Why Did LG Phones Really Die?

Hey, what's up, mkbhd? You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. It's a very good quote, mainly because it's true and in this case we just saw LG die a hero. That's it, so it's officially official. LG is closing its smartphone business they won't make any more smart

phones

, um, and when this news broke a couple of nights ago, I bet most people were in one of two camps, one, oh, what a shame, or two, oh, LG was still making smart

phones

, which is crazy because no. LG only made smartphones, but LG has made a lot of

really

influential phones that have had a direct impact on the phone you probably own right now, so this is great news.

LG is a great company. Giving up smartphones is great news, but how? Did this happen? Well, we already know that LG has been making phones for a long time and it's tempting to think, if you're at least my age, that its heyday was probably in the mid-2000s with phones like the LG Voyager, LG Envy, LG Chocolate, those. If I knew a lot of people who had those phones, those are very popular phones. My first smartphone was the LG Voyager. I am considering this as a smartphone and I started this channel when I had that phone and even made some videos on it. but yes, a lot of other people had several LG semi-smartphones from that era and I mean a lot of people, 21 million people bought the LG chocolate, but you might be surprised to know that their most popular Android phone of all time was the g3 that appeared.

It came out in 2014 so that was their peak for smartphones, that phone sold 10 million units and their second most popular Android phone of all time was the g2 and it sold around 3 million so clearly there was a decline. LG never found those sales again. If any smartphone had come out after that that competed on a large scale in any price range, they didn't have a successful budget phone, they didn't

really

have anything that started doing numbers in the mid-range and they never achieved much presence. in the high-end market whether in terms of market share and all this was despite having many of the same specifications, materials and features on paper as those that were successful, but phone purge decisions are not made on paper, so my opinion LG actually made decent phones on paper, but they didn't know how to sell those phones at all, like what is the most basic art in the world of marketing, naming things, just a memorable, understandable and definitely name I'm not saying all the things.

Other manufacturers have included names because they haven't, but it's important to have something simple and easy to understand. You know, I know the iPhone 12 Pro does more than the iPhone 12. I know the 12 is newer than the 11. I'm not saying naming your phone lg v60 Thin q 5g made it a worse phone. I'm just saying it didn't help. I don't know why LG insisted so much on those extra words like Thin q, that doesn't mean anything to anyone here, but. They kept adding it anyway, but that's okay, they just forgot the names, forget even what they might think of the software.

LG phones never got much of a marketing treatment. To be completely honest, they had pretty forgettable marketing and, as many have pointed out, found them a bit difficult to characterize. LG phones, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just forgettable, it honestly feels like a washer and dryer, it's like the marketing of their smartphones is in the same vein as the marketing of their other appliances, shining, but it's crazy. The thing is, the actual character of LG phones over the years is really interesting and very low-key and influential, so over the last eight years I would say that LG has been one of the few companies that actually tries very new things. , like super wild things.

Anything really, but that's kind of been their motto: just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks, and sometimes it really sticks. Look at this list in March 2007, we had LG Prada, which was the first capacitive touch. Smartphone with display Virtually all smartphones today have a capacitive touch screen In 2010 the LG Optimus 2x came out, which was the first smartphone with a dual-core processor and the first to record 1080p videos; Then the following year the LG Optimus 3D was the first phone with more than one rear camera, think about that, when was the last time you saw a flagship with only one rear camera?

They also had the first quad-core phone, the LG Optimus 4x. Then it got serious in September 2013, the LG G2 is the first phone to have double tap to wake up. at that time they just called it knock knock feature which meant the first mass produced qhd screen on a phone which was the lg g3, so the v10 would technically be the first dual screen phone thanks to the second screen integrated on top , maybe that's an exaggeration. but there are some dual screen phones now but the lg g5 was the first phone with an ultra wide camera on the back and the g6 was the first with an 18 by 9 screen that had a bit of that taller aspect ratio to keep it. narrower and fits better in the hand and then the v40 was the first phone with all three focal lengths on the rear cameras, an ultra wide angle, a standard and a telephoto, so it would be quite easy to miss if you weren't paying attention, but it turns out that LG has been important when it comes to introducing new ideas that hooked and were somewhat taken for granted today.

