I keep seeing article after article talking about to slow down of buying phones, but I’ve never seen any mention of the main reason I stopped buying phones every year:

They stopped subsidizing them.

For a while, most carriers (at least AT&T with iPhones) would include a phone with a two year contract as part of your monthly bill. But about 3 or 4 years ago, they stopped doing this. And so people had no incentive to renew every time they were eligible.

Everybody I’m close to stopped for this reason. Now they only renew now when they have to, or when there’s a really compelling reason to. And any more, both of these are becoming less and less of a need.

Why has nobody talked about this?