What happens to the oddballs when AI becomes the price of admission?
I’ve always had a weakness for the weirdos of the phone world. Brands like Meizu, Fairphone, Unihertz, and Murena — they never tried to beat Apple at its own game. They made Android feel less like a foregone conclusion. Fairphone stubbornly insisted on repairability. Unihertz shipped tiny, baffling phones. Murena tried to sell you a phone that actively resisted Google. They weren’t perfect, and most never sniffed the mainstream, but they kept the smartphone market feeling alive around the edges.
Now the AI phone push is here. And it’s starting to look less like a creative renaissance and more like a cover charge — one that many of those small, strange brands simply can’t afford.
Meizu said in early 2024 that it would abandon traditional smartphone projects and pivot entirely to AI-enabled devices. That sounds futuristic until you realize it’s really a warning label.
The rich end gets to define the future
Apple doesn’t need to own the entire phone industry to bend it toward Cupertino. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple shipped roughly one in five of the 1.3 billion smartphones sold last year — that puts it near Samsung and Xiaomi on raw volume. But the real control starts higher up the price ladder.
In phones priced at $600 or more, Apple controls more than two-thirds of the segment. At $1,000 or more, it takes more than three-quarters. That’s already lopsided. But it looks even harsher when you consider that overall smartphone shipments are forecast to fall while premium phones are still expected to grow.
The safest money in the industry is gathering around the richest buyers, the strongest ecosystems, and the companies that can raise prices without torching their customer base.
AI raises the cover charge — and it’s steep
AI makes that imbalance harder to ignore because it raises the price of being taken seriously. A smaller brand can still buy a decent OLED panel, tune a passable camera, ship a fast charger, and build something with more personality than another glass rectangle wearing a camera island like a backpack.
The next round demands more. AI phones need newer chips, more memory, cloud infrastructure, model partnerships, longer software support, and a marketing budget big enough to convince people to use the assistant they ignored last year. Counterpoint Research expects GenAI-capable phones to reach 45% of global shipments in 2026, up from 36% in 2025. That makes AI feel less like a bonus feature and more like the next entry fee.
The squeeze isn’t just in software. Reuters reported that IDC expects the smartphone market to see its biggest-ever decline in 2026, partly because AI infrastructure demand is driving up memory costs. Low-end Android makers are expected to take the hardest hit. Premium brands can absorb the shock or pass it along to customers.
Memory costs are the hidden tax
Samsung and other memory manufacturers are prioritizing high-margin AI chips over traditional DRAM and NAND. That pushes up component prices across the board. For a small brand operating on thin margins, a sudden memory price hike can wipe out an entire product line.
The weird brands are running out of room
Some smaller phone brands were niche for good reasons. Some made genuinely bad software. Some treated updates like seasonal gossip — unreliable and eventually abandoned. But the useful ones still kept Android from feeling pre-chewed. The Android world was already watching Oppo, Realme, Vivo, and OnePlus blur into each other before AI became the new seriousness test.
Meizu isn’t the whole story, but it’s a painfully tidy example. A brand that once helped make Android feel less uniform now has to explain its future through AI roadmaps and ecosystem language, because that’s where the industry has decided seriousness lives.
That’s the part I don’t want to lose in this next phone cycle. Odd little brands shouldn’t have to beat Apple to justify existing. Sometimes the useful thing is simply having a phone industry where good, strange devices can hang around long enough to make the giants look a little less inevitable.
AI is being sold as the thing that will make phones more personal. The bleak joke is that the companies most likely to survive the shift are the ones large enough to make every phone feel a little more the same.
If you care about keeping the weird alive in tech, small phone brands worth watching might give you a reason to pay attention. But don’t wait too long. The AI era doesn’t have much patience for the strange.
