Buy early and enjoy early, buy late with discounts.
This sentence was once recognized as the golden rule of consumer products, placed in the context of the mobile phone product, that is, the first purchase can be the fastest to taste, experience better performance, photography, network quality, etc., like the iPhone and other very few products will even form a premium at the first launch.
There are too many people who want to get the first one, the number of the first products is insufficient, the supply and demand do not match, and the price increase of the second purchase and sale in the free market is almost the norm.
However, the situation has changed somewhat now, although the first launch can still taste the early, but the experience is not necessarily better than the late purchase, various system OTA upgrades, the quality of the first launch is not controllable, etc. lead to late buying can not only enjoy discounts, the experience is also better.
Buy the product for the first time and enjoy the half price experience
The first purchase means that you can taste new products and new features as soon as possible, but at the same time, it may also be the earliest to face product problems, and Apple's studio Display, which has just been released, was exposed to the problem of poor camera quality shortly after its release.
In this regard, Apple's reply is simple and rude: the system firmware upgrade is solved through OTA upgrade in the later stage.
▲Studio Display image quality is average. Image credit: MKBHD
Yes, the first sale has to endure a bad experience, as for when to debug well, it is another question.
This way of relying on system OTA to solve the experience is not good enough has formed an industry default phenomenon, and in the case of smartphones, it is too common to launch multiple system versions after release to optimize image camera effects and solve system vulnerabilities.
Recently, Xiaomi announced that the price of the 11 Ultra model was reduced by 1500 yuan, in addition to the most direct cost performance, the official also said that after 13 versions of iterative upgrades, the picture quality, camera speed, telephoto experience and other experiences have been relatively good improvements.
The first product on sale is not necessarily complete, many new features need to rely on OTA system upgrades to solve, Redmi said in the K50 series first sales Q&A, DC dimming and 120Hz can not be turned on at the same time, and the follow-up will be added through OTA system upgrades to join the function.
Meizu 18 series is upgraded through the OTA system after its release, supporting the simultaneous opening of 2K resolution and 120Hz high refresh rate, this example is not uncommon, and even triggered the "everything can OTA" ridicule.
In addition to the function upgrade, there are also many cases of ticket skipping.
This year, iOS 15 and iPadOS have undergone different degrees of ticket jumping, which should be one of the key features of the same broadcast sharing in the 15.1 version before the launch, resulting in the official version of September when the real heavy new features are relatively few, live text as a small efficiency function has won a lot of attention.
The universal control function jumped tickets longer, originally Apple said that it would be launched in the fall of 2021, but it was not released in the winter, until the iPadOS 15.4 and macOS 12.3 versions were officially launched, which will already be March 2022.
A more fortunate situation is quality control, the first batch of products shipped are more tight, if the quality testing is not strict enough, there will often be problems, before the airPods 3 debut, because of the instability of quality control on the hot search.
Headphone splicing is not rigorous, there are burrs, more importantly, there is a problem with the sound of current, a friend next to me who bought AirPods 3 for the first time in the Apple Store "won the lottery", because of the current sound finally chose to return.
At one time, some people blamed the production side for the quality control problem of AirPods 3, and the AirPods 3 made in Vietnam was more likely to have problems than the domestic version.
But in fact, for consumers, it is difficult to trace the cause of the internal information, to avoid buying problematic headphones, whether there is a real problem with Vietnamese manufacturing, I am afraid that only Apple itself knows, consumers can only rely on experience to confirm whether to return.
In today's increasingly important software experience, OTA upgrades are the norm, and the first start is still available, but your experience may be "half price".
There are fewer and fewer phone features that can't be changed by OTAs
Although OTA is a joke, it is enough to prove its influence in the field of consumer electronic products. If you look closely, it is easy to see that today's mobile phones and other products have fewer and fewer features that cannot be changed by OTAs.
A particular example is that Apple often sets aside "hardware redundancy" in designing products so that OTA software updates can be updated later.
Apple mentioned the U1 ultra-broadband chip in a page keynote at the iPhone 11 conference, but did not directly bring the corresponding functions, until the iOS 13.1 push, only supported directional perception and the new version of the AirDrop function, positioning more accurately.
