[daemonhunter]

When they cost as much as they do, is it really a surprise that a good portion of people don't want to replace them every other year? I would like to be one of the people replacing theirs every year or every other year and while I could afford it, I can't justify the expenditure. Add to that the fact that most phones purchased within the past couple of years remain performant enough for most people.

[screye]

Exactly,

at this point phones cost about the same as laptops and laptops have a ~3-4 year replacement cycle.

I won't be surprised if the same starts applying to phones, now that the improvements between generations are mainly cosmetic.

[black_puppydog]

Top reason for me to even consider upgrading from my Galaxy S5: Google maps has gotten so overloaded with "features" that opening it takes about a minute and unloads everything else including music player. Similar for Twitter. I don't complain about fb messenger because I took its bloat as a nudge to ditch it years ago already. Luckily, Osmand is getting better and better, and Twitter less and less relevant. \o/

[bagacrap]

Seems easy to justify to me. You use it constantly, a small increase in joy or functionality multiplied by many hours = worth the cost of a speeding ticket.

[josteink]

3% faster is just going to be 3% faster, and nowhere near bringing me actual joy.

Having to pay $100 a month for a difference barely measurable in real world performance however... That will cause me real-world dissatisfaction.

[Dylan16807]

You're kidding about those numbers, right?

An optimistic but realistic scenario is something like 40% faster and $20 a month, where the phone is used a lot and the speed translates into saving multiple hours a month. Definitely worth it there.

[mdorazio]

40% faster at what? Games that you aren't going to play? The vast majority of users aren't going to notice a speed increase in their daily tasks. It's like claiming the latest Intel desktop processor is X% faster than last year's when the bottleneck outside of a few applications is not the processor.

[Dylan16807]

You never wait for your phone's processor? I certainly do. It doesn't benefit all the time, but it definitely benefits outside of games.

I regret not elaborating on how X% processor benefit would only be Y% real life benefit, but I thought my point was clear enough. I would have been making a much stronger claim about hours saved if I actually thought the total use of the phone would go 40% faster...

[mdorazio]

I run a 3 year old phone and no, I have never waited due to the phone's processor. Any lags have typically been the result of memory shuffling or lengthy app bootup times that have noting to do with processor speed. I'm fairly confident saying phone processors haven't been a bottleneck for most people since probably 2015.

[josteink]

If the phone is a flagship or Apple-priced that’s at least $1200. $100 a month if you buy a new one every year.

If the webpages I browse today load fast on my existing phone, network being the speed barrier... will I actually experience a 40% speed-up on a new phone? No way.

The value is just not there. And that’s not my opinion. That’s the market speaking. Figures are down for phones everywhere.

[Dylan16807]

Every other year. $2400. And that's if you throw your old phone in the garbage.

$20-25 a month lets you trade up to a new $700-900 phone every other year.

You won't benefit from that 40% all the time, sure. But if you get 8%, and you use your phone two hours a day, that's almost five hours saved! Processing is not a negligible amount of waiting. Plus new phones tend to have better radios.

[saltcured]

What's interesting about these numbers is that few people seem to apply the same analysis to the $50/month or more they are giving to the mobile network provider. I use a prepaid SIM without any data plan and spending about $50/year for phone calls and SMS. I currently pay my home cable-modem ISP about $70/month, and it provides a service that I don't think can be effectively replaced by mobile network plans at this time (perhaps with coming 5G services, that might change).

My smartphone only sees data via wifi, and it is definitely not at the center of my life. I get more than enough internet exposure through my home and office computers and wifi networks. Being disconnected outside is one of my guilty pleasures. My main use of my phone outside work is for offline GPS and casual camera use in the wilderness, where there is no phone service even if I wanted it. As a result, I value a small and light phone since it is mostly a passive burden in my pocket. But, the battery needs to last a whole camping trip away from the electrical grid.

My current phone is an aging Moto G4 Play which can still go 5+ days with many hours per day GPS logging. I am starting to see reduced GPS reliability that I think may be physical antenna damage. So, I may replace it with a fresh mid-range phone, rather than replacing its user-serviceable battery and looking into non-OEM firmware updates to extend its life.

[josteink]

I don’t care. The value is just not there for me.

There’s a million things I’d rather spend $1000+ on that will get me real joy, rather than incremental improvements to a yet another generic product in an increasingly stale (and increasingly locked down) product-line.

Smartphones is just not a “it thing” anymore. Get over it. The market certainly says. (As in it’s not just my opinion.)

[hyperpallium]

I think the higher prices are in anticipation of slowing sales, the root cause of which is the end of Moore's law etc.

[manmal]

I‘m not sure you can blame Moore‘s law here with iPhone CPUs getting 20-30% performance bumps every year.

[hyperpallium]

Since 28nm, successive nodes cost more per transistor, instead of cheapening exponentially as they had formerly. Strictly speaking, this is one of the Moores-related laws, falling under the "etc" of my comment.

tl;dr the performance bumps cost more.

[2muchcoffeeman]

For a while it was alright. I was willing to upgrade every tick of the iPhone cycle and hand down my old iPhones.

I even handed down a couple of iPads.

The last few years has been different though. The devices have been good enough. And the prices on the lastest iPhone has kept going up. Had the prices been cheaper I’d have upgraded. My parents are on 4+ year old phones (I use for 2, then they use for 2 before another hand down) and even older spares that are just used for travel and the get a local sim. The incremental improvement is worth it if I can pass down.

As it is, I think they’ll have to get new phones when they just stop being supported. I’m not upgrading.

[EthanHeilman]

I have a pixel one; I see no reason to upgrade. What feature do new phones offer that I can't do with the pixel one.

[wilsonnb3]

Waterproofing is worth it IMO.

[sapphire_tomb]

In ten years of smartphone ownership, I've never killed a phone with water damage. I've actually never lost one to any damage at all. Waterproofing is a gimmick (to me).

[WaltPurvis]

So upgrade when/if you drop your old phone in water? That's actually the only time I've upgraded to a newer phone, the two times I ruined my old phone with water. If my next phone is waterproof, it might be 10 years before I upgrade. (Right now I'm on a Galaxy Note 4, which I got after accidentally running my Note 2 through the laundry a few years ago; it's more than adequate for what I use it for.)