[GeekyBear]

If they are price sensitive, they would have gone for something like the $399 2016 iPhone SE, which is currently in it's seventh year of support, having gotten another security update last month.

That works out to around fifty bucks per supported year, and you aren't creating a mountain of e-waste by throwing away a perfectly good phone every other year.

[fatfingerd]

Buying something like the Samsung A14 every 4 years would cost about the same and seems a lot more realistic than aspirational.

I think its great that phones are being supported for 7 years but in a way it is a marketing chip based on consumer's using unrealistic linear depreciation.

Some consumers can pass down, repurpose, or only need very basic things, but most consumers need much of the relative performance they first bought, break screens, can't handle embedded battery replacement logistics, etc, so most probably have replaced something like the iPhone SE before 4 years is up and are paying more than they would have expected.

[GeekyBear]

> most consumers need much of the relative performance

The single core performance of the current Samsung A14 is about a third of the currently sold iPhone SE.

If you're going to keep the same device many years, don't buy something with slow performance right out of the gate.

[fatfingerd]

The A14 equivalent in 4 years is going to be faster than the current iPhone SE, not broken, and IMO more likely to survive the 3 years.

[GeekyBear]

Given Samsung's use of bottom of the barrel Mediatek SOCs and slow RAM? I doubt it.

[fatfingerd]

To me that's just a marketing induced cognitive blind spot. You don't have to know what $200 phone you buy in 4 years, but you want to harp on one 90% imaginary one you will hate when there's almost no chance a choice made 4 years in advance is better than all possible choices with actual information. If for example, mediatek continues to widen their gap then Samsung will choose another one that can match the last generation in Moore's law.

A refurbished iPhone SE 2023 that has a new battery and working screen is probabilistically worth more than the iPhone 2023 you buy today, and will be less than $200 unless there's a serious shortage because they have a high failure rate?

In my thinking the cost of similar products in an industry like tech is the best available estimate of how much environmental damage is involved (I.e. upgrading tooling is itself likely to produce waste) so planning to buy a $400 phone once every 7 years and actually buying one every 2 is much worse than trying to get 3-4 years out of what people have tried to make with popular runs of somewhat outdated commodity parts.