Phone makers are about to sell you yesterday’s design at tomorrow’s prices.
The teardrop notch emerged in late 2017, when Android brands sought to differentiate themselves from Apple’s iPhone range while chasing a bigger ‘screen-to-body ratio.’
That compromise later got binned for punch-hole cutouts, and 90Hz panels were pushed out once 120Hz displays became the easy brag.
Now the DRAM and storage squeeze is so severe that manufacturers are considering reversing those upgrades and trimming the rest of the spec sheet.
When LPDDR and flash eat up the budget, you start shaving costs from screens, materials, and memory configs.
Weibo tipster Digital Chat Station previously warned that pairing LPDDR6 RAM with UFS 5.0 storage would already cost more than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro.
If your memory and storage bill is bigger than your flagship chip, the design team gets told to make do with cheaper bits.
That is where the teardrop notch crawls back in, along with 90Hz displays that are cheaper to mass-produce than the 120Hz panels people expect.
Before 120Hz went mainstream, 90Hz was the sweet spot for fast, ‘buttery-smooth’ scrolling without battering battery life.
Storage is getting the same treatment, with microSD expansion being floated as a way to avoid the expense of high-capacity internal flash.
Weibo tipster Repeater 002 says manufacturers are looking at a tray that can accommodate a physical SIM card and a storage expansion card.
RAM ceilings may drop with configurations capped at 8GB, while entry phones ship with 4GB to keep component costs from blowing out.
There is a grim upside: developers might finally have to optimise apps for phones that cannot brute-force their way through sloppy code.
Chassis quality could take a hit as well, with polycarbonate or plastic cases replacing aluminium to shave costs where buyers will feel it most.
One earlier report even suggested the budget segment could almost ‘disappear,’ which is what happens when cheaper parts still cost more.
The industry is gearing up to charge more for phones that look older, refresh slower and feel cheaper in the hand.
