[happytoexplain]

>reasons I can't comprehend

1. It continues to be true that a new phone is noticeably faster and has a noticeably better camera than a 3-year-old phone (regardless of how gross the reasons are).

2. Phones break.

3. Phones are lost.

4. Phones are given away.

5. Some batteries in the batch lose capacity faster than they should.

6. New phones are given as gifts to people who might have gone longer before buying a new phone with their own money.

7. Features.

Even regardless of all that, three doesn't seem unreasonable if you have the money. I seem to be able to go about five years before the battery life and performance become too painful (though it's hard to get an average with data points that far apart), and my tolerance for those issues is probably higher than a normal person.

[HDThoreaun]

There are certainly reasons I can comprehend. I guess it's just hard to see how those reasons lead to 100-200 million people who already had an iPhone getting a new one. I'm sure if I added all the reasons up it would seem obvious but it really does feel mind boggling at first that they're still able to sell so many after all these years.

[memalign]

On the earnings call, Tim’s answer to a question noted that the iPhone active install base is over 1 billion (of the over 2 billion total active devices).

At a replacement rate of 200 million per year, that’s 5 years to turn over the iPhone active install base. Replacing a 5 year old phone sounds pretty reasonable.

Earnings call transcript: https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/05/this-is-tim-apples-q2-202...

“The iPhone base is well over a billion active devices.”