The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016.
The year is 2030 and President Newsom has just passed the bipartisan “American Communication Act”, which requires all US citizens to purchase a new cell phone every year or pay a penalty of $1000.
No you will be required to purchase device insurance through your employer. There won’t be an open market option but you will get fined for not having it.
cash for clunkers but instead of cars its phones (and you have to specifically buy iPhone to boost apple stonk)
That’s like the scheme they tried to pull in the UK where the government was going to buy AI tokens for every citizens.
Wait till they see how old and shitty my car is.
Mine qualifies as an antique if I wasn’t using it for daily commutes
I can’t believe there are people who update phones that often. My current one is closing on being six years old and it works fine. I don’t know anyone who gets a phone this often apart from kids and teens who need a new one when they break.
I’ve had 3-4 smartphones total and have used each to their end of life. It might be the tism, but I hate changing my phone. All the setups, all the work of moving stuff to a new device sucks so much. Like why would anyone do this?
Phones bought in the early 2010s are a much different beast than phones bought closer to 2020. Pre-2015 you could expect your phone to run out of storage and RAM after only a couple years. I recall I had some google phone which immediately auto-closed every app when it wasn’t active, because of memory pressure. You couldn’t even swap between one app and another to copy & paste something. Hasn’t been the case since 2020, they’re all basically way better than you really need now.
Yea same, I don’t understand people who “need” a new phone every year. I’ve used every phone I’ve owned for at 4-5 years, the only reason I’ve replaced them that often is because I’m clumsy and drop them. My current phone is a cheap OnePlus I bought in 2021 and it still works great. I don’t have a reason to replace it anytime soon but when I do I’m going to look at a non-smart phone replacement.
Fuck payment plans for phones. The only debt I have is student debt and I’m hoping to keep it that way
What has the economy done for me? Fuck off, I don’t owe the economy shit.
Want that to change? Cough up some jobs like you promised to and maybe we’ll talk. Until then, fuck off. Go bother other porks, you know, people with money to spend, if you want money.
NOO YOU HAVE TO BUY THE NEWEST SHITTIEST THING YOU CANT BE HAPPY AND CONTENT WITHOUT CONSTANT WASTE AND CONSUMPTION IT WILL DESTROY THE COUNTRYYes
While it may seem to be a smart money move, it can result in a costly productivity and innovation lag for the economy.
“cmon piggies. we cant pretend profits will always go up no matter what if you dont fall for the constant upgrade cycle”
how the fuck would a new vs. five year old phone help “productivity” when phones themselves are probably the biggest attention suck/productivity drag in existence
Millenials are killing…devices?
People would have been buying way less phones if we made them as good as we can and, with repairability in mind, only releasing new versions when there’s substantial innovation achieved. Unfortunately we don’t live in a rational world.
If you don’t buy phone it hurts the graph. It stops going up.
Dog holding tennis ball comic meme
- Please consume
- No money, only consume
Even 29 months is too soon for a new phone in my opinion. Ideally they’d last 4 years at a minimum.
I wish they were forced to make them user repairable enough to change the fucking battery and the charging port, which is what always fails first. There’s zero reason for me to change this phone until it legitimately becomes unusable and zero reason for it to stop receiving security updates in a year.
I remember it came out that Apple was intentionally slowing down their older phones every year purely to try and incentivise people to buy the latest model.
The source article didn’t have this level of breakdown, but my suspicion is there’s a U-shaped data distribution here. There’s the conspicuous consumption crowd replacing their smartphone every year, then there’s most everyone else using theirs until it stops functioning properly, and thus there’s probably a large divergence between the mean and the median.
as usual, translating “the economy” into “rich people’s money” explains things
we’ve had multi core, multi gig ram devices always connected to mother internet for over a decade. there hasn’t been anything other than iterative progress, but other than phasing out 3g and some OS versions, what was the reason to upgrade the last 2 or 3 devices ?
In a lot of cases they’re getting actively worse and more annoying with each cycle. Multiple brands locked their bootloaders this last one, and not one which was previously locked now allows unlocking.
I’m on a pixel 6 with graphene. For everything I do it’s great. I get 2-3 days on a charge listening to podcasts/music all day every day. No noticeable slowness. Aside from the camera being bad (and not having an aux or SD card slot, but newer phones don’t have them either) I have no complaints . Why would I “upgrade”?
Hell, most new phones are a downgrade in some regards. Headphone jacks are included grudgingly at best, and every new phome is so large and heavy I develop an RSI using it.
I’ve tried multiple times to get a new phone and they all fucking suck for what I wanna do
Looking at OnePlus over here making their cameras in the 13 and 15 worse than the 12 I bought two years ago lol.
Zenfone 11 is worse than 9 as well
same platform boat. ahoy matey but getting me to this one was a chore too.
Im technologically lost atm
The new chips are optimized for AI! Hey! Where are you going?!
OSes that force downloads and slowly degrade the performance
I’ve had my phone more than 5 years now. Maybe 6
Cry some more!!!
“noo you are supposed to only use a phone for 2 years instead of 3, think of the economy”Lol. Two years? Your corporate overlords expect you to buy a new phone at least once a year!
"Why won’t you upgradddeeeee? Our newest version of your device has all the same specs, but the screen is 1.2 square inches larger and we removed all the ports from it ᵃˡˢᵒ ᶦᵗ ᶜᵒˢᵗˢ ¹⁵⁰⁰ ᵈᵒˡˡᵃʳˢ "
NOT THE ECONOMYto be honest for a second, I’ve had my phone for over 4 years and it still works as great as the day i bought it. the battery is still over 10 hours which is good enough for me. my last phone was purchased in 2014 and it’s still being used by one of my relatives (although i gotta admit it sucks). 29 months is really short especially for the US market which i imagine buys higher quality phones.
disposable income is falling off for most people and the rich people that are gaining income are not interested in buying more than one phone, and devices are already fulfilling their function perfectly well and the improvements are always marginal. why would anybody think that sales will not stagnate?
