Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Galaxy S24 Ultra: Worth $100 MORE?!”.
Well, it’s finally happened: Samsung’s already expensive, top-of-the-line, Galaxy s24 Ultra Flagship is now even more expensive. It went from an already steep $ 1,199 to a downright eye, watering $ 1,299, putting it well above the most expensive options from both Apple and Google. In truth, it’s probably been a long time coming, but let’s dig into the factors that probably led to this price increase up. First is the not very exciting elephant in the room and that’s inflation. Almost everything simply costs more these days than it used to, and that includes smartphones. Samsung made several generational improvements over the last few years, including shifting to a 200 megapixel primary camera on the Galaxy s23 Ultra, adding a custom overclock chipset to the entire galaxy s23 series and upgrading its materials all around, while not changing the prices whatsoever in the United States now, however, it seems like the universe is starting to catch up. If you s simply apply the average rate of inflation to the price that the previous few Generations cost. It’S not that hard to make up the $ 100 difference on top of the basic inflation Samsung made one very important change for the Galaxy s24 Ultra it swapped from an aluminum frame to a titanium 1. I’M sure you’re sick of hearing about titanium after Apple put into every iPhone 15 Pro ad, but Samsung is following suit. There are differences in the reasoning behind the change, Samsung swapped for the improved durability and toughness, while Apple did it for both toughness and weight savings. But the simple fact is: titanium costs more than aluminum, and that bump and price has to go somewhere sure some of the titanium that Samsung used is recycled, but not quite all of it, which means there’s going to be a price increase.
Recent research in the smartphone market also shows that people are leaning heavier into the premium segment than before. There were a few years where mid-price flagships were the best option for most people, but since then, there’s been an explosion of Pros, Ultras and other premium. Titles and people are paying up as such. Samsung is adjusting too.
It already knows that the s24 ultra has the best cameras and the most advanced AI features of the entire s24 lineup, and it’s pricing accordingly. Of course, most people won’t actually pay the full $ 1299 asking price they’ll probably buy through their carrier in the US or trade, their phone directly into Samsung, either way the discount is going to cut down on the price a little bit making $ 12.99 a little More approachable. That said, we have been seeing these excellent tradeing deals for a few years already, whether it’s through carriers or Samsung itself, which honestly means it’s a little tougher to use as justification for increasing the price either way. Change doesn’t always happen overnight, so it could just be an example of the pricing finally catching up to where the market’s at as if we hadn’t accounted for the $ 100 price increase already, there’s one more major factor at play: the fact that AI isn’t free Samsung’s Galaxy s24 series uses Galaxy AI, which is a combination of on device and cloud-based AI to improve different aspects of daily life. While the former is pretty easy to wrap your head head around and relies heavily on the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 chipset. To do a lot of the computation, the ladder is much more server based and has a lot more overhead in place.
It’S not that far off of what we saw on the Google pixel 8 Pro, which picked up its own slate of AI features, that weren’t available to the Bas model or to previous generations, and also like Google Samsung, worked out that its most premium, customers were probably Going to be the most willing to pay a little bit of extra money for those features leading to a $ 100 price increase. Certain AI features, like not assist, which turns your S. Pen, notes from scribbles into legible handwriting also rely on a healthy dose of AI. There’S even more powerful features at play like live, translate which works in the native calling app to translate from one language to another without using external software, so you can keep having conversations with friends from other places.
At the end of the day, however, we can at least be a little bit grateful that the price increase only hit the Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra, both the Basse Galaxy s24 and the s24 for plus picked up plenty of upgrades of their own, including the same Snapdragon. 8 gen 3 chipset and several on device AI features. So as long as the pricing there stays consistent, we can call it somewhat of a win for Samsung and just the market catching up over time. It’Ll take a little while to figure out if the Samsung Galaxy, s24 ultra’s price bump was really worth it at the end of the day. But in the meantime you can check out all of Android Authority’s Galaxy unpacked content and stay tuned for everything. That’S to come down below a .
