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OnePlus phones used to be my dream phone.
OnePlus forgot the purpose of its existence.
It isn't the stock Android flagship anymore.
They are lost as a company.
Totally disappointed in what they've become.
It feels like they just make rebadged Oppos.
Just another kind of cool Chinese phone.
Over-promising and under-delivering.
I feel disconnected from the brand.
R.I.P. OnePlus.
So this isn't a video I really thought I would make.
I mean, I have been a fan of OnePlus for years.
I mean, how could you not love the scrappy,
never-settle startup?
That promised to stick it to the big guys
like Samsung and Apple.
I mean, one of the smartest things that OnePlus ever did
was from day one, they started with that laser focus
on enthusiasts.
Now, sure, OnePlus had their fair share of issues,
I mean, they certainly didn't have the best cameras,
but when you consider that you had clean software,
a high-end processor, a great performance,
and you had all of that while paying a fraction of the price
of a new Galaxy or a new iPhone,
I mean the appeal, it wasn't hard to understand,
but things have changed a lot in the last few years.
(bell dongs)
So what really pushed me over the edge
into making this video was the recent discovery
that OnePlus has been secretly nerfing the performance
of their latest flagships.
Now, OnePlus is not exactly a company
that has a clean track record,
I mean, they've certainly got up to some shenanigans
in the past when it comes to benchmarks.
So you're probably familiar with how OnePlus
sends out phones to reviewers to take a look at, right?
A lot of companies do this.
However, in the past,
some of these phones were slightly modified
to deliver higher speeds than the retail units.
In some cases, OnePlus have actually shipped devices
that could recognize when you were running a benchmark
and crank the CPU all the way up to 100%,
which is not something they could do
for pretty much anything else.
Recently, Anandtech discovered something
much more nefarious, OnePlus were running the phone
at a lower performance level than it's advertised as.
So to understand why this matters so much,
we've got to take a quick detour into nerd town.
So OnePlus uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chip
inside the OnePlus 9, which is the exact same processor
that's used in a lot of other Android flagships,
such as the Galaxy S21.
It utilizes a variation of the big.LITTLE design
that's basically standard on most mobile devices,
including on iPhones.
Put simply, it puts together four small,
power-efficient CPU cores
alongside four higher performing cores.
Basically, it uses those performance cores
when it needs it, but it saves battery life
when using the weaker cores when it doesn't.
Make sense, right?
So this is a very powerful setup
that works great on devices such as the Galaxy S21.
But on the OnePlus, well, let's just say that (beep)
is out of whack.
What OnePlus have done here,
is that they have built a blacklist
inside the operating system that will
either throttle the performance cores or even prevents them
from lighting up altogether in most apps.
Which means that the real world ramifications of this,
is that if your phone sees you running a copy of Geekbench,
for example, it'll run completely normally,
your benchmark will be exactly what you would expect.
But if you're running most other things
like, oh, I don't know, Chrome,
it will not light up those performance cores,
meaning that you've paid money for a phone
that is delivering only a fraction of the performance
that it is actually capable of.
When called out for this, OnePlus,
they at first gave a blanket statement
on how they optimize for battery life,
which just doesn't hold water,
because even with this throttling,
the OnePlus can't match the kind of battery life
Samsung is able to deliver
with the exact same chip in the S21 line.
Think about this, if it were Apple who had done this,
and Apple is a good analogy here
because they have gotten into some serious (beep)
for throttling phones secretly.
So you might remember a few years ago,
there was a lot of drama around the idea
that some iPhones were losing performance,
and the result of that was that Apple were secretly
throttling the phones to keep them from basically
pulling too much power from their old batteries
and essentially crashing the phones.
So they would slow the phone down
in able to keep the phone at least usable,
but in return, you were slowly losing performance
without really understanding why.
Now that isn't great and they then since have changed it
where you can actually turn it on and off,
that toggle in the settings.
But at least that was for a reason, it was on older phones
and it was because the phones were literally crashing
if they didn't do something about it.
And to be fair, OnePlus has gone on to backtrack on this.
So they have planned to add that exact same kind of toggle
for like a performance selectorx.
Look, I like OnePlus,
they've gotten a pass for this in a way
that basically no other company should have, in my opinion,
I just can't in good conscience, turn a blind eye to this.
It's ridiculous, right?
