Wired
If you look at the performance of the mobile phone market from last year to this year as a whole, it is not difficult to see that global mobile phone shipments are declining. Of course, there are factors in the global economic downturn, but we can’t ignore the fact that mobile phones have overcapacity and may be taking the old path of PCs.
What is the old way of PC?
Since IBM standardized the standard of PC, under the action of Moore’s Law, the computer has entered the family and spread rapidly from the expensive high-tech product in the 1980s to the beginning of this century. At the beginning of this century, “10,000 yuan Pentium four-brand computer” became the epitome of an era, while DIY users enjoyed low cost and high performance.
But after entering the multi-core era, the performance of computers is still increasing, but people’s demand begins to decline. In 2011, global PC shipments peaked with more than 300 million units sold, and since then PC shipments have begun to show a downward trend year by year.
Nowadays, computers are not expensive, but people are still not enthusiastic. In essence, there is still excess performance. People have turned their attention to mobile phones and tablet devices. Computers are more used for work and high-performance gaming and entertainment.
Smartphones only carnival for more than ten years?
From the 1980s to 2011, the growth cycle of computers reached twenty or thirty years. The use of mobile phones in China should be counted from the big brother of the first generation of mobile networks. It was a thing in the 1990s. Motorola, Nokia and other companies left too many classics in the era of simulators. Mobile phone sales have also been skyrocketing.
In 2007, Apple’s Steve Jobs released the iPhone, which opened the curtain of the smartphone. Smartphones are also rapidly replacing computers as the electronic device we rely on the most. As you can see from the graph above, smartphone sales peaked in 2018. The numbers for the first two quarters of the year are even more bleak, even bleak than in 2020.
Similar to PCs, mobile phones are now starting to experience excess performance. Even if you play mobile games, game development will match lower-performance mobile phones. Maybe you can’t experience 60 or 120 frames, but it is generally not a problem to play. This makes users less enthusiastic about switching phones, and now users still It is found that the only thing that restricts the use of mobile phones is the storage space, and the more things the user stores on the mobile phone, the more troublesome it takes to change the mobile phone and the less willing to toss to change the mobile phone.
The current PC market still has its own value, and the market has been subdivided. Offices and games have their own target groups. But now the mobile phone is still “all-in-one”, only BlackBerry has briefly blown the business wind. In fact, many people now do not like to deeply tie work and life together, but there is no solution to this helplessness for the time being.
Now semiconductor companies around the world are building new factories and expanding production capacity, but PCs and mobile phones that consume semiconductors are generally weak. Perhaps in the next few years, we will encounter a global semiconductor overcapacity, and each cycle is the law of the economy. There are still a week or two before the launch of Apple and Huawei. In this context, the performance of the new mobile phone is particularly worth looking forward to.