Apple devices, all equipped with U1 chips, use the new AirDrop function, and the transfer speed is much faster.
In the past, physical hardware was often considered to be something that OTAs could not change, such as the weight of the phone, and software modifications could not change the laws of physics.
However, this "common sense" is also slowly loosening.
For example, in photography, the physical laws of the amount of light entered and the pressure of the bottom to kill people are gradually invalidated under the influence of computational photography.
The mobile phone camera module is smaller than the camera in any case, and under the limitation of physical volume, the imaging quality is difficult to catch up with the former, but computational photography introduces multiple composite HDR+ technology, including the later night mode, which greatly improves the imaging quality.
At the same time, the calculation of photography for the hardware requirements of the photography module is lower, the lens module takes multiple pictures in a flash, the computational photography divides each photo into a small part, and finally chooses to combine the better quality part into a photo, bringing better imaging effect.
In this process, the hardware is the foundation, and the compositing algorithm determines the upper limit of the photo quality, while also reducing the shooting requirements.
Huawei even derived computational optics on the basis of computational photography to further improve clarity.
In the past, photography was a physical process of photoelectric conversion, but under the influence of algorithms, it became a mathematical calculation process.
As the hardware with the most interaction of mobile phones, the screen is also affected by more and more algorithms, such as automatic brightness, the original color display that adjusts the color temperature of the screen with ambient light, and the variable refresh rate screen that changes according to the scene and operation.
There are more and more hardware parameters, but there are fewer and fewer parts that need to be regulated by ourselves.
Earlier, Apple's vice president of marketing, Schiller, mentioned in an interview:
From Siri's more natural vocal effects to intelligent photo album retrieval, from improved battery life to AR's light and shadow effects, it (machine learning) has woven through the minutiae of iOS-sized features and every aspect of the user experience.
Similarly, on the Android side, AI or algorithms appear more and more frequently at the conferences of various mobile phone manufacturers.
▲ The AI performance of Snapdragon 8 has been greatly improved compared to the previous generation
In the case of algorithms and software becoming more and more important, the mobile phone is no longer a hammer deal, from the moment it leaves the factory, it is not a complete body, but an optimization iteration at a time, to find the sweet balance point, may be the balance of power consumption and performance, or may be the balance of image and computing power.
Buy early and enjoy early, to put a question mark
Manufacturers chase the first launch, is the behavior driven by commercial interests, whether it is chips or products, which can prove to a certain extent the hard power of manufacturers in hardware, software, supply chain, etc., more importantly, the first launch means the exclusive window period.
Earlier, Xiaomi and Lenovo both said that they wanted to launch the sale of Snapdragon 8 platform models, and now we have also seen that the first new chip means maximum attention and upfront sales, and people are willing to pay for higher performance and more functions.
But today' software and algorithmic OTA updates are becoming more frequent, and a launch doesn't mean the best experience.
Chasing the first launch means that the mobile phone manufacturers have adjusted the product energy consumption ratio and the time of image performance less, and when we experience the product, we have also encountered changes in the performance of the mobile phone due to changes in the system push.
The implementation is that the performance requirements of "Original God" and other games with higher performance requirements have reduced the actual running frame rate, but the endurance and heat have been eased to a certain extent, and the balance between performance and endurance and heat is becoming more and more important.
This balance is often not achieved at the time of launch, including images, and often matures after multiple versions of OTA updates.
On the other hand, the epidemic and other reasons caused by the price increase of basic raw materials has not ended, the lack of core, material prices, means that the cost of products has become higher, taking electric vehicles as an example, batteries as one of the most important components of the product, raw material prices rose, the overall cost of the rise, has contributed to the recent announcement of a number of electric vehicle brands price increases.
In this complex situation, a return to self-need is the solution.
The first new machine experience is not necessarily good, it needs to be polished by OTA many times, and the impact of rising raw material prices is not over, it is better to go back and think about whether you must replace it, buy on demand, is the real cost performance.