This is not an old phone that can't continue to work
on an old battery, this is a brand new flagship
that they are massively cutting the performance on
to give you a little bit better battery life,
but they didn't tell anyone.
The only way anyone even knows about this
is because Anandtech found it out
and they were caught red-handed.
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So what exactly is going on with OnePlus?
Now in those early days, they delivered
excellent performance, value and they were cool.
By enthusiasts for enthusiasts was absolutely the vibe
of how they positioned their first phone back in 2014,
the OnePlus One.
So this was a incredibly hyped phone,
it's hard to understand how excited people
were about this phone today.
And we just so happen to have a brand new,
still sealed in box, OnePlus One to take a look at.
All right, and we have the minty fresh OnePlus One
still with the plastic and the sandstone back.
Wow.
You know what immediately surprises me about this phone?
It's thin.
I've never held a OnePlus One before.
This actually feels far thinner than I had expected.
(Austin gasps)
How does it still have battery?
What?
I did not expect that to work.
And you know what?
I mean, obviously this is not exactly a stress test,
but I mean, the responsiveness doesn't feel bad, right?
Like this does not feel like an ancient device.
This is 4K video on the OnePlus One.
So I'll let you, fine viewer,
be the judge of how far camera quality has come.
But let's just say even by 2014 standards,
this wasn't exactly amazing.
From the very beginning, there were,
let's just say, lingering questions,
about what the OnePlus company was all about.
To understand, let me introduce BBK Electronics,
a massive Chinese tech conglomerate that owns brands
such as, Oppo, Realme, Vivo,
and OnePlus.
Except, at least according to OnePlus at the time,
they were definitely independent, right? Definitely.
However, the CEO and co-founder of OnePlus, Pete Lau,
had come straight from being the vice-president of Oppo,
one of those BBK brands,
which was also the same company
who directly invested in OnePlus and allowed OnePlus
to share their supply chain and manufacturing space.
So that beautiful new OnePlus One
that took the tech world by storm,
it bore an awfully interesting resemblance
to the Oppo Find 7a from its very much not-parent company.
(Austin coughs sarcastically)
In quite a few of the follow-up devices,
ranged from sharing some parts,
to basically being identical hardware to Oppo devices.
Android Central, all the way back in 2018,
did a breakdown of many OnePlus phones,
and it's pretty clear that while OnePlus devices
aren't just rebadged Oppo phones,
that in many cases, it's hard to argue
that there's a lot more than just a little,
sharing the supply chain going on.
So there was a leaked memo dated from June, 2021
that spelled things out pretty clearly,
the OnePlus brand has been integrated
into Oppo since late 2020,
and should be fully integrated by the end of 2021.
OnePlus will continue to exist as a somewhat distinct brand.
But to me, it's tough to see this as anything
other than the plucky, the never-settle startup
being watered down and absorbed
into the larger overall Oppo brand.
In fact, we've already started to see this.
They announced back in July, that OnePlus' excellent,
clean OxygenOS, and Oppo's somewhat, less clean ColorOS,
would be merging their code bases.
Look, there are advantages for OnePlus having access
to the larger resources that come
with being integrated into the Oppo, BBK umbrella.
But do you think that the price for growth can come
at the cost of completely losing that
"For enthusiasts by enthusiasts" mantra
that made OnePlus such a cult hit in the first place?
It's hard to see the future of OnePlus
being anywhere near what it was in the past.
They will continue to make phones.
They are really Oppo's and BBK's really only major foothold
in the North American market, for example,
but I don't think the soul of OnePlus is coming back.
And anecdotally, a lot of the people
who I've known at OnePlus for years,
have left over the last 6 to 12 months.
It's not the same company that it once was.
And it's fine.
Enthusiast brands all around the world
who were making these niche phones, such as LG and Sony,
have been sort of ramping down their devices,
because at this point, if you're not Samsung,
you're not OnePlus, you're not Xiaomi,
it's difficult to really make a phone
which is going to stand out.
But OnePlus had that market,
and they had it for a very long time.
And it's sad, honestly.
It's sad to see the brand, not go out with a bang,
but almost with a whimper as it becomes generic.
Businesswise, it's probably the right move.
But for enthusiasts, for myself, for probably you,
I don't think there's any other way to put it,
than OnePlus have settled.