OnePlus, the small Chinese upstart that has charmed Android smartphone enthusiasts with its combination of high specs and rock-bottom prices, has earned itself a small backlash of disapproval this week. Its sin? Introducing a newer and better OnePlus 3 — the 3T — too soon after the first one. The 3 came out in the summer, and the 3T is following up now, roughly half a year later.
Most aggrieved are the people who bought the OnePlus 3 most recently, feeling somehow cheated by the rapid replacement of their shiny new thing with a shinier new thing. If you were in attendance during OnePlus’ launch presentation for the 3T in London last week, as I was, you’d have witnessed company co-founder Carl Pei peppered with questions about why the 3T exists.
I’ll give you the short answer: the OnePlus 3T exists because it’s better.
That’s as much justification as any new piece of technology needs. If the newer thing is better than the older one — and not arguably better like the new MacBook Pros, but definitively and conclusively — then it stands to reason that it should step in and take over. To do anything different would be to slow innovation down.