Why does nobody buy LG Smartphones?

okay take a look at these two phones this is what 350 buys you from lg this is what it buys you from samsung it's plastic or take a look at lg's last flagship phone the v60 spec for spec it is surprisingly comparable to samsung's galaxy s20 or s20 plus the same chipset 8k video stereo speakers and yes samsung has a better display but lg has a better battery and a headphone jack and while samsung's phone is still hovering at around the 700 mark i got this for 400 brand new so it begs the obvious question how is it that this company is storming ahead there are almost 30 percent market share globally while this company's at barely two how is it that samsung is having record-breaking sales while lg is looking like they might need to take a step back or stop production entirely well take a closer look at this v60 and thanks to dashlane for sponsoring this video okay this is how the phone came to me and to be honest it's an immediately impressive device i got it for around the same price as the oneplus nord which is a phone with plastic sides and mid-range internals and it was way cheaper than some samsung's phones that are entirely plastic this is solid glass and metal it kind of feels like a slightly tankier version of the galaxy s10 plus in design and even actually has a us military level durability certification you do feel the lack of screen refresh rate and i would say that the notch up top makes it look kind of generic but it's a good screen you've got to remember that lg makes some of the best tvs on the market right now i'm using two of them on either side over here and when you look at the screen you can feel it plus i gotta admit even though lg's software skin does look a bit like knockoff samsung there's some interesting stuff here you could take 3d photos which is definitely a gimmick but it's a fun one it has asmr video mode and for those of you who don't know what that is it basically takes the quiet sounds and amplifies them it is missing a telephoto camera which is a bit of a shame but the main 64 megapixel sensor is pretty solid and you know how i mentioned it as a headphone jack right it's not any ordinary headphone jack providing you've got a decent pair of headphones to plug into it they will sound better than on any other phone any other phone thanks to a quad dac inside that basically just gives your headphones the juice they need to run out their best mkbhd made a really interesting video about why people don't buy sony phones and he highlighted how they were better than they were given credit for but i would argue that lg phones just given how cheap you can get them are even better versus the credit that they get so why does no one buy them well as i've been describing this v60 to you would you say it's left an impression on you would you say it's left you with a clear idea of what lg is all about probably not almost everything about this phone or really all their phones from the design choices to the software skin to the feature set they don't feel cohesive they feel like just a random assortment of choices without any real clear objective kind of sounds a bit like my life to be honest the point is i don't know what this is meant to be and i think it's because lg doesn't know what it's meant to be put it this way when you think of apple you might love them you might hate them but you probably feel something it might make you think of the really satisfying unboxing experiences it might make you think of clean lines and quality it might just make you think of high prices but you do have an association even sony as many mistakes as they've made in the smartphone market they at least know who they are sony phones are photography focused with tall aspect ratios and sony industrial design but with lg even as someone who owns like 10 lg devices i couldn't tell you what their deal is if you go back through their past smartphones you realize that with every new generation they just tried something it usually didn't take off so they dropped it then they tried something else and then they dropped that too they gave one of their phones a mini secondary display they made one of their phones modular they built curved phones they even had like vain recognition for unlocking don't get me wrong not all of their ideas were bad ideas this isn't a wish.com scenario for almost a full year lg was the only major player with an ultrawide camera they were one of the first to pay attention to creators with a proper manual video mode lg was they were one of the first in the world with not just a quad hd smartphone display but also laser autofocus lg was an innovator but by not sticking to the things that they did try instead just hopping from one idea to the next their brand just stopped meaning anything meanwhile they were giving their competitors time to to basically take their half-baked ideas spend time on them and do them better the point is this if you can't cultivate a strong emotional connection to your brand then even if someone does buy an lg phone one year they've got no real attachment to it and so unlike samsung and especially apple lg had one of the lowest levels of customer loyalty or in other words the minute that another brand comes out with a phone that looks cooler lg users would be very likely to just jump ship the company is now teasing a rollable phone and i would love for this to work out for them but chances are it's just going to follow the same path as the rest of their half-baked concepts okay i also think lg's naming convention is a big part of their problem so historically lg has had two main series of flagship phones they've had the g series and they've had the v series and that's fine that works but then why did the g series go up in once g2 g3 g4 but the v series went up in tens v20 v30 v40 and then why do the budget phones go up in both tens and ones like you've got a k42 you've got a k51s they've got a q60 and straight away this makes the number itself meaningless and it means that as an average consumer looking at lg's entire lineup i've got no idea what's what it's like trying to learn a new language that's good anyway the worst bit is thank you every single one of these flagship phones presumably to try and make them fit in with lg's wider smart home brand had the word thank you slapped onto their name what were they thinking it's unnecessary it makes it look really complicated like a phone for nerds and i imagine a lot of people's first thought is how do i even pronounce that if i can't tell you the name of my phone am i really going to be spreading the word i'm being a bit dramatic but naming is important like if you think about how widespread the excitement has been as sony's moved from the playstation 4 to the playstation 5. do you think they'd have the same level of excitement if they'd moved from the wqsj47 to the wxjkll probably not now thankfully it looks like lg has finally got the hint because velvet is the simplest nicest name they've given to a phone in a long time and if you are enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be