June 20, 2017. The OnePlus 5 launched yesterday at $479, and the tech press has found its new angle on OnePlus: the brand is getting expensive. That $479 price point is $80 more than the OnePlus 3 launched at fourteen months ago. The community is processing the increase, largely accepting it because the Snapdragon 835 at this price is still the best hardware-to-price ratio in the market. But the direction is established and I think it is worth naming clearly: OnePlus is moving upmarket, year by year, incrementally enough to avoid triggering a community revolt but consistently enough to trace a line.
The OnePlus 5 also launched with a camera that reviewers have identified as inverting the photo gyroscope output, producing stabilized photos with a subtle jelly effect. OnePlus pushed a software fix within 48 hours. The speed of the response is exemplary. The existence of the problem in a shipping product is not, and it signals that the company’s hardware quality control processes are not keeping pace with the expectations the brand’s reputation has created.
The 5T and the headphone jack debate
The OnePlus 5T arrived last month with a bezel-reduced 6-inch display, improved front camera, and no headphone jack. Apple dropped the jack with the iPhone 7 in 2016. The OnePlus community spent a year decrying that decision. Now OnePlus is making the same call, and the forums are loud about the hypocrisy. Pete Lau’s explanation, that the display size increase required the removal to preserve internal space, is plausible but unpopular. Carl Pei was clearer in a tweet: the headphone jack is “a compromise we’re not willing to make.” The 5T dropped it anyway.
This is the first clear instance of OnePlus abandoning a community-tested position for a hardware engineering or trend-following decision. The community’s preferences and the company’s decision diverged, and the community’s preferences lost. It is a small thing in isolation. I am noting it here because the pattern it establishes, that community feedback on specific features has limits when engineering or market direction pushes the other way, is the pattern that will determine a great deal about what OnePlus becomes in the next five years.
The price trajectory: $299 (2014), $329 (2015), $399 (2016), $439 (2016 3T), $479 (2017), $499 (2017 5T). From here the direction is clear. Whether it ends somewhere the community can still follow is the question.
Part of OnePlus: The Complete Story, my full history of OnePlus from founding to the Realme merger.