Yesterday, I was reading a thread that asked what’s the point of buying a new phone as often as as people do. In the comments there were a variety of answers, but what interested me is that there were a wide variety of answers for how long each person liked to go before upgrading. So I’ve attempted to come up with justifications for a bunch of different intervals. Let me know what you think.
Every….
Year: You spend multiple hours a day on this device, it’s worth having the most up to date. You can sell your old phone for a pretty good price so it’s not as expensive as it seems
2 years: If you like getting your service from one of the major providers then getting a new phone with a new contract can be a cost effective way of getting new tech often.
3 years: With this interval there’s often a noticeable hardware upgrade when you get your new phone and a 3 year old phone still has some resale value.
4 years: Samsung and Google both guarantee 4 years of support, so this is a natural interval for these phones.
For the rest of these, I’m going to focus on iPhones because I use an iPhone and it’s what I’m familiar with. I suspect that a lot of this also applies to android phones. Perhaps push all of these milestones 1 year forward since apple guarantees 5 years of support instead of 4 like Samsung or Google.
5 years: For iPhones this is the interval you’d want if you always want to have the newest iOS. Most phones get compatibility with 6ish iOS’s including the one that comes installed. For example the iPhone X (2017) -> iPhone 14 (2022) since it’s not going to get iOS 17
6 years: For iPhone X again, this is basically the same as 5 years, but you stretch it another year because it’s not a big deal to go without iOS 17 between it’s release and when you buy an iPhone 15 a little while later.
7 years: Let’s continue with the iPhone X example. iOS 15 has continued to get security updates this year so it’s likely that iOS 16 will receive them next year. It’s security, not software features, that are truly important and it’s the last year that apple guarantees having parts, so 2024 is the best year to trade in an iPhone X on from an economy/function trade off point of view
8, 9 and 10 years: you dislike change, you are incredibly broke or you only have a smartphone in the first place because it’s basically necessary to function in modern society. Plus you get to be smug about being green. Most major apps to support back to iOS 12, which makes 2023 a good year to upgrade from your iphone 5s before all your apps start to break, and your aunt starts to wonder why she can’t contact you on whatsapp.
10 years I’m not sure what you’re doing, but you do you, keep up the good work 🫡
One final note, if your phone is too old to have a resell value worth the hassle, still go through the effort of finding an electronics recycling drop off. The plastics won’t be recycled but the metals, especially the rare earth metals will be!
Of course not, it all comes at great cost to the planet. We obviously disagree on the necessity of a phone for modern society. In my frame of thinking where it is a necessity, I write from the point of view that obviously keeping your phone longer is better. It doesn’t even warrant mentioning. So my motivation for making this list was to encourage people to consider keeping their phones one year longer. To do that I have to list every single interval so that I can reach the people who most need the convincing: those who upgrade constantly.
Is being smug bad? It’s a feeling I enjoy so I listed it as a genuine benefit.
It comes to a great cost to you, not the planet. You are paying the price now and you will pay it for a very long time, with money, not with morals. The prices of food are never going down. The yield of crops will constantly fall with each increase of the average temperature.
We do disagree, the difference is the environment will do the arbitration. We cannot sustain this model. It’s not about morality, it’s geology, physics, biology…
Most of the cost will not be borne by me personally. Even if the price of food goes up, as someone from a rich country I already spend relatively little of my income on food. I suspect this is the case for most people reading this thread right now. So for me it is about morals not money. Yet, I fundamentally agree with you; money not morals is the easiest way to convince people to make a change. That’s why I focused on it in my original post.
I want to push back on your idea that food prices will continue to go up. IRL, I work in food sustainability, which means that companies hire me to to help them decrease the environmental impact of their companies. While the increasing global temperatures will push down yields if nothing changes, things are constantly changing and tons of people are working very hard to make sure that food yields are resilient to increasing heat. Plus, and this is the area I work in, we are working to reduce food waste at the producer level which will also help reduce upward price pressure.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed our discussion
Even in rich countries, people stealing in grocery stores is becoming way more common today. People in poor countries will move where there is food. Guess where it is?
Monsanto already said that the germination of corn was very complicated and that we shouldn’t count on them. Replacing corn by something like sorghum would still greatly lower the yields, since corn was a superstar of yield.
And it’s not just the yield but also the quality of the grain itself in function of the temperature, the amount of calories in the grain. The projected drop of yields of corn is around 1% per tenth of degree. +4°C mean a drop of up to 40% yield.