Samsung needs to give us a reason to care about new phones every year

I take no pleasure in saying this, but if the rumors about the Galaxy S25 series are true, then these phones look boring as hell. That would be fine, except that Samsung is asking us all to get very excited about them by hosting a big, loud launch event. And I think it’s time for Samsung — and honestly, the industry as a whole — to look in the mirror and ask: do we really need this?

I’m not saying Samsung or any other tech company should throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and cram some questionably useful stuff into their phones just for the sake of it. That helps nobody. It’s just that getting up onstage and declaring that these phones are fundamentally different and new should be a truly special occasion. And that used to be true! But now, it’s just a thing we do every year that feels a lot like the thing we did last year.

In this particular season of mobile innovation, hardware just isn’t as important as it once was. Take the iPhone 16; the launch event centered so much on software features that Apple called it “Glowed Up.” But when the phones shipped, those software features weren’t ready, and all we really had was a single new button. Did we need all that fanfare?

Google’s on a slightly different trajectory since it completely overhauled its Pixel phone series a few years ago. It’s still figuring out how to make a chipset that doesn’t turn your phone into a hand warmer if you do too many things or how exactly to make the camera bump go sideways. It feels like a lot of that has been settled in the Pixel 9 series, but even that launch event was largely about software features and the many ways that Gemini now inhabits its phones.

Samsung is far from alone here, but I think it’s fair to say that the Galaxy series is in a particularly stagnant phase. The S-series phones have basically looked and behaved the same for the past few years, and all signs point to incredibly minor updates for the S25 series. Even the company’s folding phones have changed very little over the past couple of years. Apple didn’t give us much with the iPhone 16, but at least there was that new button.

There’s one hopeful glimmer on the horizon: slim phones. Rumors indicate that Samsung might show one off at Unpacked, and it seems like Apple might be gearing up to launch a slim iPhone 17 later this year. Is a phone that’s a couple of millimeters thinner anything? I don’t know, but it would look and feel fundamentally different than last year’s phone, which is more than I can say about many of the phones I tested in 2024. Samsung’s slim phone might not arrive until May, so it looks like we’d get a teaser tomorrow at best.

So here’s what I think: let’s bring back S years. Remember the S year iPhones? When Apple offered minor spec bumps but called it an iPhone 6S instead of an iPhone 6? Let’s do that again! Let’s have the big, flashy announcements, but not every year. Let’s save them for the big moments when the tech is ready and it looks or behaves fundamentally differently. Give us a reason to get excited, because the same old fanfare is getting a little stale.