[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every 2 is much worse than trying to get 3-4 years out of what people have tried to make with popular runs of somewhat outdated commodity parts.