Nearly half of our readers now wait three years or more to replace their phones as spec upgrades have plateaued.
Consumers behave somewhat rationally despite capitalist dipshits hoping they wouldn’t.
Cool headline bro.
Three years is a long time?
I usually have mine for at least five years, and only replace them when the battery won’t hold a charge and there is some kind of massive discount.
Battery replacement is $50-100, don’t replace the whole phone for battery performance.
While good advice, the replacements have been between zero and $100 but I wouldn’t have bothered switching for free if the battery wasn’t going dead.
Thinking more about it, the increase in memory for the new one made the minor effort to replace the battery less appealing as well.
Yeah, my last phone’s battery was starting to go and I was able to get a last gen flagship for a riddiculous £400 with a £200 cashback from Samusng just for buying it and I got £75 for my old phone in trade-in so it ended up being not that much more expensive than changing the battery. I’d had the last one for almost 5 years before trading it in.
I usually keep mine for as long as it is getting security updates (plus a few months). This currently means 5-7 years.
And quite frankly, I would like to keep it longer. New phones just aren’t that much better anymore.
My last phone was 8 years old and was still doing well.
Really after 8 years the new phones were finally significantly better for the same price.
The business I work for which does refurbishment has been doing extremely well. People are buying second hand more often as well which I think is good. We’re at the point where most people don’t need the newest hardware, and can easily do everything they need with a device that was released 5 years ago.
Time to move smartphones into the “durable goods” category.
Incremental upgrades has been mentioned, but biggest is likely price creep over the years turning it into a purchase that hurts the wallet more and more.
My previous phone I had for almost a decade I think, it was an s5 galaxy I think. I used it until it refused to turn on.
I had a s5 for nearly that long. It stopped charging and a replacement charging port didn’t work. bought a s10+ 1tb dirt cheap and its been nearly three years.
Omg I miss my s5 so much
The previous three phones I replaced were because:
- Fell off a shelf and shattered to the point of unusability
- Stopped turning on
- I wanted to try Graphene, but wanted a fall back if I broke something (after becoming confident Graphene would meet almost all my needs, I ended up sending the backup phone to a friend, so it didn’t go to waste)
Only reason my wife upgraded her iPhone 7 was because it was stolen.
I stopped getting a new Samsung S# every year when they reduced their trade-in plan drastically. Went from like half the price of a new phone to just $200 if that. Between the and the standard S# slowly approaching $1k each year, I only upgrade every other year and even then I buy the previous model year. Genneraly costs under 800$ for both my wife and I to upgrade.
Yeah, we are seeing people all up and the down the replacement pipeline move up a notch. I have a few friends who used to do the every year upgrade thing, and they are almost all on 2-3 year cycles now. While everyone else shifted to: “well, my current phone still works” cadence.
Didn’t read article, but is every other year what we are considering a ‘long time?’ That’s what I consider a long time for some hard cheeses, but certainly not a phone.
pixel 7 pro on deck
Same here, and I’m not sure what I’ll go to next - the USB port has gotten flakey.
I want to try a Linux phone, but hardware seems to be made of unobtainium, and the software seems like it’s not quite there yet.
Part of me is tempted to just get another pixel 7 Pro on swappa.
6a here. I’d probably still be rocking my pixel 2 if it were for the 3G shutdown.
Yes, the cameras are marginally better and the CPUs faster, but that’s about it. I don’t need, and certainly don’t want, AI features, which is often the rationale for a new phone now. A user-replaceable battery would be nice, though.
Some older phones will not allow you to get the latest OS. So you get stuck with an older one that no longer get security patches. This leaves you vulnerable to hacking. That’s why I eventually get a new one. This takes many years obviously.
FYI: Speech recognition is an AI feature and it gets (marginally) better with the newer chips. For example, in noisy environments.
That’s probably the most-used AI thing that nearly everyone uses on occasion. Older phones had to send your speech to the cloud but with the new chips all that processing can be handled locally.
My Galaxy S22+ is over 3 years old and I expect to get at least two more years out of it. I can afford to get a new smartphone every year if I want but there’s no longer any compelling reason to do so.
You have to keep it for two more years! Because even Samsung can’t get Samsung to sell Samsung DRAM for new phones!
Companies stopped innovating. Phones are getting worse each year, yet they cost more and more.
There’s innovation! What are you even talking about‽
I just upgraded my phone two months ago and now two of the four cameras (which is the same number as my old phone that I bought four years ago) have something like 20% more pixels!
Also—now that I have the latest chip—I can talk to my phone in like three more languages. I don’t speak any of them, but… Innovation!
My new phone is also significantly heavier than the old one and the battery life is like 10% better than my old phone when it was new! Also, my display has a few extra lines of resolution on the top and bottom!
No innovation? Hah!
Don’t forget all of the stupid AI bullshit that you need to disable manually
Adorable to think you can even disable it in first place.
You can turn a lot of it off, but yeah I’m sure there’s shit in there that you can’t
My first smartphone as an S8 that I got late 2017. I used that for 5.5 years before finally upgrading.
I would have gone longer but the battery could not go a simple workday without needing a charge. Samsung also stopped security updates, so I had to upgrade.
I fully intend to use my current one for as long, if not longer.Just like with PCs. There were times when you needed a faster computer whenever possible just to work without falling asleep. Now any computer you can buy off the shelf can run all the tasks you usually need without problems (gaming excepted).
I am still on an iPhone 12 Mini, I bought it in 2021, and have finally resigned myself to buying an iPhone 16 this winter.
Hanging on to my 13 mini for as long as i can.
Looks like the foldable will be the next with a small, external, screen. If they can magically get the weight in the ballpark of the mini I might be interested. That said at $2k+ I probably won’t be.
I can see myself dumping €2k for a foldable iPhone/iPad device, but then I would need to keep it for 5-6 years
