What's the point of buying new phones every years?

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.

syklone,

For me it’s just an unhealthy fascination. Tech is the one place where consumerism got it’s dirty claws in me. We didn’t have a computer in my household until I was 15 and it was a super slow and old PC my older brother bought for $500. This was back in 1999. I eventually became obsessed with finding the best value for money mobile devices and bought way too many phones, laptops and computers.

boba_bobble,
@boba_bobble@lemmy.fmhy.ml avatar

For me, I just like “fun” phones. I don’t update purely due to specs. I recently updated to a fold phone because I’m a bit bored with glass slab phones. A lot of phone manufacturers have decent trade-in deals where I’m at so I never pay full price for them. I might trade in this phone and get the new one if the build quality was improved but it needs to be a notable difference between versions.

Nioxic,

i upgraded from a samsung galaxy S9+ to a S21

Reason?

better battery. the old was too poor to last more than half a day.

the apps are the same, and honestly apart from the ultrawide camera, the pictures look so identical i cant really tell them apart.

i did notice a slight improvement in loading times of a game, but… its 2 second difference. nothing major. and also the new screen is a bit brighter, but the resolution is lower.

i miss my S9+. it was great.

My S21 is 2 years old now, and still holding strong. It’ll probably be replaced in 2025 or something. It’ll all depend on the battery. but i live in EU, so i may be holding on till we see the EU law with replacable batteries come into effect. then i can use the same phone for even longer. spend my money on more interesting things, like graphics cards and mechanical keyboards.

hardypart,
@hardypart@feddit.de avatar

There’s an actual reason for me, which is still not good enough of a reason for me to actually buy a new phone even if the old one is still working. Emulation! My Snapdragon 888 is good enough for 3DS, PS3 and Wii and all this stuff, but it can’t keep up with the current develpments in Switch emulation. That’s why I’m already looking forward to my next phone (as soon as my current one doesn’t work anymore)

tias,

The Google Pixel 7P that I have now I bought because I dropped the 6P on the ground so bad that it wouldn’t even start. The 6P I got because it had significantly better camera and was faster than the OnePlus 6T I had before. I know you say 100mp doesn’t make a difference from 12mp but there’s really a huge difference in image quality with the Pixel compared to the 6T, especially in low-light conditions or when you zoom. And it’s not just me, people have been commenting at how good the pictures are without even knowing what phone I own.

I also enjoy new features like the gestures to control apps. Overall, apps and the OS get slower because new features keep being added, and security updates stop coming, so I need to renew the hardware to keep up. I use the phone for hours a day every day, all year around, so I think it’s worth putting some money into it. But I don’t get a new one every year. Maybe 3 years, or possibly 2 years depending on what gets released.

Blaze,
@Blaze@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

Sorry for hijacking this thread, how do you like the Poco F5? It’s currently on my radar

El_Rocha,

I switched to the Poco F5 from my Mi Mix 2S. Overall I think it’s probably the best bang for buck in the category. If you know your way around MIUI’s shennanigans, it should be pretty great. The only complaint I have (it’s really small) is that I was used to tap the power button for shortcuts, but now that becomes weird because it always unlocks the phone.

Blaze,
@Blaze@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

Thank you!

jsveiga,

I use my phones until the battery life is too degraded to be practical and the phone is too damaged to have the batt6replaced. My Samsung A71 is about 3 years old. Some months ago I noticed the battery was pillowing. Since it was still holding charge for more than a day, the guy at a repair shop (where I took it to get a new battery) just punched a pinprick to deflate it, and it’s still going strong.

damnYouSun,

Which will work fine right up into your phone explodes. You don’t punch a pinhole to deflate bulging batteries you replace the battery. The bulging isn’t dangerous in and of itself, the bulging is a symptom of a problem you are ignoring.

jsveiga,

Well you only live twice :-)

datendefekt,
@datendefekt@lemmy.ml avatar

This is why I personally would prefer phones with replaceable batteries like the Fairphone.

gandalftheBlack, (edited )

Isn’t it a safety hazard to deflate a battery like that?

JWBananas,
@JWBananas@kbin.social avatar

Yes. Never deflate the spicy pillows.

jsveiga,

I suppose so, and I’m also thinking about additional gasses damaging the phone.

So far so good, it’s been 3 months already.

gandalftheBlack,

Please replace your battery asap if you can… The aftermath of battery explosion incident is not good.

jsveiga,

I appreciate your concern, but it’s been 3 months, and it’s still holding a good charge.

I suspect it was a single event where it overheated and gassed. I kept using the phone for weeks thinking my phone case had deformed (I didn’t notice the small bulge, but the case’s power button wasn’t aligning well with the phone), before I realized it was the battery.

When it dies, I’ll get a new phone. If I still have both hands.

JWBananas,
@JWBananas@kbin.social avatar

I generally start looking to replace mine around the time that Google Maps starts becoming laggy. That's usually around the 3 year mark for me. After 4 years things get pretty bad.

Nexus 5 -> Pixel 2 -> Pixel 6a

Practically every app update grows its respective compute and memory footprint. And over time, it adds up. Combine that with the big jumps in resource usage that come with OS updates, and eventually things just start slowing down.

Pap3r,

I feel like when I was younger and phone tech was changing a lot in the early days of the iOS and Android the difference even 1 year made was sometimes huge. Nowadays it’s much more incremental. A slight processor boost here, a couple GB of Ram there. I think a large part as to why that is is two things.