I don't know if you can buy that many high-end smartphones that don't have an ultra-wide feature and touch to wake and a high-resolution screen, these are all really good things that caught on and that we see everywhere because they turned out to be good ideas , but there were also a lot of things that didn't catch on, like that mini screen on top of v10 and v20. We don't really see that anymore, this self-healing back on the back of the g flex is a really cool idea, we don't see that anymore. They also tested curved phones for a while because they were supposed to be more natural to hold. your hand and against your face that didn't last long they also had that modular phone that one year with the g5 was great but a year later they finished making modules for it and the whole ecosystem folded and then the g8 is the most memorable recent one for me , so I had a set of infrared sensors for reading hand veins and these weird gestures that barely worked when these things didn't catch on the next year they disappeared, they just left it, it was just gone from the next phone and that has It makes sense, but it's also a little disconcerting as a customer, since what we're looking for in a long-term commitment to a phone is stability, reliability, and consistency, and at least being somewhat predictable that these things will be useful. for a long time, so you're not likely to want to buy a module ecosystem if you don't even know it's going to be available next year, you know, and that's not even considering LG's pretty bad track record when it comes to deliveries. software updates for their phones, which adds to the whole not-very-predictable stability issue.

Now I've noticed a lot of conversations about how maybe YouTubers are responsible for LG's downfall because we didn't give them enough credit, let's talk about that, so I checked back just because I was curious. Turns out I've made about 20 videos about LG smartphones over the past few years. 20 videos and that's not including all the links that I loved. LG also made one of the first videos I had. What went somewhat viral on this channel was my LG G-Flex self-healing video from 2013. And believe it or not, the most viewed content I've ever done is showing off the LG Wing to 32 million people on tick-tock, for What the problem is not the lack of coverage, people talk about LG phones, the real question that many people ask is if this coverage is fair, because if you saw these videos, you might still wonder if LG got the credit they deserve, so my opinion is that there is a big difference between sharing a product with the world and giving it credit for something new or some innovation or an idea that we haven't seen before versus reviewing and recommending a product in general to buy it. a purchasing decision are two very different things and what I started to notice is that I can speak for myself, basically there is a big distinction between innovation and trying something new and being able to recommend something to a wide variety of people and phones that often give them does well in one segment, often doesn't do well in the other, it goes both ways.

Sony, for example, I'll leave that video linked below, so I think over the years a lot of credit has been given to LG for all of that. trying new things and being unique, especially with the hardware, because they clearly did a lot of that, throwing things at the wall to see what stuck every time they showed something interesting and new. I was there to try and point a camera at him. I share my findings with all of you. This self-healing g-flex was a really fun experiment. The g5's modular design was a favorite. It was impressively well thought out and the multiple cameras on the back of the v40 were fun from the start, even if the software features they built into that version to take advantage of them were a bit complicated, so yeah, absolutely ticking the boxes in the group. of innovation and trying new things for sure, but then when it came time for reviews and actually deciding whether we now recommend this. a large group of people, LG phones as an overall package were always a bit difficult to recommend to those larger groups, even recently, uh v60, overall pretty good phone, but a 60 hertz screen on a flagship when all the competition had moved to a higher refresh rate.

