Other than your carrier give it for free or cheap, I don’t really see the reason why should you buy new phone. I’ve been using Redmi Note 9 for past 3 years and recently got my had on Poco F5. I don’t see the point of my ‘upgrade’. I sold it and come back to my Note 9. Gaming? Most of them are p2w or microtransaction garbage or just gimped version of its PC/Console counterpart. I mean, $400 still get you PS4, TV and Switch if you don’t mind buying used. At least here where I live. Storage? Dude, newer phone wont even let you have SD Card. Features? Well, all I see is newer phones take more features than it adds. Headphone jack, more ads, and repairability are to name a few. Battery? Just replace them. However, my Note 9 still get through day with one 80% charge in the dawn. Which takes 1 hour.
I am genuinely curious why newer phone always selling like hot cakes. Since there’s virtually no difference between 4gb of RAM and 12gb of RAM, or 12mp camera and 100mp camera on phone.
I mean, most of the population isn’t buying a new phone every year, it’s just that there are enough people using phones in general that at any given time there are people buying new models. It’s the same reason why there are people buying cars every year.
I personally use my phones for about 3 years. Sometimes up to 4, but usually year 3-4 is when the battery degradation gets so horribly bad and performance stutters so much that I figure if I’m going to do a full reset and buy a new battery and all that, I might as well get a new phone.
Exactly this. I bought a Oneplus 7 Pro for AUD $750 ($500 USD) in early 2020 and tried to “upgrade” to an iPhone 13 Pro recently. Ended up giving it to my husband and have no plans on getting a new phone again until this one dies. This phone was the last good Oneplus phone before they started transitioning to…whatever they are now. I’ve rooted it, I’ve switched ROMs a few times, I’ve unrooted it and gone back to stock ROM. Love this 2019 phone that seems to be unlike anything else available in the market rn.
Rocking op7pro too here. Changed back covers 5 times already, swapped battery for a new one. Never owned a phone for that long and I have no intention on buying a new one.
I have been using same phone for 5 years now. Never visited to service center. Always used cover & screen protector. I usually see two strategies either buy very cheap phone and keep upgrading in 2 year or buy a mid-range use it for 5-10 year before upgrading. There is usually no significant upgrade in tech in 1 year but wait for 5 and you will feel you are actually getting something new and better
The only real issue are updates. After just 3 years my previous phone didn’t get any security updates and I had to get new hardware. I actually liked my previous phone more than my current one. But it is how it is.
That’s the reason why I switched to iPhone after many years of Android, security updates are vital nowadays with all the sensitive data and apps we use on our phones, Apple is the only one that guarantees al least 5 years, iPhones are not too expensive if you don’t buy the latest models and I’d rather avoid supporting companies that don’t understand the importance of security.
Pixel actually guarantees 5 years now and if you put GrapheneOS on it, then you’ll have one of the most private and secure operating systems available
just a side note for graphene: i have the feeling that it’s not for everyone. “too much” security tends to get in the UX way
Chances are if you know how to use an Android, using Graphene isn’t too much harder. You can still download from the play store and run apps like normal. If you’re reading this post then you probably have the technical knowhow to plug your phone into the computer and press the start button.
Fair point with not being for everybody though, I wouldn’t be comfortable giving it to my non-techy family and friends. You do have a fair point.
I’ve been running GrapheneOS on my Pixel 3 for three years and I have few complaints. I still cant figure out how to get automatic updates to work in Android 13 with the Neo or Droidify stores but atleast the stock GOS apps auto update. BTW, to clarify what you said, we have to use the Aurora app to download from Google Play Store.
You’re right it’s not for most people. Not having Google services installed might be a major blow for people who have become accustomed to the conveniences they provide. I just use a separate vanilla Pixel for Google services if I need them, but the phone with my SIM card is the one with GrapheneOS.
