Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break.
Also anyone can make an ARM CPU so the margins are thin, whereas with x86 CPUs Intel will basically only ever have one competitor - AMD. They want to find another monopoly.
The upgrade cycle has really just been a process of filling up the market. In fact I’d argue there are still a lot of old devices still in use beyond an ideal lifespan. There’s still going to be a much quicker refresh cycle than desktops for a while, but they’re likely to converge gradually.
What we might see is high end users keeping their flagship for longer, and refresh phones ‘downstream’ in the family to more recent midrange devices rather than passing on their own device and getting a new flagship. In fact, that’s what I just did for my teenage daughters.
We should be able to keep our devices until they die, but without regular software updates, you're playing with fire.
Now I do have a 10 year old Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 4GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and a nice 1920x1200 display serving as a Plex Server. In day to day use, the only time I can tell the difference between that and my modern laptop is when I try to run too many things at once and that could be alleviated by upgrading the RAM to 8GB.
As far as the iPad 1st generation, it's true that you can't get software updates -- I have one too -- but you can still download the "last compatible version" of apps for it. I reset mine last year and re-downloaded and ran Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Google Drive (for reading PDFs), Spotify, Plex, and all of Apple's iWork Suite.
It still supports AirPlay and prints to all of my printers. I can check my Exchange email at work. The browser on the other hand crashes constantly.
Intel gave up too early in my opinion, the Zenfones (pre-Snapdragon) were great phones, I just don't think Asus alone had enough penetration to make it worth their while.
My experience with the Zenfone 2 was not very positive though. It seems to have been more Asus's fault than Intel's, but also Intel could have done a better job with their kernel. Yes the CPU was fast relative to its price (because Intel was dumping them) but almost everything else about it was not very good. Battery life was poor, seemingly because Intel never got core parking to work in their Android kernel (I also owned a Lenovo Atom tablet which had the exact same problem so I'm going to blame Intel here). Most apps ran pretty fast but anything with ARM binaries ran very slowly in emulation or in a few cases didn't work at all. ASUS's Android skin was terrible and had an obscene amount of preinstalled bloatware. There were loads of bugs, and installing updates was always a guessing game of whether it improved things or made it even worse. Sometimes GPS wouldn't work. The Marshmallow update was both extremely late and extremely buggy. The plastic back started developing cracks after about a year without ever dropping it.
The ability to run windows software in either Wine or a VM was a rather cool-but-useless novelty.
The "killer app" for smartphone refresh rates staying low are (1) battery degradation and (2) forced OS updates for app updates, which in turn slows the phone down to compel an update[1].
[1] I'm actually curious if OS updates slow down older phones these days. This was the case 5 years ago but perhaps things have changed/
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/technology/apple-slows-down-...
The said that as the battery degrades, they limit CPU spikiness that can abruptly kill the device even with a non-trivial amount of juice left.
That's not nearly the same as "slowing down the phone with every upgrade".
Often people have reported better performance after an OS upgrade, although obviously results may vary, and subjective impressions are always, well, subjective.
Short support cycles seriously dent the feasibility of keeping the same phone for even two years...
- Devices that support Verizon's bands & CDMA are mostly only sold as Verizon branded devices. (CDMA is less important every year but I still occasionally need 3g)
- ~All Verizon phones have locked bootloaders and no official way to unlock them.
- Manufacturers don't make the easy mistakes which let you unlock their bootloaders anymore.
I will not be a Verizon customer for much longer.
Things will always improve, but for cameras, we are getting to the point where if your smartphone camera isn't good enough for you, you are probably at least an enthusiast and you probably want to get a real camera.
Since then, I've seen absolutely no game changing improvement.
It was hobbled at the outset with 2GB RAM. At introduction performance was adequate. It has degraded since then. There are times when I exit an app and it takes several seconds before the home screen is populated. Navigation normally runs in the background but if I open a different app, it may get bumped and disappears from notifications. I listen to podcasts frequently and its background process (the part that keeps audio going if I open other apps) gets bumped.
These are not related to processor horsepower but I believe are symptoms of insufficient RAM. It could also result from additional installed applications, but I have uninstalled more than I have added and it seems not to improve.
Maybe it's time to look at third party ROMs.
Towards the end of its life its performance had degraded to the same point you experienced. Multiple seconds for the home screen to populate, camera lag, etc. It's crazy that a cell phone with 2GB of ram is incapable of running recent versions of Android with decent performance and even crazier when I'd open up a task manager and see mandatory things like Google Play Services consuming almost 60% of the ram on the device.
Advantage is that you buy for half the price of a new flagship.
On the Android side, it's sorta debatable whether Google Services is really part of the OS or not, but in any case, a Galaxy S4/5 with the latest google SW is a performance disaster. Maps regularly freezes for like 3-5 seconds at a time; its sluggishness is almost certainly causing additional auto accidents. Pretty much every other G app takes more than a second to open, despite being compiled-to-native-code during installation. Disabling airplane mode will cause 100% CPU on all cores for like 15+ seconds. Performance was certainly better when the phone was new 4-5 years ago.
I haven't broken a phone yet, but I doubt I could keep using a phone for 10 years anytime soon.
Even if not, most phones being sold worldwide are cheap Android phones that don't have sophisticated anti-theft technology.
Laptop: 1 (spilt wine on it, was not able to repair it)
I agree for desktops, but laptops regularly get broken and stolen.
That's basically me right now, still have my trusty sgs2 running lineageOS and will continue to have it till it breaks