Slashdot Mirror
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.
I want my darn headphone jack. And I'm keeping it until my phone is unrepairable.
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.
I don't think this is a new issue. I've always replaced my phones when they stop being useful rather than when a new phone/feature comes out. Generally this puts me on track to get a different phone once every four years, give or take a little. I can't imagine shelling out a grand for a phone that is almost identical to the one I had last year.
My old phone doesn't have a notch. I want a notch! I need a new phone!
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.
But you may run out of support on Apps for your old gear and find no ear for your complaints...
System is geared for consumption and profit from there. Using old gear is counterproductive to this philosophy - try to win against that, fat chance.
Long term effect of this, I leave it to your fantasy.
Underlying reason, same thing, maybe the fiddler crabs effect, he who has the biggest claws gets the female.....
My laptop (M6700) was released in 2012, my phone (Note 4) is from 2014 and my desktop (4770k) is from 2013. They're all sufficient, even in late 2018.
In the case of the Laptop I can't find never Laptops that perform as well or have as much room to expand for anywhere near the price I paid.
The thing is, cameras can only get so good before you run into physical limits and adding pixels doesn't help anymore. If you want a better image, you will need a camera with a better lens.
How ridiculous! If I am going to sink $600 - $1000 into a phone, I wan't the damn thing to last a DECADE at least.
This is one of the (many) reasons why I use a dumbphone (for which I paid 30 bucks).
Here is a concise documentary on the subject.
Any new technology goes through a ramp-up period where the next iteration is substantially better than the previous one. At some point, a new technology with a fixed set of purposes asymptotically produces fewer and fewer returns at each iteration, until the manufacturer struggles to provide enough newness to convince people to upgrade. And sometimes, in the process, even goes backwards in some areas. (going from 3d icons to flat icons, removing transparency from frames, etc.)
PCs went through this several years ago. Currently available hardware is way more capable than most people need, and operating systems have gotten as good as they're going to get for present use cases. As users, we're still looking for that Minority Report touch interface, but it doesn't look like we're ever going to get it. So PC and tablet markets stagnate.
Phones have reached the same stage. They're "good enough", and there's no longer any compelling reason to pay hundreds of bucks on the next tiny iteration.
What can move things forward is a "killer app", a new purpose for a particular class of device, that requires new hardware and software to support. (For tablets, this would be an interface that allows competent content creation -- again, see "minority report" -- but tablet manufacturers are only selling to content consumers, apparently.). Virtual gaming allowed phones to limp forward another cycle or two, but currently there's really no compelling feature that needs to be added or improved.
At least, no feature that the manufacturers *want* to add or improve. Battery life still sucks, and batteries tend to wear out and are getting harder and harder to replace. And manufacturers still want us to pay a high boutique premium for storage, at a time when flash is dirt cheap. Instead of providing phones that last a week on a charge, which would actually be useful, manufacturers seem to be convinced that we want credit card thinness as a feature. (I do not. Thin phones are hard to hold and more prone to breakage.)
And so, the industry stagnates, while manufacturers continue trying to whip the horse forward, not realizing it died some time ago.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Now that I know what today's smartphones really are for, which is the selling of my personal information, I feel there is no compelling reason to purchase a new one. My next cellular phone will be either a simple flip-phone with no "apps", or a smartphone which is a true PC in a small, "phone"-factor format that runs my choice of Linux OS which *I* can control. Anything other than that, and I'm not going to purchase one. I lived the first 30 years of my life without a cell phone, I'm sure I can live the remaining 30 years without one.
Shocking, I know, but I don't feel the need for a new phone. I still love the AMOLED display with its vibrant colours.
The fact that it has a headphone jack and replaceable batteries just reinforces my commitment to this "ancient" phone
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The same feature loss is happening on Android phones too. My Samsung Galaxy S5 has both MHL (HDMI) and an IR transmitter. I can both connect it to a TV and control the TV with it. Fantastic for traveling, especially being in the Navy. I can connect my phone with my movies to a TV in the mess, or in barracks rooms when attach posted to a different city, or just when at a friend's house.
In the S6 they dropped support for both, In the S6 they even dropped a MicroSD slot. Of course with that abortion that Android KitKat was where they took away normal user write privileges onto the sd card, the writing was on the wall that they were going to try that. That was an obvious ploy to go the Apple route and make you pay hundreds and hundreds extra.
So it's not just Apple that drops really nice features. Android phones are falling over themselves to drop features. In fact, I've noticed there is this life cycle for all goods. You have three stages. Phase 1 is the prototype, phase 2 is the feature phase, and then the phase 3 mass market stage. The prototype phase is where it's new technology, and still working out the bugs. The feature phase is where they throw every feature they can think of at it to encourage wide adoption and because they aren't really sure all the things people will want. Then you have the mass market phase, where they zoom in on the center of the bell curve and getting anything outside that basically requires getting an older model.
I love my phase 2 Galaxy S5. I'll keep it until the oLed degrades beyond recognition.
Rugged phones are a thing. Look into Moto Force or Galaxy Active.
Circumcision is child abuse.
and their TV / Movie display device. For some reason.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
there is a good reason for the update.
My last update was from Samsung Galaxy S3 to the S7. The reasons being much better camera and wanting to try the Samsung/Occolus VR googles.
And my two requirements are:
1. Headphone jack
2. Support for secondary SD-Card storage so that I can have 256GB+ storage for video, audio and pictures without extortionist prices (Internal storage for apps only)
So the way things are going now, it seems my S7 will have to last for a long, long time.
... and is certified waterproof to 3m for 30min.
Sorry, I mis-typed. That should be 3ft not 3m. [ Thankfully I don't do unit conversions for ESA or NASA :-) ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
But do they care ... most picture aren't taken to be good, they are taken to remember or commemorate a moment or event, or to communicate to someone else something about yourself.
It is kind of like the whole loss-y compression debate, for most people, most of the time , there is a good enough, and unless you are a professional , or someone who make money at it you are unlikely to have interest in paying the required premium to get passed 'good enough'.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.