alt Hacker NewsAfter the blowout success of the Macbook Neo, I'd think the bet would be on a cheap iPhone. Maybe not, as so many people finance their expensive phone through their carrier, but I suspect a $300 iPhone would eat the mid-range Android market.
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Not sure about this- Windows laptops have been a disaster for a decade- consumers have basically no clue of what they're buying and how it will work- will it be a piece of cheap, creaky plastic; will the basics actually work (e.g. audio in and out); will the speed be acceptable, will its fans constantly sound like a jet taking off, etc. A well made cheap laptop with guaranteed quality is a godsend.
The case of smartphones is completely different: Android is actually a good OS and there's plenty of excellent devices and high quality brands in the mid range.
I really doubt it, for several reasons. The Neo is cheap because it mainly leverages a compute core that already existed, consisting mainly of binned parts.
Yes the chassis had to be designed, but that can be used in common for future iterations. That's much harder for phones where the chassis is very tightly coupled to the specific circuit board design.
The 17e already is the cheap iPhone and it's $599. Putting it's internals in a different shell is one thing. Designing and building a half price internal board is quite another, especially as it would either require an entirely new SOC, or mean continuing production of a legacy SOC thus taking up valuable die production pipeline capacity.
Even if they did use an older SOC. Now they'd have to continue supporting that anaemic underpowered SOC with OS updates for years to come, and these future OS updates would have to run well on it.
I don't see it happening.