Flagships are overkill.
Yes I said it. I mean really even midrange devices are overkill at this point. I get that the main feature which scales with the price is the camera but even on a flagship it’s subpar in comparison to even a entry level, old DSLR.
So if we’ve ruled out the cameras what are the actual benefits of a flagship? Lets break them down and give the reasons why they’re not as important as we think, and how very clever marketing techniques have been used to convince us we need one.
The processor, or chipset.
I am currently using a Samsung A14 4g. Widely regarded as a slow and generally terrible phone, and yet here I am as a tech enthusiast and professional and I’m having zero problems with it’s performance. It’s responsive, can handle the tasks I need a phone to perform and has been playing casual games brilliantly. Granted if I want to play full titles I’ll play on PC or a console, but who really wants to play full blown games on a 6.5″ touchscreen when we have big TV’s and proper gamepads? A flagship phone has laptop or even desktop levels of performance, but ask yourself if you really need this level of performance? Most of us are communicating and consuming media on our phones, we don’t need all that power.
Storage.
This is a strange one. The budget phone technically wins here. Admittedly the flagships have faster read/write speeds on their storage but when it comes to sheer quantity the budget phone generally wins hands down. Why is that? In general flagship phones pricing structures start with a base storage of 128gb. Then there are versions with more storage that you can purchase for heavily increased costs. The budget phone however will generally have a fixed internal storage of 64gb or 128gb, the ace in the budget phones sleeve however, is that they still have micro SD card slots so can cheaply be expanded by however much you want.
Display
This one is a bit of a subjective point. But again coming back to the Samsung A14 the LCD panel on it is excellent. I really do not need anything better. I can’t see the individual pixels, it gets very bright and the viewing angles are great. This might not be the case for all budget phones but at least the ones I’ve experienced recently have all been great. In fact I’d go as far to say that in some cases an LCD panel is better for most users. There is no burn in with an LCD panel, and generally they’re a lot cheaper to replace. You may not get the latest gorilla glass, but when a replacement LCD and glass costs £20 it’s nearly the same price as a screen protector for some flagships.
Construction
The previous point leads nicely into this one. There are some differences here. Flagships will generally be made of metal around the sides, glass on the back and offer some sort of specially coated glass for the screen. The budget phone will be plastic all around with generic glass over the screen. 99% of people nowadays will throw a case and screen protector on their phone. The case will be made of a rubber or synthetic leather and the glass will be tempered glass with little to no oleophobic coating. Why do the materials of a phone matter when you will never see it or touch them? Arguably the budget phone wins here. If the housing is plastic, do you really need a case? Plastic won’t crack like glass and is more resistant to fall damage than metal as it absorbs impacts better. If the screen is cheap to replace on the budget phone, do you really need a protector? You can just use the phone as it is, and if worst comes to worst you completely break the phone it might cost you £100 to replace, whereas a battery replacement on a flagship alone will cost you that and a screen can be upwards of £300. You would be surprised at the added bulk and weight a screen protector and case adds to your device.
Cameras
As touched on earlier, there will be no contest between the cameras on a flagship versus the cameras on a budget phone. The flagship wins every time. Even a flagship from 5 years ago still beats today’s budget phones. But again, as I mentioned before the very best flagship today will still be beaten every time by the cheapest, 2nd hand DSLR that will set cost around £70. With that you have a near unlimited amount of lens and filter options. The flagship will undoubtedly be riddled with non optional AI enhancements that frankly ruin most of the pictures they touch, and anyone that knows their stuff will know they’re edited. It’s personal preference but to me they look like a poor Photoshop so I’d rather go without. Call me old fashioned but I prefer my photos to have shadows and look true to life. The budget phone will most likely be a similar story with the AI. However you won’t be trying to create a masterpiece with a budget phone. You use the camera when you have nothing better on you, or to capture information. To that purpose a smartphone camera excels. Photographers want to be able to control their focus, aperture, lighting and exposure time which smartphones can only emulate. Sensor size also comes into play here, with a smartphone there is a limit to how big this can be. A dedicated camera will always be able to capture more light and raw information, doing away with the need for AI completely.
Update policy
Currently the latest selling point of flagships is their newly extended update policies. Some brands are now offering 7 years of OS and security updates for their latest releases. This is great for sustainability but how many of the original owners are going to keep their devices this long? Flagship owners generally fall into two categories; tech enthusiasts who change their devices often or people that get them on contract and renew when that contract ends. At most that will be 3 years and most tech enthusiasts will upgrade every year. How many of those devices will go sat in a drawer for the remainder of their 4 years of updates? At best this benefits the 2nd or 3rd owner of the devices who will purchase them on the used market. However budget phones aren’t like they used to be. 2 to 3 years of OS updates is common nowadays and up to 6 years in the case of Samsung’s A16. Contrary to what their marketing departments would have you believe there is no hard cut off on your device when the updates stop. Android versions 3 to 4 years out of date can still get all the latest apps and google play security updates so this isn’t a device killer. Technically a win for the flagship here but I’d argue it’s not the selling point it’s advertised to be. It’s definitely a nice to have feature if longevity is a major factor in your purchase, but then again cost comes into play which I will delve into further down.
