Those damn Brits, how dare they?! Buy more, more often!
Devices are prohibitively expensive these days. The marginal gains from improved tech is also not used to benefit the end user. Devices are not working for the one that pays for it. If only they would release a flagship device with unlocked boot loader, open drivers and a pledge to support it for 10 years. I would buy that. Otherwise I see no need to upgrade.
It’s less that the improvements are marginal (modern flagships are significantly more powerful than 4 years ago for example), it’s just that 90% of people have absolutely no use for most of that increased power. The most intensive thing most people do on their phone is watch media.
I know a lot of young men who, if they have money, just have to have those extra gigaflops and that 4k 90hz phone screen.
Then 95% of the time they browse the web and use it for twitter, etc… 🙄
I will buy a new phone when my phone actually dies, broken screens and old batteries can be replaced. And iOS gets updates for like forever.
I’m on an iphone 11 (or is it a 10?) and it still gets updates.
I’ve had my moto x4 for 8 years and it’s still kicking strong. If it ever dies, I’m getting another.
Not surprising. I used to update every 2 years but my last couple have had a 3 or 4 year gap.
As it should be really. These can be very expensive devices that only make sense if you get a decent life out of them.
When smartphones first took off, each new one was a large upgrade. But each passing year sees new phones being more and more iterative. There’s hardly any difference at all anymore between individual years.
I’m at the point now where I keep my phones until they break or stop getting security updates.
When smartphones first took off, each new one was a large upgrade
And they were subsidized by the cell phone company, so they only cost $200 (In many places in the US, at least).
Yeah definitely this is a big factor.
I have a small pot I save into for my phone upgrade each month. Waiting longer means I get a shiner new phone when I do finally decide to upgrade.
And once I have it I want it to last as long as possible!
When it used to be just part of your contract you wouldn’t think about, just get a new one when your contract said it was time.
There wasn’t even a maximum on the contract. When I got my first two phones, I agreed to a 2-year cellular contract. If I closed my account or moved providers before that, I had to pay AT&T some amount of money to kill the contract. After those two years were up, I could do whatever I wanted. I was then on a month-to-month payment, like standard cell plans today. They just wanted to make sure to recoup their money over 2 years for subsidizing my cheaper phone upfront.
Now, the subsidization is more like a subscription fee, where there are additional fees on the bill each month toward the phone and the cell phone company encourages you to get a new one once it’s paid off. You’re still paying full price for a phone. Possibly forever.
I just don’t see the point of upgrading every two years, and even if I did I’m buying used at this point.
I’m on iPhone and despite all the fanatics creaming their pants over each release, very little actually seems to change.
I know a guy with a 6 year old phone, and when he listed off the features it made me realise how little things have actually changed since it was released.
I have an iPhone 8 and see no reason to update in the near future.
Reading this on iPhone X
Similar with android. I had a pixel 5 and loved it, the pixel 6 pro came out and I was dragged in (higher res screen, 120hz etc etc). Then the pixel 7 pro came out and I bought that too (mainly for signal improvements).
Looking back, my pixel 5 did/does everything these do. I’ve decided my next upgrades will be whenever the below happens:
- Phone broken
- No more updates
- Feature I need, and I mean need (it would be hard for a phone to come out to do this)
I don’t need some random AI features/camera improvments. 99% of my phone use is podcasts, browsing the internet and any phone from the last 5 years will do that nicely still.
They need to give us back the headphone jack, that’s a feature worth getting a new phone for, but then again we can just use an old phone instead.
Or you could put a usbc dongle on all of your headphone cables for $1 each and finally move out of the 80s tech bubble.
Not sure they’re $1 each if you need a dac.
You say it’s from the 80s like it… matters at all whatsoever. It works, and it works well. It doesn’t stop me from adding an extra useless bit of cable on the end of them either, if that’s what i really wanted to do.
Again I was sucked in here… I bought WF1000XM3, then XM4. Since having a kid, we’ve had to watch spending a bit more and i’ve really started to embrace repairability and longevity. Recently picked up a Framework laptop that I plan on keeping for a long time.
Have a framework, probably the 1st gen.
It had a big bug where it would go to sleep and never wake up, but I finally found a firmware upgrade and it’s been perfect since, maybe a bit on the power hungry side while asleep.
You might want to consider a used thinkpad, they last literally forever and you can get a decent one for $500 or so.
Just my thought, the fw is great, tempted to upgrade the mobo at some point, or get the 16, but it’s not cheap, it’s more about being able to upgrade and the flexible i/o, which is actually cool.
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Recently , 5G in the 12, 144hz in the 13 pro , satellite and crash detection in the 14 , this year usc-c. Upgrading that often is an enthusiast thing really (or marketing).