Apple isn’t the only one that guarantees many years of updates. The fairphone (although currently only sold in the EU, they’re coming soon to the USA) has 5 years of promised support, Google Pixel 6 and later also have 5 years of promised updates, Samsung Galaxy, has 4 years, while one year less than its competitors, still much better than the 1-2 years most phones used to have. Android phones these days aren’t like the wild west back then, Android phones are on par with iPhones, the choice is merely personal preference.
Happy to hear companies are finally getting it.
Because they welded the one consumable that needs replacement to force you to buy new every few years: the battery
I don’t think a phone where the battery is welded to the body exists.
I know you’re probably being hyperbolic, but sealing a phone’s body construction to make it waterproof is very different from ‘welding’ the battery in.
Gaskets, o-rings, and screws exist. The waterproof argument is a weak one that doesn’t hold water. There’s no reason why it needs to be glued together and past phones have had waterproofing with a removable back and replaceable battery.
Yeah I’m sure you’re more informed of the engineering trade-offs with regard to smartphone manufacturing than literally every major smartphone manufacturer.
Yeah I’m sure phone companies communicate engineering truth to us, and not what their marketing departments find most in their interest.
Of course they don’t, I’m not saying anything about what phone companies communicate, I’m talking about what they do.
The smartphone market is extremely competitive, they are very highly motivated to find the most efficient way to engineer a device that maximizes consumers’ purchasing preferences.
A world class product team produces a design that matches customers’ preferences according to world class market research. World class engineers figure out how to maximize features that satisfy those preferences. That virtually always involves trade-offs.
When one company does a better job of maximizing features that match consumer demands, their market share goes up.
When a company focuses on maximizing features that a vocal minority of users want, they struggle to move units.
It’s not some conspiracy to provide inferior products, it’s just capitalism being capitalism. Companies make what people will buy.
Marketers do not just passively give users what they already want. They also manipulate what users want. This isn’t some conspiracy theory, the marketing discipline is quite open about this. When something is in the interest of the company making more profit, they convince users that it is in their own interest. This is just capitalism being capitalism. Not being able to easily replace your battery is as clear an example of such a thing as you could ask for.
Except it’s not, you just live in an echo chamber where people endlessly repeat the misconception that the average consumer as any interest in replacing their own battery. They don’t. Marketers aren’t manipulating millions of people into thinking they don’t, either.
If companies like Apple wanted to force people to upgrade, all they would have to do is stoop to the level of the competition by not offering 6 years of OS upgrades on new phones. Or they could not offer first-party, warrantied battery replacements for ~90 dollars. Honestly, apple constantly goes out of their way to make their devices last longer than the competition, and still the bigbrains on Internet forums walk around with their heads in the sand.
You go ahead and do you homie, nobody is going to be able to change your mind from something you’re so desperate to believe.
Implying manufacturers want us to be able to repair our devices more easily yet can’t design them that way because of some impossible feat of engineering required to add an o-ring and some screws? Give me a break dude. None of this is groundbreaking territory.
That’s not what I’m implying at all.
Manufacturers want to give consumers a device that meets consumers’ purchasing requirements better than their competitors’ products do.
They only want us to be able to repair our phones inasmuch as consumers will buy more easily repairable phones instead of more tightly sealed phones, which is absolutely not the case. Sealed phones consistently sell waaay more than non-sealed phones, likely because they can be slightly thinner with marginally larger batteries. Every once in a while an OEM will release a phone that has a hot-swappable battery, but nobody outside of niche online electronics communities cares.
What I’m debating is the idea that there’s some nefarious conspiracy to withhold hot-swappable batteries from consumers to force them to upgrade their phones. That’s ridiculous. OEMs make sealed phones instead of easily disassemblable phones because consumers buy sealed phones instead of disassemblable ones when given the choice.
And it’s not that hard to figure out why, honestly. Personally, I would rather take my phone to an Apple Store and have them swap the battery for what I can be certain is an OEM replacement for $90 than spend $50 on eBay on a probably fake battery, take time out of my day to swap it myself, and assume the liability in the event of an improper seal. And consumer purchasing patterns show that I’m in the company of the majority of phone buyers in the US.
