased the capacity from 2000mAh to 6000mAh.
screen form is also an important direction for innovation in the mobile phone industry. Since the release of Xiaomi MIX generation, "full screen" has begun to become popular in the mobile phone industry. So far, only the Android camp is present in the folding screen market, and Apple has not followed suit.
Left: ZTE Axon 40 Ultra Right: iPhone 13 Pro Max
From the perspective of consumers, these efforts of mobile phone manufacturers were considered novel in the past, but now they cannot perceive the novelty.
So, is there still hope for a major breakthrough in the mobile phone industry? Node Finance believes that although the current situation of the industry is already like this, there is no need to be too pessimistic. Looking back at the history of human development, technological innovation is never achieved overnight. Only when it reaches a critical point will disruptive innovation appear. In the mobile phone industry, from mobile phones to smartphones, mobile phone innovation has not completely stagnated, but has entered a bottleneck period after the last round of "technological explosion".
Of course, we must also fully realize the speed of change in the technology industry. If we keep comforting ourselves with "the critical point has not yet been reached", it is tantamount to digging our own grave. The mobile phone industry is already facing some questions about its future survival. Currently, many technology companies are developing next-generation terminal devices with the intention of replacing mobile phones, among which AR and VR are the most popular.
Apple is optimistic about AR, while Meta is betting heavily on VR. The latter's VR headset "Quest" has shipped more than 10 million units. In China, the price of the latest model PICO 4 of ByteDance's Pico starts at 2,499 yuan, which is already on the same level as a flagship mobile phone.
Wang Ming, an agent of Pico in a province in South China, believes that although the VR product is currently very popular, it is still in the stage of burning money to change the market. He analyzed the Neo 3 launched by Pico last year as an example. At that time, as long as the user clocked in continuously for 180 days and met the daily operation time requirements, he could get half of the purchase price back. The original price of the Pico Neo 3 was more than 2,000, which was just over 1,000. This year Pico launched Pico 4 again, priced from 2,499 yuan, while Neo 3 has dropped to 1,899 yuan.
Wang Ming also pointed out that the main selling point of current VR products is games, but the game content is not rich enough. This can also be felt from the Pico product manual shown by Wang Ming: the number of game applications in the Pico Store is over 200, and there are 6414 applications on the Steam platform that support VR, of which 5305 (games + applications) are exclusive content of Steam VR. The largest source of resources in the industry is the upstream game platform, which is the same as mobile phones.
The good news is that the shipment volume of VR headsets exceeded 10 million units last year, which has been a huge improvement compared to before. But this is bad news for mobile phones: in the competition for next-generation terminal devices, mobile phones are no longer the only choice in the market.
Node Finance Statement: The content of the article is for reference only. The information or opinions expressed in the article do not constitute any investment advice. Node Finance does not assume any responsibility for any actions taken due to the use of this article.
text / produced by Sihai / Node Finance