Emergency satellite SOS was a massive selling point for upgrading to the iPhone 14 to a lot of people. To your point though, my 2015 iPad is just now being dropped from future updates.
Meanwhile in Canada it’s being recommended to disable emergency SOS on both iPhones and Androids because of how many false 911 calls they end up placing, causing first responders to waste time on non-emergencies.
Very interesting, do you have any source or references that springs to your mind? I have emergency SOS enabled, but it never happened to me that it has been falsely triggered. And I can’t imagine many scenarios were it would be.
I had it enabled for a bit and everything worked fine, but I was worried about accidentally triggering it so disabled it before hearing about the false alarms.
Here’s an article from the CBC about it.
These are two separate features.
I doubt many people actually have a use case for satellite SOS though.
There’s some pretty remote places in the US. So you don’t need it 'till you need it.
Yeah, marginal camera improvements are kinda meh to me. Has there really been anything that significant since Face ID?
5G is the only thing that springs to mind for me, but I’ve honestly never felt that 4G held me back on a phone considering it works perfectly for playing videos…
Android has gotten high refresh and variable refresh which is great for battery life. Other than that just raw speed, which is usually just throttled down for better battery life and monstrous huge screens.
As far as I can see on the apple side they haven’t seen anything but incremental, and sometimes increments in the wrong direction, changes in the last 6 years.
Next iPhone gets usb c.
That’s great, but considering everyone’s already got the cables they need, for most people it’s not really a feature to upgrade for.
Most people have 1 cable they need for their phone and a lot of usb c. Upgrading means no more going to find that 1 unique charger.
Yeah, it’s nice, I just don’t think that feature is worth upgrading for most people.
Face ID and Apple Pay were jumps forward in the way that people use their phones and were quite exciting, introducing USB C is just backtracking.
Absolutely not. I don’t have a laptop, have a family group that have between us, iPhone X, XS, 11 and an old 7max. All chargers I have owned for the last 10 years are USB A at the charger. So the cable will be USB A to lightning for all the phones and to something else, like micro usb for other devices like a rechargeable bike light. USB C is just to cause e-waste and of no practical use.
Buying a handful of spare chargers is much cheaper than buying a new phone.
I kept my old Sony Xperia right up until I could feel a bulge on the back of it, lol.
I don’t upgrade until the thermal runaway takes my device from me!!! Lol
I don’t upgrade until my phone decomposes lol
Isn’t that due to a potentially hazardous swollen battery though? It’s best to replace it before that stuff happens
Yeah I’ve already got a new phone.
I’ve started to upgrade when iOS updates stop. As the cost of devices goes up, I just keep them longer so the cost per year is about the same.
I haven’t had an iOS device in ages, but Apple does seem to offer pretty decent support timespans for their phone hardware. Looks like it’s 6-7 years of support after the release date, which is respectable compared to the rest of the industry.
On the Android side, my phone stopped getting updates after 4 years, which feels too short to me. Not having access to Android 12+ wasn’t causing me any problems but I didn’t want to wait for some future bug, limitation or security flaw to emerge. I switched to LineageOS (just last night actually) to keep it going for another few years.
Smartphone CEOs dumbfounded when no one wants to buy their $1999 xPhone 25 Pro Max XXL Z-Flip 4d-folding hextuple AI 8k camera with Bionic 10Ghz chip including real neurons
Which is ironically the same as the $1999 xPhone 24 Pro Max XXL Z-Flip 4d-folding hextuple AI 8k camera with Bionic 10Ghz chip including real neurons from last year.
Nah, the 25 has a stylus. The 24 didn’t. The 26 won’t either.
The 27 will come in an exclusive shade of grey! Instead of last year’s exclusive shade of dark grey. Rumor has it they might even try a grey-green in 2030.
You’ll have to get the 26+ PRO ULTRA for $2699 if you want the stylus back.
Thats gonna be my next phone! Guaranteed!
Well the networks will try to tie people in for 36/48 months so… they kind of asked for it.
I’ve been sin only for a while, didn’t realise it had jumped up from the average 24 months in the UK now.
I bought a second hand pixel 6a a couple weeks ago, my previous phone was the OnePlus 3, lasted me 5 years and at the time of purchase it was already a two years old second hand, bought them for basically the same price, 200€.
How are you liking your pixel so far? I know its off topic, but I have one myself and am really happy with it and wanted to get another perspective!
I love it, performance is good, battery is awesome, build quality is pretty good and I’m happy with the stock OS, back in the day I used to unlock the bootloader and root as soon as I get the phone, but with the software support this phone is going to have and the features it has, I hardly see any reason to root.