It was tough or even the LG Wing was great, but 765g on a thousand dollar phone was a little hard to recommend and it continues as you go back. LG G8 could be the most perfect possible example of an LG smartphone in recent years. this was a really solid phone, high end chip, pretty solid design, very modest of course, no camera bumps, kept the headphone jack with the quad dac, kept the expandable storage, decent battery and great feature , palette identification, yes, that was the new thing they decided to launch. on the wall, so the extra large notch on a phone this year had a time-of-flight sensor, an infrared sensor, and a receiver to identify your hand and let you do hand gestures on the phone and it didn't really work. well you should have seen the room full of journalists, youtubers and PR reps all with this new phone while we try to make our videos about it, everyone is trying to do what it takes to make it work and no one can even We are a room full of professionals, even trained LG professionals, they're like you get it, it was brutal, so if you're going to share that phone, you're going to do one of two things, one is give them credit for trying. something new and maybe it's a strange and unusual set of sensors that we've never seen before, but we highlight what's interesting or review it and we like to package it all together to see if it's really worth buying over the competition for most people and look, I called.

In my review, he was the jack of all trades and master of none, which I thought was true, but apparently he was also pretty harsh. Apparently people thought I was being too harsh on the phone. I didn't really believe it, so I was also far from the most negative opinion about the g8, but here's the point: when you take a step back, the most innovative, unique, untested things you do on your device are almost by definition useful for the smallest number of people and this is true for all phone manufacturers. Now this usually isn't a big deal because if the smartphone company is making money somewhere, then yes, they can designate one of their lines to be the sole innovator.

Take one like Samsung is a perfect example of this, they have their flagship products making money, so they don't take big risks, so they create all kinds of risky and untested ideas in other product lines just to see what sticks. with Xiaomi phones making money, so the mixed series is specifically the one where they test their wild designs. Vivo, if you have noticed, is basically the innovation brand of the Oppo group, so with LG and this is my own analysis. No, I haven't seen their books, but they didn't really have a steady, consistent source of income.

They didn't have some. another smartphone that was gaining them too much market share so they could afford to subsidize a risk taking one. His main line was the funny one, it was the one thattakes risks, so this was just a straight business decision, so you can read the official. Press release from LG explaining why they left the smartphone market and has this statement: LG's strategic decision to exit the incredibly competitive mobile phone sector will allow the company to focus resources on growth areas such as vehicle components electrical, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, artificial intelligence and business. to business solutions as well as platforms and services, so the basic translation LG does many other things as a company that monitors televisions, home appliances that we already know, so cutting the smartphone division that was losing money is just one decision that allows them to focus on other things that could grow more, so what happens now?

Well, if you were thinking of buying an LG phone, don't, if you already have an LG phone, you can check the list. They have promised a small phone list. I guess we'll continue to get one more update until the Android 12 update. We'll hopefully see that they can support phones as much as they can before they disappear, but there's definitely a lot of talent and a lot of patents there, whatever they decide. What to do with that infrastructure is anyone's guess, but I think the moral of LG's story is innovation, trying new things and taking risks is great, but it requires a balance between some long-term stability and consistency, and LG just couldn't achieve it. that balance, but the real bummer is losing LG is an l for all of us just because it's a competitor, meaning one less set of great ideas to be tested like who knows how many others. ideas of types of ultra-wide or multiple cameras that they would have had that we won't be able to see now and that's one less competitor to incentivize the other bigger companies to keep their stuff together and earn our business, so we've lost others. smartphone companies before but LG feels like the biggest lately it feels like the biggest space, the biggest void left in the market anyway the point of this video is not for me to defend myself like I killed to LG, but you know, The question of what happened to LG is not explained by simply saying: "Oh, the big YouTubers didn't give LG enough credit", the truth is always more nuanced, even if you think that's true and This truth is that it was a business decision.

LG was probably thinking for a long time, so either you die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain and LG just died a hero. Boots LG smartphones. We'll miss you not because we were all using our phones but because you moved the needle, uh, that's pretty much it, shout out to Mr. Mobile, who is also releasing a sort of retrospective video looking back at some of LG's greatest moments. I saw he was working on it. I haven't seen the video yet, but I'll link it below when I release it because I imagine it'll be pretty good either way, that was it, thanks for watching, I'll catch you in the next one, in peace.