Sealed phones consistently sell waaay more than non-sealed phones
OEMs make sealed phones instead of easily disassemblable phones because consumers buy sealed phones instead of disassemblable ones when given the choice.
Give some examples of the phones you’re referring to here because I’d bet you’re referring to recent phones like the XCover Pro which use ancient hardware that appeals to nobody.
For 30 years, manufacturers sold phones with replaceable batteries and consumers gobbled them all up with nobody demanding that they instead glue phones together.
You claim phones are thinner when glued yet my Note 4 from 2014 is thinner than my current Galaxy S21 Ultra even though the former had a removable back and replacable battery.
The reason why they’ve all gone to sealed phones is because they ran out of innovative ideas years ago with the yearly release cycle and have now resorted to raising revenue by making phones harder to repair yourself, removing accessories, locking down firmware, and building them with more fragile materials. It’s the same enshittification that we’re now seeing in social media and streaming services. Don’t fall for the marketing propaganda that these companies are pushing because it’s all bullshit.
My guy, you’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and it’s embarrassing.
Manufacturers used to sell phones that you had to have plugged into the wall at your house, and consumers gobbled them up. The market has innovated, and now consumers expect something different. How is “consumers used to buy x when it was all that was available so obviously they must prefer it over y” anywhere close to a rational argument?
My claim was that phones are thinner with bigger batteries. Your s21 ultra has a 5000 mAh battery, the note 4 had 3200 mAh battery. The s21 ultra has a much bigger battery in a smaller footprint.
The smartphone market is insanely competitive, if any manufacturer were deliberately making their phones worse, other manufacturers would be capitalizing on that and taking their market share. Phones are easier to repair today than they were 3-5 years ago, you can check out the ifixit repairability scores if you want. Phone firmware is no more locked down now than it has been in the past, unless you’re specifically talking about how much worst modern pixels are than they and nexus’s were in the past. I don’t know about Androids since 2020, since that’s when I switched, but the steel bezels and flat glass on iPhones since the 12 pro make them FAR more durable than any phone I’ve used. Haven’t had my phone in a case for 3 years, and there have been a handful of times it’s fallen out of my pocket while getting into my truck. The stainless bezel doesn’t deform like aluminum, so side impacts aren’t transferred to the glass. Countless drop tests corroborate this.
You think phones are getting worse because you want to think that, despite the objective reality. You personally want a feature set that’s not widely popular, and you’re mad about it. Which I actually totally get.
There is no point. We realised it only recently. If you remember the cell phones from the time before smartphones, there hadn’t been much technological progress. My first cellphone, a Nokia, could store up to 10 short messages. It’s pedecessor had the same storage capacity. Of course, there were technological milestones that have been passed, e.g. antennas which didn’t protrude out of the phone, vibration motors, (in comparison to today) really shitty photo-cameras (and the buggy software that was needed to transfer the photos to the computer), etc.
The point is, that they all were capable to do the same thing: calling and texting. Looking back, there was not really a need to replace the old cellphone. Advertising made us want new shiny things.
This changed when smartphones emerged. Hardware wise, there are not many differences. Some have faster processors than others, others have better cameras. The storage capabilities are sufficient. For the normal user these specifications don’t matter. All smartphones are capable of accessing the (real) internet. The main difference today is in the software (operating system). Older phones run on software that is too outdated to keep pace, and the software support is often limited, which as a result leads to possible security flaws - because the user is supposed to upgrade the hardware, not the operating system only. And that’s why new phones are bought, despite the old ones would still do.
My smartphone ist running on Android 8 (Nougat). It’s still working and is sufficient for my needs. But I wouldn’t run my online banking with that phone. Also, it gets pretty hot and slow when navigating with Google Maps.
