There’s few purchases if any that are as big a deal for most people as a smartphone. Some people are iPhone devotees, while others will only go Android. There’s other players in the game too, but they’re lesser ones. Up until recently it seemed that there was no price people wouldn’t pay to get their hands on the newest smartphone that had become the Apple of their eye. Needless to say, all those people we saw lined up hours in advance to buy the newest iPhones over the last decade plus had plenty of cash to drop on them. Here at 4GoodHosting, our staff is just like the one you’d find at any Canadian web hosting provider office anywhere in the country - the majority here are fairly opinionated when it comes to what we like or don’t like about certain mobile devices. One thing that’s universally disfavoured though? The way many of them are ridiculously expensive if you’re buying them outright and not through a mobile service provider’s contract. Seems we’re not alone there, as the numbers of high-end smartphones being sold has dropped quite considerably over the last year. While demand for entry-level and mid-price smartphones has remained strong, global sales of the best quality smartphones like the iPhone XS and XS Max have dropped steadily over the past year. Lack of New Wrinkles + $$$ = Remaining Inventories The consensus seems to be that a lack of innovation with the new top-of-the-line smartphones, and then having steep prices attached to them, are making it so that consumers have much less of the compulsion to ‘buy now’ like they did previously - over all of last year (2018) global sales of smartphones grew just 1.2% compared to the year before -1.6 billion units sold. The largest sales declines occurred in North America (-6.8%), Asia / Pacific (-3.4%) and Greater China (3%). The way these markets rely more on flagship smartphone sales than any others makes it so that the sales drop affected manufacturers AND retailers more emphatically. As for the manufacturers specifically, the final quarter of 2018 had Apple experiencing the biggest decline – down 11.8% – among...
