Previously on Lemmy: Motorola
Maybe we should just make this a series now.
Never settle for Oneplus.
I’ve always felt that Oneplus is a brand that I should like on principle of having clean software with barebones but powerful hardware, but in reality, every single Oneplus phone I’ve seen always had some sort of big BUTs attached to them, so buying Oneplus always feels like settling.
Take the Oneplus One for example, that sandstone textured cover was THE most creative material I felt a phone could have had, and I’m honestly shocked nobody has ever done it again. But along with that of course, comes with the cringy “smash your phone” marketing campaign, the half-hearted attempt to distance themselves from their parent company Oppo, the whole software mess with CyanogenMod/OxygenOS, etc.
Had a Oneplus 3T for a while, same deal: Great phone when it works as intended, but they raised their price without making the phone better, and the inexplicable random restarts/battery drain is so irritating, never had another phone that does that.
Recently they’ve dropped all pretense of not being Oppo and abandoned their core audience, choosing to have the “courage” to drop the headphone jack. Mediocre Chinese phones with flagship specs are a dime a dozen, I just don’t see a reason to buy them anymore.
They used to be great value, good specs for affordable prices, then slowly turned into premium shit when they got more popular. Same happening with Nothing now.
Exactly that, they were great until 4 or 5, I think. Then they became premium. It’s kinda a version of enshittifcation for hardware makers: Pander to enthusiast community at the start, get some marketshare and mindshare, then go premium and raise prices, abandoning the original group of fans.
Most of the OnePlus series, including older models, is fully supported by LineageOS, and unlocking the bootloader is straightforward. That were the most important reasons for me to go OnePlus. For me and my family there was nothing else comparably easily supported by Lineage with a good price/performance ratio. We currently use 6T and 8T models, that we bought used. The only downside for me is the lack of a notification light.
I appreciate they have unlocked bootloaders. Now that I’m comfortable upgrading my old phones with the latest Android and security updates I’ll never buy another phone that doesn’t let me unlock the bootloader like Samsung. It’s why I replaced my Note.
I got a OnePlus Nord. I think they are pushing too many phones. They do like Xiaomi, they announce a phone, it doesn’t even have time to arrive in the stores that a new one is already announced. This is confusing as they need to resort to ridiculous naming like “OnePlus Nord 2 ce lite se 5g”. Stores can’t hold 100 identical phones that are differing only in the name. The store where i bought my Nord, dropped OnePlus entirely because “we already carry Oppo, vivo, realme, it’s the same brand”
And this reflects also in the updates. They can’t possibly continue to send updates with this many phones.
I like to get a phone that gets at least 3 years of updates, but in total for the bbk group it means supporting and testing 400 phone models at the same time? They have thousands of employees but they’re not enough , what happens is that software development is basically dropped as soon the new model comes out
Why can’t they do like Apple??? Just three phones per year. Easier to market, easier to support…