Charging
Flagships brag about their ultra fast charging. Some go up to 120w wired and 50w wireless. The budget phone might get 25w over wire and no wireless charging at all. Lets apply this to real life. The average phone user charges their phone once ever 24 hours, overnight. The average phone has a 5000mah battery (no difference between budget and flagship here, they all have around this capacity) and an average person would have their phone on charge overnight for at least 7 hours. The charger only needs to be a 1a charger for the battery to be full by the time the user wakes up with time to spare. That equates to 5w charging speeds. If for whatever reason somebody didn’t want to or wasn’t able to charge overnight, the average charging speed of a budget phone is 25w, at max speed that would take just over an hour to charge from empty to 100%. I’d argue that isn’t a major inconvenience.
In my experience with the Oppo Find x8 Pro, even using the 80w charger the battery still takes just short of an hour to charge, because once the battery gets to a higher percentage the charging speed slows right down to protect the cells from damage. Arguably there’s not a lot of difference here. Wireless charging is a bit of a niche criteria for a phone. Some people swear by it, personally I have no need for it. If it was a must have for someone a midrange phone would probably be a better way to get this. Cost of repair also works in favour of the budget phone here too. A flagship phone will most likely be using split cell batteries or silicon carbon cells to achieve the higher charge speeds, or for a more compact form factor. The replacement cost of these batteries will be higher than normal. The average budget phone’s battery will cost around £10, and the repair will be much easier due to its plastic construction.
The cost
This is the big one and I’ve saved it till last. The range of budget phones is huge, and so is the variety in cost. There aren’t many differences between these phones, save a couple like the CMF phone 1 which has much higher specs than it’s similarly priced rivals, which it achieves through cutting out features such as NFC. Other than that it’s generally camera specs which I’ve already spoken about not placing too much value in. There are plenty of perfectly good budget phones from reputable brands that can be purchased outright for £100 or less. I’ll use £100 as the basis for comparison.
On the flagship side it’s the same story, however purchasing habits are different here. The majority of buyers do not go for the lowest price variant of their chosen phone, due to the storage limitations the brands impose to push buyers further up their ladder. Some examples; the S25 Ultra 512gb is £1249. The iPhone 16 Pro Max 512gb is £1399. The Pixel 9 Pro XL is £1319. If I average this we get £1322. I’ll round this down to £1300 for comparison.
Immediately noticeable is that the average flagship is 13 times more expensive than the average budget phone. Do you get 13 times the value from the product? Absolutely not. At the end of it all if you purchased both of them side by side you would have a smartphone in both hands running the latest version of the chosen operating system. They can run the same apps, and aside from a few gimmicks they can fulfill the same purpose.
If we compare the cost of ownership it gets worse. Over two years the budget phone would’ve cost £50 a year where the flagship costs £600. It would take 13 years of keeping the flagship going to get the yearly cost down to the initial price of the budget phone. However even if that were possible (It’s not, it would have to go 6 years without updates on a 7 year promise) it would likely need a battery replacement every 3 years which on the average £100 battery charge would add another £400 to the total cost. The likelihood is the phone would also need a couple of screen replacements in that time too. OLED’s get burn in and bleed when damaged. This would add another £600 to the total cost. So over the imaginary 13 year ownership the flagship actually would cost £2300. Obviously this is dreaming because a phone will never last that period of time, but it’s a useful visualization. If we did the same calculation for the budget phone pretending it could last 13 years the cost would be £100 plus 4 batteries at £10 each and 2 screens at £20 the total cost of ownership comes to £200. The gap is increasing £180 vs £2300.
A more realistic calculation would be that over a 10 year period you replace your phone every 2 years, selling the old one on the used market. The average flagship loses 77% of its initial value after 2 years, whereas the average budget phone loses 50% over the same time period. To get us to the end of the 10 year example we would need to purchase 5 phones and sell 4.
Let’s calculate the flagship first.
5x flagships equals £6500. 4x flagship sales equals £1196. That gives us a total cost of ownership of £5304.
Secondly the budget phone.
5x budget phones equals £500. 4x budget phone sales equals £250. Total cost of ownership is £250.
That’s a staggering difference of £5054 saved over 10 years, just by not buying a fancy phone. You could quite easily buy a decent car with that money.
Another hidden cost of owning a flagship is the risk of theft. A thief knows a cheap phone from an expensive one, and if you have an expensive phone to your ear you’re much more likely to be a target and potentially get hurt.
The final cost is the mental toll. That resell value in the above examples depends heavily on the condition in the case of the flagship phone. If it’s damaged say goodbye to the hope of recouping any money. £1300 is no small amount of money to anyone except the richest among us. Can we really afford to risk this amount of money on a accidental drop on a daily basis, or even losing the device? With an average monthly take home wage of around £2000 in the UK this represents nearly a whole month of someone’s salary. Wouldn’t we all be better off with that kept in our bank accounts in today’s climate?
To conclude; the marketing departments of phone companies must be some of the best in the world. They have somehow convinced the average person who won’t spend more than £50 on a pair of shoes that they absolutely need a £1300 phone that will only last them until the next model is released just a year later. When we look at this objectively it’s ludicrous. If someone buys a new camera it might cost them £300 but it will be dependable for at least a decade. With a flagship we’re getting cameras that will be worse than this, and a load of fad features that don’t add any true value over a much cheaper device. Can it even be argued at this point that it’s vanity with brand recognition? The Samsung A16 looks identical to the S25 unless you had the device in your hand, and all iPhones have looked the same since the iPhone 11. I really do think we’re being played here, and taken for fools.
Hopefully this will be insightful for anyone reading this, and having all the information we technically already knew laid out in front of us is a useful tool for logical thought and rational decision making.
