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Apple has the best budget phone on the market. I’ve been saying it for a while, and I’ve been ridiculed for it, but it’s true. In fact, you probably have the best price option for every budget.
I know it sounds ridiculous. After all, the iPhone was always * the * premium phone, the phone for people who really don’t mind paying an extra couple hundred dollars to be part of Apple’s ecosystem of services. On the other side of the fence were Android phones, offering almost the same power and more features than the iPhone, for a significantly lower price. People used to laugh at Apple for “introducing” iPhone features that Android phones have had for years, with home screen widgets being the latest example.
The latter has not changed. But Apple’s iPhone 11, which was launched in September 2019, was a big change: It was priced at $ 699 and dangerously close, in terms of features, to the more expensive Pro variants. The main differences were the LCD screen and a dual camera on the iPhone 11 versus an OLED screen and a triple camera on the Pro. The iPhone 11 had the same powerful A13 Bionic processor, a very similar design, the same camera for selfies, the same water resistance rating and nearly the same battery life.
And then, in April of this year, Apple introduced the new iPhone SE, which also has the most powerful processor Apple has on offer, for the price of $ 399.
Suddenly, if you wanted a cheap phone with lots of processing power, the iPhone SE, heck, even the iPhone 11, was very hard to beat. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 processor, the more powerful alternative to Apple’s A13 Bionic, is expensive, making it difficult for Android makers to pack it into an affordable device.
In that sense, the Pixel 5, which launched yesterday, is a bit like Google’s admission of defeat. The company stopped trying to compete, spec for spec, with today’s best smartphones, and instead gave us a 5G phone with a dual camera (probably a great one thanks to Google software) and a mid-range processor for US $ 699.
Google usually makes good or even excellent phones. And Apple’s iOS is not objectively far ahead of Android; it’s a matter of preference these days. I’m not saying the Pixel 5 is a bad deal (at least not without trying it out).
But consider this. Apple’s iPhone 12 will likely cost as much as the Pixel 5 (or, if some rumors are to be believed, even less at $ 649). If the reports are accurate, it will have an OLED display, 5G, and Apple’s latest processor. Apple will certainly leave some fringe benefits for the Pro variants, but the company’s strategy as of late is to make its mid-range offering almost as good as its high-end offering, as is the case with the recently launched iPad Air. I bet the iPhone 12 will be very close, feature-wise, to the iPhone 12 Pro.
Let’s go back to Google’s Pixel 5. It’s barely competitive even with the one-year-old iPhone 11. It has a significantly weaker processor, a weaker selfie camera (8 megapixels vs 12 megapixels) and no advanced facial recognition system (it has a fingerprint scanner on the back), but it wins in 5G, RAM, storage and OLED display. Some of those perks will probably wear off in a month when the iPhone 12 launches. Unless you’re an Android fan, it will be difficult to recommend the Pixel 5 over the iPhone 12. In fact, I think the Pixel 5 won’t cost $ 699 per a long time, so I would wait a bit before buying .
Some of the Pixel 5’s features, like the fingerprint scanner on the back, already feel dated. However, the camera is likely to be excellent.
It’s not just a Google problem. Even Xiaomi, which historically offered phones with Qualcomm’s most powerful CPU on a budget, has a hard time undercutting the iPhone; Xiaomi’s latest Mi 10T costs 499 euros (US $ 586), while the Mi 10T Pro costs 599 euros (US $ 704). Apple can afford to put its most powerful processor in its mid-range and entry-level phones. Most Android manufacturers can’t.
A fast processor is not the most important specification these days. The Snapdragon 765G in the Pixel 5 will surely suffice for most users. But an Apple phone with an A13 Bionic processor will be supported for another four to five years, from now on. Androids don’t usually get major updates for that long. If Apple offers its shiny new iPhone with a much more powerful processor at the same price, or even cheaper, would you really go for the Android phone?
Sure, Google’s market share is small. With Huawei out of the picture in the United States and Europe, Apple’s biggest competitor is Samsung. But even Samsung is having trouble catching up. With its Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition, the company finally started offering a great competitor at the same price as the iPhone 11. But that phone came a year after Apple’s flagship, and Apple will have a new, faster flagship in question. weeks.
Google’s Pixel 5 will likely remain a great option for Android purists. But the value it offers for the money makes it difficult to justify buying one. It’s indicative of how difficult it is to compete with Apple these days.
We still don’t know everything about the iPhone 12 (officially, we don’t know anything, but so late in the game, rumors tend to clear up most of the details). But judging from what I’ve seen in Android camp lately, I can safely predict that it will do very, very well.
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