OnePlus 5T review: outstanding combination of specs and design for $500, Oxygen OS is good, but no water resistance and no MicroSD card support
OnePlus' $500 wonder makes us question why we'd ever pay $800 for a smartphone. — After launching the OnePlus 5 earlier this year …
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2017 the OnePlus 5T lands at $500 with flagship-grade specs and Oxygen OS, and Ars Technica's verdict is blunt: it makes paying $800 for a phone hard to justify. The catch list is short but real — no water resistance and no MicroSD expansion, omissions that would become a running theme in every OnePlus review that followed.
Read against the later coverage, this review is the baseline of an arc: the OnePlus 10T arrived five years later at $649 still with weak water resistance, and the $749 8T in between added cameras and faster charging while skipping wireless charging entirely. The value gap that made the 5T famous kept narrowing as the price crept toward flagship territory.
First-order effects
- Buyers shopping sub-$500 in late 2017 get near-flagship silicon, design, and software from OnePlus, directly undercutting the $800 tier the review explicitly calls out.
- OnePlus ships the 5T knowing two gaps — water resistance and expandable storage — will be the standard objections reviewers raise against it.
Second-order effects
- Rival flagships priced near $800 are forced to defend their premium on durability and features the 5T omits, since raw specs and Oxygen OS no longer justify the difference.
- Each successive OnePlus release raises the price floor ($649 for the 10T, $749 for the 8T) while carrying forward the same omissions, testing how much of the original value proposition customers will tolerate losing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the 'flagship killer' segment dissolves into the flagship segment itself: OnePlus converges on flagship pricing while retaining budget-build tradeoffs, leaving buyers to decide whether the discount justifies what's missing.
- Persistent omissions like microSD support across generations signal that expandable storage is being engineered out of the Android mainstream rather than treated as a cost-driven cut.
The trend: OnePlus is drifting from disruptive undercutter to conventional flagship maker, with each generation's price rise outpacing its feature catch-up.