Yeah I mean the processing power and general hardware just got to a point where nobody really needs more. In fact my 4 year old phone has the same amount of RAM and similar processor to my new one lol. Unless you’re cutting edge 3D gaming it’s not needed to have anything more.
I upgraded only because of battery life, higher Hz screen, newer android version, and to get a wide angle lens. Now I have those even its like…what next? Camera quality is all I ever need, screen Hz is perfect. I’m not sure what will make me upgrade next time but if I replace battery down the line and use a third party OS then maybe it’ll go even longer!
When I looked at the S22 as a potential upgrade to the S20 I have now. It is basically a better camera but no SD card slot (yes they do huge capacities, but boy do you pay for it). So, actually a downgrade for me. Couple that with the fact my battery is still good. Keeping it until at least the S24 now.
To be honest, if my current phone had the a reliable way for me to change it’s battery, I would keep it for longer even! I got my custom ROM going with the latest updates, pixel ported cam. The only limitation I have is lack of 5g and reduced battery life. In all honesty, with chargers in my car, work and home, it hasn’t become a reason to change yet.
Yeah honestly I can see why manufacturers are so reluctant to put replaceable batteries in phones. It’s one of the main reasons people upgrade these days.
They have the handy excuse that it’s to make the phone waterproof and they will die on that hill it seems!
Even that is a lame excuse, waterproof phones event existed in the replaceable battery era! Speaking of the replaceable battery era, I remember those extended batteries. With a thicker back cover, we got even bigger batteries. It’s a pity how we have no choice now.
I noticed the same trend for PCs in the last 20 years too. In the late 80s and throughout the 90s, things were advancing at a blistering pace. At the start of 1990, a common configuration was maybe a 20Mhz CPU and 16 MEGAbytes of RAM, and by then end of the decade, we broke the 1Ghz barrier and were putting 512MB-1GB of memory into our machines.
Yet now, I’m still playing recently released 3D games on a first generation quad core i7 from 2009 just fine (as long as nothing in the game starts spewing too many particles).
I’ve noticed that a lot of the reasons to upgrade now are artificial. My wife dug out an old PC to use two monitors recently, but still does the same tasks that she was doing a decade ago. The computer is ridiculously slow though because of ‘updates’.
Bog standard things like checking her emails and opening Word slow the computer for nothing. Even bare Windows runs slowly because of the graphics enhancements.
Also windows now just hates running on spinning drives and will get the 100% disk useage issue, the only fix I’ve found is swapping to an SSD. HDDs are pretty much only useable as secondary drives now.
Yep, if you’re doing mundane office stuff, you might as well fire up a 386 with Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Except for file formats and more shinyness, not a damn thing there has changed.
You’ll have to prise my 4a 5G out of my cold dead hands…
Not surprising. For most people smartphone reached a point where replacing every two years is pointless. My phone is also 4 years this year, still holds his battery and works flawlessly.
I think it is mainly battery life which drives upgrades now. Unless you really want the best camera. It’s the only thing that seems to improve for the last few iterations.
Everything else is pretty much perfected at this point, but batteries and tiny cameras are hard to perfect. Still have to wait more than two years to see any meaningful improvements in either of those.
Only just replaced my close to 4 years old OnePlus 7 Pro, because it just bricked out of the blue. Would have happily used it for a couple more years. Practically the only improvements on my Pixel 7 Pro, compared to the OnePlus, are battery life and the cameras (especially since I was running Pixel experience on it anyways).
I’ve been upgrading every two years because usually they have some promo for trade ins (Samsung) so I’m getting a new battery and warranty (and slight improvement of camera) for about $200
Meanwhile, here I am with a Galaxy S8 from 2017, doing just fine. Only bad thing is some stuff burned into the screen from overuse of some apps in the past coughs reddit coughs.
I had an S8 for my secondary device and had to move to an S10e for something similar.
My main device is an iPhone 12, which won’t get replaced until Apple come up with a USB-C phone. I used to upgrade every 2 years because there were significant changes to each phone. iPhone 3GS, 4S, 5S, 6S, 8, and 12; that said, if we hadn’t decided to try to get my grandmother on a better device, I’d probably still be rocking the iPhone 8. I kind of miss having a dedicated Home button…
Going on 6.
Had mine for 5 years so far and not planning to replace it any time soon. It even has a 720p display, can’t say I ever notice or think “wow I wish I had a QHD phone instead”
Crazy, even the LG G6 I had 6 years ago had a QHD screen.
You likely aren’t missing that much, if that is a normal LCD and presumably a smaller screen you probably have smaller pixels on your phone than a modern 1080p OLED because of the pentile subpixel array.
