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People Are Keeping Their Phones Longer Because There's Not Much Reason To Upgrade, Study Finds (vice.com)
According to a recent study by Hyla Mobile as reported by the Wall Street Journal, a mobile-device trade-in company, the average age of an iPhone at trade-in is now 2.92 years. That's up from 2.38 years in 2016, and 2.59 in 2017, according to the company. From a report: Part of this, according to Biju Nair, chief executive of Hyla Mobile, is because phone plan carriers moved from a subsidized payment model for new phones, to payment plans, as smartphones got more expensive over the years. Now, if you purchase it from a big carrier like Verizon or T-Mobile as part of a plan package, your phone is basically on loan to you from the carrier, while you make smaller monthly payments until it's paid off and you own it outright.
It can take years to pay off a new smartphone (the iPhone XS Max costs almost $1,100), and once you've done it, there's not much incentive to give up that investment -- especially when the newest models aren't much different in terms of specs and performance than the one you already have. Add to this the efforts by right-to-repair groups to raise awareness about the fact that your phone actually doesn't need to go in the garbage every time you crack the screen, and you've got people keeping their phones longer. The way we view new technology has also changed in recent years.
It can take years to pay off a new smartphone (the iPhone XS Max costs almost $1,100), and once you've done it, there's not much incentive to give up that investment -- especially when the newest models aren't much different in terms of specs and performance than the one you already have. Add to this the efforts by right-to-repair groups to raise awareness about the fact that your phone actually doesn't need to go in the garbage every time you crack the screen, and you've got people keeping their phones longer. The way we view new technology has also changed in recent years.
It's an absolutely welcome development as the amount of e-waste the humanity is producing is staggering. Now, let's increase the average duration of smartphone ownership to at least five years and make smartphones upgradable.
For many people their phone _is_ their camera, and just visit anywhere people go for entertainment or tourism to see the extent to which they use them. Cameras on phones matter.
Then again, my phone is over two years old and its camera is still perfectly adequate. A camera isn't a good reason to upgrade, but may be a differentiator when the time to upgrade comes.
I actually pressed reply to correct your thinking on bluetooth, then I realized your correct. I use bluetooth 90% of the time but nothing beats wired headphones for reliability. When I'm doing a live show I have my track preview on the headphone channel. With Muxxx you can send it out over bluetooth but its a pain in the ass to do. An if your bluetooth fails, which happened to me, in the middle of a live show you are fucked. Never had my wired phones fail in a show but if they do I keep a spare set on hand. Just plug them and keep going.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.