A mountainous shift in the mobile business in the last few years has been to unbundle the 'subsidy' from the contract into a separate installment plan,making the price much more obvious to the user. There was a widespread narrative that this would damage the tall-conclude of the market (partly Samsung but mostly Apple), but this doesn't seem to have happened at all. However, and shifting to an installment plan model does introduce a couple of interesting modern dynamics. MORE
Source: a16z.com