> 5-10 years means you want a wall phone. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a contrarian position and the options on the market don’t support it well as a result.

Actually no, that's not what it means at all. The phone I want a phone supports various smartphone features like GPS and NFC. It receives regular software and firmware updates, providing whatever new software functionality has been developed lately. It's built to last, without artificial barriers and compromises that prevent 5-10 of use.

The market may not support it very well, especially when looking at the major handset manufacturers. If that makes me a contrarian, fine. But let's not pretend that the "market" (a space dominated by just a few vendors) is optimizing for long-term customer satisfaction or any such things, or that the absence of something in the marketplace means that that things is silly.

I get that you're coming from a specific context, needing and wanting to turn hardware over quickly. But there are plenty of other people (who are generally quieter than tech enthusiasts) who don't have any such need or desire. A well-supported phone with enduring battery technology would be very welcome to me. The fact that the market doesn't meet our needs is reflective of the market-makers, not the would-be customers.

It might make sense to turn over phones every two years if you are a business that maintains lots of phones.

As an individual, I generally keep my phones for at least five years.

Why should I spend $300 per year instead of $150 when the lower cost option works for me?

(I'm typing this on a 2020 iPhone SE; it runs the latest software. Although this year, that's not necessarily a good thing. Liquid Glass, Safari bugs.)

But you make sure to find homes for the replaced devices, right? And that future owner will appreciate longer battery life.

My guess is that, from the factory, Apple's firmware doesn't actually charge the battery all the way up to its 4.2V "full" threshold. It's probably stopping at 4.12 Volts, or something like that. Then, that threshold will slowly rise over the years in order to keep perceived battery life consistent. Eventually, after several hundred (or maybe a couple thousand) cycles, the threshold stops rising at around 4.2 Volts, and that's when you'll start to see the "battery health" number start to decline.

While I'm not an Apple engineer, I am an embedded systems engineer. I promise you, this kind of trickery is commonplace in consumer electronics. It's also far more common in expensive stuff (phones, laptops) than in cheap stuff (power banks, vapes). Cheap stuff could do this, it's not hard, but the people making those devices don't get paid enough to care.

Point being: A lithium ion battery's capacity is reduced every time you charge it - sometimes by only a couple mAh, but still. This is intrinsic to the chemistry. Your phone is doing things behind the scenes to mitigate that wear, but wear still happens. If you intend to keep your phone beyond its designed 2-3 year lifespan, it behooves you to keep charging current down.

> Fast charge doesn’t seem to hurt.

For me a year is nothing though, my phone is on its 4th year, my daughter has my old iphone X.

The logic is that is causes the battery to get hotter.

Yes, I am using the high powered ones.