LG may be a quitter, but this week's money and strategy reports from some big names show other smartphone companies succeeding by selling things people want, while carriers try to twist regulators' arms to keep their profits intact.
Top of the list, of course, is Apple, which banks on its gorgeously optimized operation and multi-device ecosystem. Apple juiced its profits this week with a new purple iPhone 12, a classic example of taking an existing product halfway through its annual cycle and making it look new to boost sales. Apple's new AirTag Bluetooth trackers are beautiful and easy to use, and they tie you to having an iPhone forever if you want to be able to find your keys.
Samsung has a solid plan, too: a highly integrated manufacturing operation on a massive scale, and cost-cutting in all the right places. Samsung made its highest first-quarter mobile profit since 2014, Reuters says, with great sales of the S21 series. Phonearena reveals that the Samsung Galaxy S21 costs 13% less to make than the Galaxy S20 did, and removing headphones and power adapters from the box also helped reduce expenses.
If you can't sell a lot of things, you can at least make them high-margin. Sony announced this week that it made a profit from selling a mere 2.9 million phones in 2020, according to Android Authority. It lost money in past years when it sold more phones; lower costs and higher retail prices made the difference for 2020. The Sony Xperia PRO is a perfect example of a very high-margin product: one of last year's models amped up with a case and new software, priced at $2,500 because it's marketed to video professionals. Pity the phone doesn't actually work—see our review for the details of that hot mess.
Carriers, meanwhile, can lean on regulators and move the goalposts. That's what Dish is trying to do in the ongoing fight over Sprint's 25-year-old CDMA network, which some longtime Boost customers still use. Having gained custody of the network in last year's merger, T-Mobile plans to shut it down in January 2022. Dish wants to extend that expiration date so it won't have to give Boost subscribers free or heavily discounted LTE upgrades for their ancient CDMA phones.
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Dish should have seen this coming when it agreed to buy Boost in July 2020. At that time, T-Mobile announced it would turn off Sprint 3G in early 2021; Dish has already gotten a year's grace. But the more Dish can put off the shutdown, the more money it will save as customers upgrade their phones on their own. (Which you should do, if you have an old Sprint or Boost CDMA phone without voice over LTE. CDMA is going the way of the dodo.) So Dish has gone crying to regulators like California's public utilities commission, complaining that it needs more time. It may have some leverage: T-Mobile's statements on the issue appear to have been inconsistent.
I didn't love T-Mobile's anti-competitive merger with Sprint. But I'll side with a company that provides PCMag Readers' Choice–winning service over Dish, which has been delaying and avoiding offering wireless service since its first spectrum purchase in 2008. It claims to be launching its first 5G city, Las Vegas, later this year; we'll see.
Incidentally, Dish lost Boost subscribers both last quarter and this one. It's not doing a great job as a competitive national wireless carrier, CDMA or no CDMA. It seems not to understand that to succeed in this industry, you have to actually offer something that people actually want.
What Else Happened This Week?
- Amazon has a bunch of new low-cost tablets coming. According to Statista, there are really only three tablet players in the US: Apple, with 65% market share, and then Samsung and Amazon, each at about 13%.
- T-Mobile is selling a $60 AirTag competitor that works with both iPhones and Android phones and has real GPS rather than just connecting to a network of phones via Bluetooth. But will you really remember to charge it once a week if you can't remember where you put your keys?
- Samsung's new Galaxy Book Pro laptops will have 5G. Qualcomm has been pushing 5G-enabled laptops for years now, but the category seems stuck on the same old problem where carriers aren't offering service plans that compete with just putting your phone in hotspot mode.
- Speaking of good service plans, AT&T finally introduced a decent mobile hotspot plan, with 100GB for $55, to counter T-Mobile's home ISP moves, Phonearena reported. My pick for an AT&T hotspot is the Nighthawk LTE. If you want an AT&T 5G hotspot, wait until it comes out with something that supports C-band.
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