Everything is more expensive. This is something that must be assumed (the assumed reasons for which are not shared) since the pandemic. Despite this, there was some hope that manufacturers would once again focus on the middle class, which garners the bulk of sales.

This is something that hasn’t happened, and as I mentioned last year, it pushes me to recommend high-end models from 2022 over the current mid-range, and as we approach the end of 2023, this makes one thing clear to me: there’s no hope for the discount phone’s return.

There is almost no new middle class. While reviewing the nominations for our Xataka awards, we noticed something quite unusual. This year the pace of publications was particularly slow. Even manufacturers like Xiaomi, which maintains the Redmi Note 12 family and its numerous variants, have dropped a few gears.

Samsung also didn’t want to take over the midrange with too many models and there was almost no presence on the part of manufacturers like OPPO or Realme, which is quite an unusual thing. The upper (low) range has maintained its annual pace, but efforts in the mid-range appear to be low this year.

Mid-range hardware is pretty sluggish. There has been almost no movement in the mid-range through 2023, with the MediaTek Dimensity 8100 saving some gems (compared to last year). Qualcomm released Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 in March. Apart from POCO F5, there is not a single mid-range model that implements this.

Instead, we normalize the midrange with processors near the lower levels; This would have been unthinkable just two years ago.

Efforts are in the high range. The next big revolution in mobile telephony is artificial intelligence, and this requires a computing capacity that is currently beyond the reach of the humblest ranges.

MediaTek, Qualcomm, and even Apple to some extent are preparing their own generation of processors to improve the computing of local operations; A struggle we have not seen in the medium term.

Producers want to make money. And the margin is in the high range. The price of high-end phones has increased significantly in recent years. The middle class did the same, leaving us with an average ticket of close to 400 euros for the most prominent models of some of the main brands.

No matter how much the prices increase in the lower segment, the most expensive always leaves more margin. And the most expensive is the premium series. Here we are talking about the fact that the high range is sold at two to three times the production price; this is something that is difficult to achieve in more modest ranges.

Image | Xataka

in Xataka | Best mid-range mobile phones: which to buy and recommended models