And if batteries were trivially replaceable, I'm sure they'd come up with a different excuse: not enough storage space, "it's getting slow", this year's model has a much nicer camera, blah blah blah blah.
It's not that I'm not sympathetic toward wanting the new shiny. I've been there and done that and generated my share of e-waste. But I've managed to (mostly!) get off that treadmill. I only got a new phone last year because my old one stopped getting security updates. The new one will (in theory) be supported for 7 years, so, barring loss or catastrophic breakage, I should be good until 2031.
I think this is changing simply because the rate of change for phones has slowed down like it did for computers. Just like a 2014 computer is a lot closer to a 2024 computer than a 2004 computer was to a 2014 computer in 2014, a five-year-old phone is a lot less outdated than five years ago.
After happily replacing the battery in a ten year old phone, six months later it was obsolete due to the 3G network switch off; the device was no longer capable of one of it's primary functions; making and receiving phone calls.
It's not that I'm not sympathetic toward wanting the new shiny. I've been there and done that and generated my share of e-waste. But I've managed to (mostly!) get off that treadmill. I only got a new phone last year because my old one stopped getting security updates. The new one will (in theory) be supported for 7 years, so, barring loss or catastrophic breakage, I should be good until 2031.