Conclusion: It’s not the hardware specifications which lead to the replacement of smartphones. It’s the more complex (security wise) software requirements certain applications (online banking apps, medical apps, e.g. insuline tracking apps, overall more sophisticated apps that runs slow on an outdated smartphone) demand today.
The world around you uses Instagram daily. They do need a better camera and all the AI photo enhancement filters. Plus, consumerism, you know.
Other than that, there’s no technical reason to buy anything better than what flafhsips were a few years back. I have one and it’s constantly underutilized.
I mean, maybe 5G or wifi 6 could be a reason to migrate.
Your carries never gives it to you cheap. At best they sell you it at cost. More likely they sell it to you at MSRP. the cost is wrapped up in your monthly, and they hope people are too stupid or lazy to notice.
The camera technology advances significantly every year, so it really matters if you’re a photographer.
Beware of your phone going out of support and losing security updates. Android manufacturers tend to drop devices after 2-4 years, Apple after 4-5.
In my experience, batteries start to deteriorate after about two years or so.
Honestly, this is more bad “charging hygiene” than anything else. I thought this was the case too until like 10 years ago when I learned how Li-on batteries worked, and since then, I’ve had negligible battery deterioration after 3+ year old devices.
The TLDR is don’t charge your phone past ~80% except on rare days you need the extra juice, and by extension, definitely don’t leave your phone on the charger overnight. Most people do exactly that and it absolutely murders your battery health.
If you’re on Android, AccuBattery is helpful with charge alarms and detailed info if you want to learn about it.
If you have a Samsung with the “protect battery” quick option, it’s a god send and makes this all super easy.
If the battery greatly damages itself by charging past 80%, then the device should be aware of that and accommodate. I should never have to set an alarm to unplug my phone in fear of destroying it. This isn’t the 90s, where we tried to avoid over-charging Ni-Cd batteries. Making it work for the lowest common denominator is the only way to do it.
If, you know, you’re a company that doesn’t want your customers to buy more of your stuff. Yay e-waste.
I don’t know about other manufacturers but I have a Pixel phone and it has a smart charging feature that learns what time you normally unplug it in the morning, and it intelligently manages the charge overnight to minimise potential battery damage from overcharging. Is this not a standard feature across phone manufacturers?
My OnePlus 7t also has this feature, but it was added as a recent Android software update. It’s great to see that it’s on the Pixel! This probably means that it’ll probably be distributed among other flavors!
I like new cameras, higher refresh rates, and super fast page loads.
Selling my phone on Craigslist every year and buying new is about the same price as buying new every few years.
$1500 phone. 3 years. $500 per year.
$1500 phone. Sell for $900-$1000 at one year old. Buy new phone for $1500. $500-600 per year. And I have a always warranty (extended by my credit card).
Similar price per year, night and day better product.
$500 seems insane to me, I’ve only ever paid about £100 for a phone and it does everything I need it for.
Yeah that’s a no go mate, I couldn’t even do my job if I had a £100 phone it would end up being a cluster fuck as I need to constantly look at spreadsheets, and multiple email inboxes and work through a web Ui portal and none of that is gonna be a good experience on a phone at that price.
I’ve used enough of those cheap £100 phones be they new or second hand to know for someone who’s actually using their phone to do work they are completely unsuitable.
The only time I ever “upgrade” is when I break a phone beyond reasonable repair. If batteries were easier / more cost effective to replace, I would keep this Pixel 4a a few more years. The battery is starting to lose capacity now, I’ll have to check on the cost of battery replacement before too long.
Considering a Fairphone next time I do upgrade.
Batteries are cheap to replace.
To keep our corporate overlords in their elegant fineries. DUH-HOY
The convenience of not replacing the battery.
I’m in a good financial position and swapping the battery isn’t rocket surgery, but it’s a bit of a risk I’m not willing to take. Plus Pixel phones go on a decently deep discount in September before the next model is released.
And I wait until the battery is bloated so it’s kinda a safety thing too.
