system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why do smart TVs decrease in price while smart phones increase in price? There is a lot of overlap in their functionality as technology improves for both, but yet changes in price diverge overtime. Why?
gpt
Good question. It's a phenomenon which is pretty unique to the particular products and the technical barriers to each of them.

The overwhelming largest cost in a smart TV is the display, not the other components, and not even the product design. The display in a TV today comes in one of two forms: LCD or OLED. The market dynamics of these two forms essentially guarantees that prices will fall over time. The top end of both these markets are made from two Korean companies Samsung Opto-Electronics and LG Display, who used to dominate the entire industry. The LCD market is no longer dominated by them, as the emergence of Chinese manufacturers with equivalent capabilities but cheaper production has basically squeezed them out. The OLED market was still dominated by them, with Chinese companies unable to match their technical expertise. This was quite short-lived with the emergence of BOE Tech, a Chinese company which is rapidly ramping up OLED capacity. As a consumer this just means we get cheaper TVs at the same or even higher quality.

The other components in a TV are relatively inconsequential. Much of this is because of the size of the TV, which is so large that your components can be whatever size you want them to be really. Also with an external power source, you can basically also make them as inefficient as you want without worrying too much.

A smartphone on the other hand, has component costs which are increasing in every generation. There are so many components, all of which are top-end, that it's difficult to pinpoint exactly which components are responsible. Broadly, you have new components which were not in the previous generations; for example the iPhone 12 features a LiDaR module manufactured by Lumentum, which gives it the ability to measure distance by shooting lasers. You have components which you've had to add more of; for example the five cameras in a Samsung Galaxy S21, or the multiple extra antennae required to enable MIMO technology for 5G connections. You have components which need to become more high-functioning; for example, the most cutting-edge commercially-available chips in the world are 5nm chips manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor or Samsung. Today they are almost exclusively used to make processors (CPU/GPU) for Apple, Samsung, and Huawei.

A lot of this has to do with the size of a phone. As components get more numerous and more powerful, they consume more power. Improvements to battery efficiency have lagged the increasing power requirements, so most phones have resorted to increasing the size of the batteries since they can't increase the size of the phone. About 70% of the space inside an iPhone 12 is just the battery, up from 40% in the iPhone 6. Interesting solutions have been devised to cram more modules into a smaller space; for example, by stacking two boards on top of each other from the iPhone X onwards. However, the fact remains that components need to get more efficient, higher performance, more numerous, while taking less space - which means more expensive.