One, the tech has stagnated to some degree. Innovation doesn’t exactly sell a phone to regular non tech folks, a stable “don’t have to think about it” experience is what most people are after.

Two, a lot more issues with the cell phone platform are solved with software rather than throwing around more powerful hardware.

All that being said when I was younger I loved the idea of bleeding edge tech in my pocket, I upgraded all the time. The appeal was more customization at a lesser cost to performance, I wanted all the bells and whistles and less of the jank that came with it. I’m a little older now and lean much more towards the “give me something that works and doesn’t crash for the 10 minutes I have to look at my phone” club.

For those that upgrade to the latest iPhone/Pixel every year no matter what, I chalk that up to lots of expendable funds. It doesn’t appeal to me any more but I can also recognize that there are probably plenty of people out there now, like I was 10 years ago, so it could also be a general interest in the tech and how the bleeding edge keeps pushing for faster, more efficient technology.

axtualdave,

I’ll pile on with a “Yup!”

While I fell into a pattern where I intend to upgrade every 2 years maybe 5 or 6 years ago, I’ve noticed in that same time frame that both the cost of new devices has gone up significantly and the durability of those devices has dropped.

I’m very easy on my phones. They spend a vast majority of their time on my desk, or plugged into my car. I’m old and boring enough that “going out” involves sitting down at a table at a nice dinner with friends and then going home. That said, the battery life on my phones starts to degrade after about a year. Various flaws start to creep up in the device. I’ve already had to replace the screen on my Pixel 7 Pro once – though, to be fair, it took a tumble from the couch onto a hardwood floor, but even that, really, shouldn’t turn the screen non-functional.

It’s disappointing to see that planned obsolescence rearing its head.

galloog1,

See, I am not easy on my phones and I wish they were more durable/glove friendly.

Mostly_Gristle,

Pixels have extremely thin screens, apparently. I tried to get the battery replaced on an otherwise perfectly functioning Pixel a few years ago, but it ended up being cost prohibitive because replacing the battery also required replacing the screen which was “potato chip thin” according to the repair guy, and it was almost impossible to swap the battery without breaking it.

ghostwolf,
@ghostwolf@lemmy.fakeplastictrees.ee avatar

I spoke about this with a person, who wanted to get a new phone and replace their 3yo model. Ultimately, they just wanted a new thing, because it’d make them happier. That’s irrational.

DJDarren,

It’s not irrational when almost every piece of media we see is somehow designed to make us want The New Things. Companies spend a lot of money working out how to convince us that we’re dissatisfied with what we have.

Also, it’s kind of sensible to upgrade after three years, when the device you have is still feasibly worth something on the second hand market.

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

I only get a new phone when my current phone just dies. The hardware for even the best phones out there really doesn’t change much even in 5 year spans. It’s actually kind of annoying. The biggest difference between the phone I have now and the first smart phone I ever had is a few hundred cycles faster CPU and it has 4 cameras instead of just 2.

I wish these things were like a desktop PC and I could just buy parts and build it myself so I could have the raw power I want.

No difference between 4GB of RAM and 12GB

You… You’re serious? I guess if you’re a super casual user, it won’t matter. But if you want to do more at once, you need more RAM. Shit, even if you don’t more RAM does make a difference when the apps start consuming more and more as time goes on.

nihilomaster,

I wish these things were like a desktop PC and I could just buy parts and build it myself so I could have the raw power I want.

So when my last phone was nearing death i finally made the decision to get myself a Fairphone. Plan is to save money in the long run by just replacing parts as they break not the whole device. Plus it’s one of the only phones out there with a replaceable battery. The modular design makes it quite bulky but I actually like that as well.

godofpainTR,

My old phone with 3GB ram was hell (granted it had a weak SoC too). Now that I have 8GB (on a midrange phone too), it’s become much more enjoyable to use my phone. Everything is snappy, nothing ever freezes

FiftyShadesOfMyCow,

The Megapixel “argument” is also laughable. Like you said, casuals can’t know the difference.

Whey_Isolate,
@Whey_Isolate@lemmy.ca avatar

Still rocking my iPhone 7, and I’m planning on using it until it completely gives out. I agree that there’s very little reason to get a new phone, these days pretty much all of the improvements are just incremental and have no effect on the basic functions—calls, texts, web browsing, etc. Hell, even the fancy new cameras aren’t really needed, past 12mp (~4K) your camera quality doesn’t really make a big impact on image quality (most people have 1080p or 2k displays anyways) and you can only get so far with multiple lenses and AI stuff.

OrkneyKomodo,
@OrkneyKomodo@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

A free phone from your carrier is never actually free. You will be paying for it over the next 6 months to 2 years.

Thorny_Thicket,

I had to wait 6 years untill someone released a device that’s atleast in some aspects better than the one I already had. If I were forced to switch every year I’d hate most of them.

Switched from LG V20 to Galaxy XCover 6Pro

Shurimal,

I upgrade when the opsys gets hopelessly outdated (as in apps no longer supporting it) or the device physically breaks. My last phone (Huawei Ascend P7) lasted for 7 years, but the Android 4.4 got just a bit too old, plus I cracked the screen a month after removing the battered to hell glass screen protector...

I don't care much about the phone not getting OS updates since I don't keep anything important on a phone in the first place and I don't care much about CPU/GPU performance since I don't run intensive apps on my phone—that's what my desktop and server are for. My current phone I bought last year will last probably for 5 more years.

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