| > people who need phones will still buy something even if reluctantly I'll be blunt: no I won't. I reluctantly bought the phone I still use (a moto X4) back in 2019, at which point it was already getting old. It was one of the smaller Android phones available at the time; I measured it diagonally corner to corner (including bezel) at 159 mm (6.26 inches). The screen size is 130 mm (5.2 in) according to Wikipedia. This phone is in fact much too big for me, and I'm not happy with it. But I will be sticking with this phone into the indefinite future: until it breaks, becomes unusable, or a worthy replacement arises (a phone the size of the Nexus 5X or preferably smaller, with my must-have features). In the event I can't get this I will switch to a cheap feature phone since I need something for emergency use. I'll look into the mp3 player market to see if there's something I can use for playing music and audio books, maybe if I'm lucky there's something with a nice screen and an e-reader. I'm sure you're right and some people are more willing to compromise than me. However, what also seems likely is that many people are somewhere in between and will wait until their current phone is unusable before reluctantly downgrading to whatever the latest model is. Surely plenty of sales are lost due to this. |
All told, I've probably bought less than half as many phones as I'd prefer. Yes, I do eventually buy one because they effectively are required nowadays, but that's quite a lot of money that isn't going into these company's hands.
Meanwhile, the rest of the market also seems to be lengthening their time between phone purchases..... and phone manufacturers respond by releasing bigger and more expensive phones year over year over year. I won't try to claim it's the majority of the cause, but surely there's some connection between those two.