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!
I’ve had a total of four smartphones starting in 2012. The reasons for my three upgrades were, in chronological order: battery degradation, theft and battery degradation. I’m hoping that the next one is battery degradation too.
Regarding your 1-year justification, I do spend all day on my phone. It just happens that it’s already more than good enough for my needs. The OLED screen is sharp and doesn’t tire the eyes, the size is great for my hands, the storage space is sufficient and the camera is as good as you can expect a camera with a tiny photoreceptor to be.
<rant> I use my phone’s camera a lot, but the marketing gimmick of just upping the megapixel count and barely anything else means that smartphone cameras have effectively been the same for years. Which is why this ugly trend of multi-camera phones came around as well. My 24 megapixel Nikon camera delivers much better images than my 64 megapixel phone. The best way to improve picture quality in phone cameras would be to increase the size of the light-sensitive surface, not just to subdivide it into more and smaller pixels. But that would require a larger distance between the photoreceptor and the lens, which means a thicker phone.
And since by some divine decree phones must continue to become thinner and thinner until they can double as razor blades, that’s never happening. Thicker phones could also mean larger batteries, a more comfortable grip, better impact resistance, the return of the headphone jack, more easily replaceable components (battery especially), better heat dissipation and more, but who cares about making a product that’s actually better when instead you can aim for a paper-thin sheet of overheated components with a transparent battery that lasts twelve minutes and a 128-gigapixel sensor where each pixel is as wide as an anorexic electron and half the processing power is used to reduce noise in the ISO 9000000 setting required for that sensor to actually register a visible amount of light? And then you take your wire-thin phone and put a huge kevlar case on it so that you can actually hold it without cutting your fingers and it doesn’t shatter into dust when you drop it. </rant>