Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What Happened to OnePlus?”.
Hey, what’s up mkbhd here welcome to 2021, so this is the oneplus one, and this is the oneplus 8 pro and the oneplus story is a really fascinating one. So when people ask me like in real life, hey what phone do you use? And i say it’s a oneplus 8 pro the phone i use is called the oneplus 8 pro. The reaction is always one of two things: they either draw a total blank and they have never heard of oneplus and they have to be filled in on what oneplus is, or they already know about it and they pull one out of their pocket too, and now, Maybe they already saw the reviews and they love the thing. It’S actually gotten to the point where it’s become a defining characteristic of the oneplus brand. It’S a really popular enthusiast, smartphone brand, where people really know about it in the community already, but in the outside world.
They’Re still trying to break into this mainstream where everyone’s heard of them, but there’s a really great quote from the dark knight you might heard about it, where you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain and loki. That’S kind of slowly what’s been happening to oneplus over the past couple years. Let me explain so from the beginning, and this is an important fact to sort of keep in the back of your head for all. This oneplus is a brand owned and managed by a company called bbk electronics, and that company also runs the brands for oppo, vivo and realme. So, while all these companies are sort of viewed as independent and they’re, independently managed and run they’re, also kind of related like brothers, so anyway, okay, the oneplus story, starts pretty hot right. They’Re, the new kid on the block, they’re a fresh face and their first phone is a pretty massive success. It’S a the oneplus one and this phone, especially in the enthusiast community catches on instantly. You know they can barely keep up with orders.
They have this wild. Invite only purchase system to get your hands on it, and the phone is hard to get right off the bat and the reason that this phone is such a massive success is because it’s positioned perfectly, as maybe the original flagship killer. So it’s coming from a new upstart company: that’s not spending millions on marketing, they’re, really listening to comments and their forums and they’re delivering features enthusiasts really want, and they have an incredible price to performance ratio. They partnered with cyanogenmod for the software for a custom near stock android experience. It was like a souped-up version of the nexus 5.. They didn’t cut corners with specs and performance and they added features with software updates and they were active within their community and it all comes from this young hungry upstart.
That kind of feels like a startup. That was the kind of energy i could get behind. I really liked this phone when it came out and i feel like, if you’re putting together a list of like the best phones of the last decade. I think this has to be on it.
So oneplus as a company starts building up from that right and there’s a few botched marketing campaigns here and there i suspect, just from them not really being very familiar with this new market they’re working with, but very quickly, they’ve broken in, and they just carve out This identity as being the new enthusiast phone with bang for the buck, but remember remember that fact i told you to keep in mind from the beginning of the video oneplus is a new company but they’re, not exactly a new company. Remember, they’re a sub brand alongside vivo and oppo and realme. So, while a lot of their phones and their startup style management is really fun. If you’ve paid attention over the past couple years to some of their designs and even their oldest stuff, a lot of oneplus phones are also oppo phones. It goes all the way back to that. Oneplus one came out around the same time as the oppo find seven.
Two different phones from two different companies but related companies. So the hardware shares a lot of parts and most of the substantial difference is in the software, since oppo is targeting one market and oneplus is targeting another same idea with the oneplus 5 and the oppo are 11.. I mean put them side by side and tell me without the logo. You could tell these apart a little bit after that. There was oneplus 6t that looked a lot like oppo r17 and even today you have oneplus new nord n100, which is visually almost indistinguishable from oppo’s a53, and even some oppo technologies, like luke charging, get rebranded and included in oneplus phones as dash charging. Now, none of this is a bad thing.
So how do i bring this up? Well, the oneplus brand has been evolving right in front of our eyes. Clearly, they started off this company that was very focused with one phone per year, bringing the hype with the maximum value for the lowest price and diving deep into enthusiast features and listening to users and forums and on social media. All of that, but that isn’t sustainable by itself. The enthusiast market is a tiny fraction of the entire market, and so, while being the enthusiast favorite is great. They definitely want to leverage that status to be able to sell to the whole rest of the market, and so we’ve seen lots of attempts at that over the years. First of all, their flagship pricing as you’ve seen, has slowly crept up year over year, so the oneplus one started at 299 when it first came out flagship killer status and it’s slowly bumped up over the years to now, oneplus 8 pro starts at 8.99, so they Have those early phones, starting with one plus one one plus two one plus three, but they also tried phones like the oneplus x, which were more fashion focused. They started dropping more phones per year with a t version and a pro versus non-pro version, and their latest attempt the nord, which has turned into a full-blown line of budget phones in different regions for different low prices. Now to the enthusiast, this may seem disappointing, like they aren’t as focused as they once were, with this one hard-hitting phone per year to slay the giants as they now go, chasing the mainstream.
And so there’s this pretty new narrative playing out in headlines and comments that oneplus is sort of turning into oppo with all these new phones that are coming out. But if you’ve been paying attention, then you already know: oneplus has been taking pages from oppo’s playbook since the very beginning and both companies, along with pretty much every other major smartphone company, wants to sell eventually to as many people as possible. So there’s a really great video by fellow youtuber tech, alter i’ve recommended it before it’s an oldie, but a gay, but you should watch it on the theory of enthusiast brands and basically his theory is there’s almost no way that an enthusiast brand doesn’t eventually disappoint you, Because there’s only two ways their future can go either. They will move on from enthusiasts and try to eventually sell to the rest of the world, the mainstream buyer, which is a little disappointing, or they continue to try to appeal to the most fickle crowd in the world. That is also the smallest and eventually find that that’s not good enough to sustain a business and they die, and that’s also pretty disappointing. So the moral of the story today is don’t be a fanboy, meaning don’t become such a fan of a company that they can eventually betray you and let you down be a fan of the products themselves.
So if a company you like drops a bad product, maybe it’s time to consider other options. It sounds super simple because it is but a lot of people don’t have quite the same luxury. People working at oneplus, for example, probably feel differently about the company. They work for today than when they started, especially if they’ve been working for the company for a long time matter. Of fact, many people from that company’s early days have left so the oneplus story has been pretty crazy. You know on one hand, it is pretty unusual to see i mean it’s pretty rare and actually kind of refreshing that you see a new brand or a fresh face, sort of break in and disrupt things and shake it up a little bit.
But, on the other hand, you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Now this isn’t to say: oneplus is like done, and they’ll never make another good phone again and they’re going to become evil. No, i actually think they’ve sort of created a dna that will allow them to probably keep making a lot of really good phones. Phones that i continue to use and, like i’m sure, that’ll, keep happening. But i think, if you’re looking for the best bang for the buck, or even the the most enthusiast, focused smartphone brand – well, that’s new shoes to be filled. That’S going to be a sort of a rotating spot at the moment seems to be a lot of red me.
A lot of poco, and probably some new brands coming up, will be in there too. So either way. That’S been it thanks for watching and uh. Let me know if you guys enjoy these sort of explainer videos like this. I had a lot of fun with them, so hopefully you do too anyway, catch you guys in the next one peace .