I'm in no place to judge how other people live their lives, but sometimes I'm still in awe that smartphone companies can create the customer behavior of changing their phone every year just for slightly better cameras.

Apple is usually pretty good at keeping older phones performant enough but,

This is the first upgrade cycle that I upgraded in anger over an unusably slow and energy inefficient OS on an “older” model

I was traveling in south / south east Asia and my iPhone 15 Pro was dying twice a day despite minimal use besides maps and taking some photos. My battery health was 86% so not perfect but surely it shouldn’t die twice a day.

That coupled with the keyboard constantly lagging with every letter I typed made me realize Apple no longer cares about older models.

They threw that out with Liquid Glass.

I wish Android wasn’t also closing off their ecosystem.

It helps that the major cell carriers have convinced people to pay multiple times more than the budget carriers, to offer free phone upgrades every few years or when switching carriers. Makes me wonder how much cheaper phone plans could be

Perhaps your assumption is wrong. In a high income cohort, I know zero people that buy new phones every year.

https://nsysgroup.com/blog/average-device-lifespan-how-long-...

> Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) shares more data on smartphone lifespan by brand. According to their research, people who use iPhones keep their devices longer: 61% of Apple smartphone users and 43% of Android users have owned their previous devices for two years or more.

>Notably, 29% of iPhone users held onto their phones for more than three years, compared to 21% of Android users. Additionally, CIRP found that over a third of iPhone buyers (both those who previously used iPhones and Androids) have owned their devices for over three years, while fewer than a third have owned them for less than two years.

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