remarkable now do you wanna know what their biggest problem is though it's pricing and you might be thinking well you said earlier that lg phones are really cheap they were when i bought them but at launch they were not lg's problem is less about the price itself more the fact that they can't seem to stick to one like this velvet yes i bought it for 350 dollars but when it was announced less than a year ago it was 600. or take the lg g7 smartphone in the uk it launched 779 pounds and within six months it was 2.99 that is the worst value retention i've ever seen and i think a big part of it is sales now putting a smartphone on sale isn't necessarily a bad thing i think some companies do a really good job with these flash price drops but those only work if you put the prices straight back up to normal as soon as you're done but if we go back to that g7 price graph for a second this phone was on permanent sale two days after becoming available maybe it didn't get as many pre-orders as they were hoping for so they dropped it but if you're this flexible with your price who's gonna take it seriously like who in their right mind is going to buy an lg phone at full price if they can wait two weeks and get 20 off and then who's gonna buy it at that price if they can wait another two weeks and get another 20 off what lg need to do is to pick a lower starting price and stick to it if they'd launched this velvet phone at 400 instead of six hundred dollars i think sales figures would have been in a completely different ballpark i think the three four star reviews that it got would have become four slash five star reviews and most importantly it would have started to make the lg brand mean something value also on this note if you have the option to be cheaper than your competitors you should do it like with this flagship phone the v60 the company launched at 900 and that's not bad in an age where top end phones are 1200 but for some reason lg decided that with some of its carriers they would bundle in the secondary display worth up to 200 to turn it into a sort of btec foldable phone what proportion of normal smartphone users do you think want this kind of phone experience five percent maybe what else you should have done is to forget the second screen and make the phone seven hundred dollars being cheaper than your competitors is the best selling point you can possibly have and i would say the final nail in the coffin for lg is that they've just done a poor job with the press with youtubers and the media in general now this isn't me saying that i deserve review samples or loan units but almost every time i've tried to contact lg whether it's because i wanted to attend a launch event so i could cover it or even just to ask a question about a product no matter how i've contacted them i've been met with something along the lines of we'll get back to you they do work with some media in the united states but globally it just feels like they almost don't have a pr team i don't personally mind paying for my own devices it's what i did for all of these but i don't think lg's apple i don't think they're in a position where they can afford to do this think about it for most reviewers and for most writers if they have to go out and buy lg phones just to cover them at their launch prices they then have to wait two extra weeks compared to the us journalists who might have got them for free and early or two weeks and two days if they wanted a discount only to then create a piece of content that probably doesn't earn back what they paid in the first place because not that many people are searching for lg phones who's gonna do this where lg is right now they need relevance they need conversation you know part of the reason that lg has this problem that no one really knows what they're about is yes they have mixed messaging but it's also just the fact that the average person never sees anyone talking about them and the solution is honestly as simple as just finding people who want to cover these devices and giving them access to do that there's one barrier though there's one thing that makes lg's situation even tougher than it seems it's the fact that with a lot of markets and the smartphone market in particular when companies get ahead they get further ahead and when companies fall behind they get further behind and this is the position that lg finds itself trapped in let's say i had a smartphone company of my own and let's say that one year my market share fell from 20 to 10 this is even more of a problem than it sounds like for starters i'm making less profit which means i've got less money to reinvest into making my next phone better which is what i would need to do secondly because i'm only selling half as many phones i'm only ordering half as many components and the way it works in these markets means that you get a less good deal because of this you pay more per component but what makes this even worse is that even though i'm selling half as many phones i'm still paying full price for all the fixed structures that are in place or my factories or my storefronts on top of all that once you lose a customer to samsung to apple to xiaomi you would have to do something even better than them to win them back you're no longer the default option for that customer so we're in a market where life's not good for smaller phone brands they either die like amazon's fire or they get acquired like htc by google or they are already just a sub brand generated from one of the bigger brands the big companies are almost too far ahead for the smaller ones to compete okay let's talk about dashlane an app whose entire premise is to make the internet easier so you've probably been told at some point that the internet is unsafe that you're constantly a risk of being hacked while you're online and that you should make each of your account passwords not just unique but also complex enough that they end up looking like an entire novel written backwards but who's gonna remember them that's what dashlane's for you basically just use your fingerprint or your face id and dashlane will then be able to instantly autofill all your details onto any site now there's a decent chance that you're already using like google chrome's default autofill software which is fine but there's two key advantages to this a it's faster because it works no matter which device you're using i could be autofilling something on google chrome on my mac but then i could pick up my iphone open a safari browser and still have the same details ready to go and two it's safer because instead of just remembering a password that you typed in dashlane can auto generate the best passwords for you so you can have every single one of your accounts like completely locked down but at the same time the only thing you'll ever need to access them is your biometrics so i've left a special link down below for dashlane it is actually completely free to use but if you do go through this link you can upgrade to premium for 50 off okay thank you so much for watching my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one you

