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.

Comments

Newer = worse

[MrLogic17]

I want my darn headphone jack. And I'm keeping it until my phone is unrepairable.

Re:Newer = worse

[myth24601]

Same here. I have tried using Bluetooth but it isn't reliable and when it fails, you are just out of luck until you have time to troubleshoot/charge/spend$$ on another. With regular headphones, they almost never fail, when they do it is gradual (one ear stops working) and a replacement is fairly cheap and widely available from many outlets (even a drug store in a pinch). (of course, there is a dongle but they are a hassle and the location of the lightning port is not as good as the headphone port is on my current phone)

Until you offer something in a new phone that my phone can't do and I can't live without and am willing to sacrifice convenient headphone performance to do without, I am sticking with my current phone.

Re:Newer = worse

[fbobraga]

I'm happy with my Galaxy S5, with removable batteries :D

Re:Newer = worse

[Anonymous Coward]

I want my darn headphone jack. And I'm keeping it until my phone is unrepairable.

Nobody cares.

I care, and so do millions who are either forgoing upgrading or are increasingly buying portable audio/media players or are buying dongles that allow simultaneous 3.5 mm headphone connections and USB-C or Lightning charging, because it was stupid to remove the ubiquitous 3.5 mm standard in the first place. There is nothing wrong with it.

Re:Newer = worse

[jwhyche]

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.

Re:Newer = worse

[butchersong]

When phone manufacturers (or the bluetooth spec) manage to eliminate audio / video sync issues I will move to primarily Bluetooth. At this time both my android and iphone seem unable to achieve this.

+1

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

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.

Re:+1

[Naznac]

one thing that is gone from modern smartphones and should never have been removed is easily replaceable batteries. It`s a pain to open a phone to replace it nowadays...

Re: +1

[pgmrdlm]

Buy an extra battery. Carry it without when you are out and about. Instead of carrying a charging cord for IF you can find a place to plug it in. Pull the back off the phone, pop the battery, and put the replacement in.
Oh no Mr. Bill, you are now back to 100 percent without having to charge.
Big deal that at night you charge your battery and your phone at the same time. How many devices do you have that need charged? But a multi usb charger, and problem is solved.

Re: +1

[edwdig]

Or do like the rest of us and buy a USB battery pack. You can get one for under $20 that fits in your pocket and can provide a full charge to a phone 4+ times. No need to turn your phone off and take it apart, and it works with all your USB devices.

Re:+1

[Sumus Semper Una]

Ironically, I feel like you can thank the phone plan carriers for this. There haven't been huge advantages to getting a new phone every year or two for a long, long time. But people did it because, as the summary states, the cost was subsidized by the carriers as bait to get people to switch networks and sign 2 year contracts. Since they stopped doing that and customers started seeing the high price tag attached to those phones they have been deciding that while the $100-$200 upgrade to the newest phone was something they could live with, $500 (or much more, depending on how new a model you want) is not.

Honestly, I feel like the rapid upgrade cycle we saw for several years was the strange behavior and what we're seeing now is just a return to normalcy.

No reason to upgrade?

[mark_reh]

My old phone doesn't have a notch. I want a notch! I need a new phone!

Re:Why not use them until they die?

[Cederic]

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.

Yah

[no-body]

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.....

Most things have been 'good enough' for a while

[0100010001010011]

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.

Now that I know what smartphones really are for...

[DaveM753]

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.

...and yes, it must have a 3.5mm headphone jack sans DRM.

...and get the fuck off my lawn.

Newer = worse for Android too

[Excelcia]

I want my darn headphone jack. And I'm keeping it until my phone is unrepairable.

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.

Re:Newer = worse for Android too

[Voyager529]

Samsung is the one vendor still keeping most of these features around.

IR blasting, removable batteries, physical/reprogrammable buttons, and unlocked bootloaders would like to have a word with you.

I have two requirements, and only update when..

[CptLoRes]

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.

Re:Why not use them until they die?

[fish_in_the_c]

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'.