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 5,111,358

Keywords: lg, lg phones, lg v70, unboxing, smartphone, android, tech, lg phone 2021, lg unboxing, best lg phone, fail, scam, why lg failed

Id: FW3wNsTLCEw

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/JxY1989]

I don't think he is particularly biased. And it explains why big names often don't review LG phones (no review models being sent out and terrible PR/marketing dept).

Could explain why very few tech reviewers even look at LG anymore.

[u/dgduris]

• You have the best sounding phones - like nothing else is in the same universe - during the evolution of high-res streaming.

• You have the best manual cameras in upper stratosphere - Sony being in a separate universe.

• You provide the highest value and innovation per dollar in the US market.

And you have LG's market share?

YES! Your marketing SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[u/JeromeZilcher]

Thanks for the post. On-topic, I think!

He made a debatable statement about the LG Wing in this video:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/LGWing/comments/kfqhdy/the_otherwise_respectable_arun_sneaks_the_wing/

That he had not even tested at that point.

He is one of the many reviewers (including Mr Mobile and MKBHD) who do not put much value in a 3.5mm jack let alone a QuadDAC. So I always look at their reviews and opinions with interest, but I know they give me only a part of the puzzle, not the whole picture of what there is to know.

On the plus side: he made this great video about fast charging and battery maintenance:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/lgv20/comments/j5sq3d/arun_explains_in_a_balanced_accessible_way_what/

[u/drucurl]

He's horribly biased...especially against. LG

I was actually pretty surprised to see him give LG a shake in this video.

But his body of work is like MKBHD's. Constant shilling for Samsung and Apple and barely knocking them for their flaws. Both pretended that the Samsung taking away the SD card slot was no big deal. Both also act like the quad DAC is nothing much....or the supposed drop proofing on the Vseries devices etc.

​

Love it or hate it, the LG V-series retains almost ALL of what Samsung (and to a lesser extent Apple, who aren't a value-for-money company anyway) have removed:

SD Card Slot, Charger, Headphone Jack. Those things are so important to me that I think I might actually switch over to LG when my Note dies.

That said, LG has other problems that weren't discussed. Their quality control has been, imho a notch below the other OEM's....and that's not just the bootloop saga.

[u/Clintgreen01]

I do enjoy his videos and I have subscribed to his channel a while back. I mostly agree with his overall assessment of LG currently. I would never have even looked at the V60 as a replacement for my S10e except I had a specific requirement for a barometer. In searching for phones with barometers, I found I was limited to the S20 (or wait for the S21) or an iPhone. iPhone was disqualified because the app I need the barometer for is an Android app. So - my search also highlighted the Velvet - and only then did I even see there is something called a V60. There was no marketing material for the phone at the shops or units on display. Even when I had selected the phone I had to contact LG to find a unit in stock somewhere to actually get to buy one. At 2/3 the price of a vanilla S20 - it was an easy decision.

[u/ISeeADarkSail]

They sure are phones.

[u/rhophotos]

I will concede that the G line didn't have a real cohesive lane though. It started out as an iPhone/galaxy competitor, sort of a phone for everybody, then it kinda became the place where LG tried new stuff, then it just became a baby V line phone.

The V line tho has always been very linear in its development.

[u/ANDROID-SKA]

He is an apple fan boy

[u/giraffe_legs]

I've used Samsung since the s4. Went from a S9Plus to this when it released. I like the phone however Samsung's programming efforts are miles ahead. I lost features I never knew were Samsung features until I got this phone (true smart screenbrightness, smart lock when you put your pocket, voice commands while on call). Bottom line, I'll be going back to Samsung after I pay this phone off but I do love it. Got the dual screen. This monster.... This LG ThinQ v60 5g is a monster in both name and spirit. You go chonk ass phone, you go.