Why Apple and the Carriers Want Your Old iPhone
wsj.com
wsj.com
That seems like the key to all of it. A 2 year old iPhone (or to be fair, Google Pixel now) still has enough years of support to be worth spending hundreds of dollars on for budget minded buyers.
Hundreds of millions change their phones every year, which is why there's supply for the used market.
Billions of people don't change their phones every year, because they can't afford to or don't care to.
Knock on wood!
There was a period of dramatic progress but now things have largely settled. I recently replaced a 12 Pro with a 14 Pro and it is likely nothing at all changed. There is zero impact in my life. Have the 12 Pro waiting in my drawer for my son with an XR to upgrade, but he doesn't even want the hassle of doing the transfer and then setting up the apps that don't properly migrate data.
Exactly. "Oh look! It's so smooth when I scroll back and forth!"
I actually stop scrolling to read, but I guess I might be in the minority.
The screen refresh and always on Lock Screen are added bonuses.
"Many people change their phone every year." I expect that to be one of the things that immediately changes with our current, fantastic economy in the US.
Very few people upgrade every year. The average lifespan of a mobile phone is 2.5 years.
In the late 2000s that length of time was lower because phones were improving by leaps and bounds every year but now phones are waterproof, have more resilient screens, cost more, and performance increases between models have slowed.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/smartphone-users-are-waiting...
The lifespan increase pattern is mirroring the personal computer upgrade cycle, but more rapidly.
I've never replaced a phone sooner than 5 years after I got it, but I know I'm a weirdo.
Yes, those 1% who wear out their flash are going to be furious and complain online and even just 1% of phone buyers is still millions of people.
Eventually the read speeds would get intolerably slow. Launching applications or rehydrating them would take forever as the storage would just be so slow compared to when the device was new. Rebooting would take 10 minutes or more. This failure mode pushed me to upgrade at least twice.
I now just stream the majority of my data, and on-board storage has ballooned so I don't end up rewriting that high of a percentage of the overall storage that often. It was easy to cycle through all the storage when the on-board was 16GB but at 128GB+ it takes a bit longer to burn through it all.
I haven't, either. But then, I'm aware of the limited life of flash, so I only purchased phones I can put an SD card into, and then almost all of the data I store on the phone gets written to the card. I'd rather wear the card out than the embedded flash.
But I like replaceable cards anyway. It's a cheap way to minimize the use of on-board flash that is difficult or impossible to replace.
iPhone screen replacements at an Apple store seem to be in the $200-300 range, which is expensive enough that I'd consider other options, including just buying a refurb phone from a reputable reseller.
$90 to replace a battery seems outrageously overpriced to me.
I just found it surprising that it was that steep.
basically, the app judges your current phase of sleep by sensing your movements, and purports to wake you up at the optimal moment. It seems to work for me, which is good enough for me, after all. YMMV?
But if you're unable to download it now, I don't have a good solution for you, sorry. I hope you figure it out!
Smartphones are computers.
Creating artificial product categories, taxonomy, is why we’re in this predicament.
Semantic woo is leveraged to decide a smartphone is not a general purpose computer such that corporate entity can label it new thing and set new expectations.
Intellectual property law and protections need to be thrown in the garbage, no device sold without being unlocked.
It’s thought policing when I’m convinced a general purpose computer (smartphone) is something else altogether. We live in a carceral society that’s extracting our agency to coddle a handful of replaceable figureheads.
War is peace. Apple is anti-1984.
That there's a GP computer inside isn't that meaningful. There's one inside "smart" TVs, too, but those TVs are still just appliances.
This is why my old iPad 2 is sitting in a box somewhere. Old Android phones got wiped, bootloader unlocked, and the latest version of LineageOS, etc. they could handle. They mostly get used as readers, fancy remotes, or media players (older ones in airplane mode when not powered off fully for security reasons).
How we allowed this to be the case for our pocket computers is beyond me.
You want the two of your heaviest apps you want to use together to fit in RAM, to be able to switch between them.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/and...
But usually after 3 years (5 for tablets) the thing is too slow to use anyway.
I think part of it is also that older iPhones still have good processors due to Apple's substantial lead in mobile CPUs. An iPhone 12 (2.5 years old) will Geekbench at 2,000 single-core. The latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (a month old) will Geekbench at 1,700-1,900. Apple's phones just really hold up performance wise for a good while.
A Pixel 5 from October 2020 will Geekbench at 770 compared to 2,000 for the similar-age iPhone 12. Even a Pixel 7 Pro from October 2022 hits 1,400. When Apple is shipping CPUs with a multi-year head start, older devices are still going to be pretty good. Snapdragon 888s from 2 years ago hit 1,200-1,300. Those devices aren't going to feel as snappy as long as a 2.5 year old iPhone 12 getting 2,000.
Apple's software commitment is a big part of it, but the fact that their devices are years ahead CPU-wise also matters.
The Android ecosystem also means that there are budget, non-used phones out there which compete and drive down the price of used devices. Do you want to buy a used Galaxy S21 or would you rather get a new OnePlus Nord or Moto G? Apple doesn't offer you a lot of choice in new phones at a budget price. There's no $150 new iPhone out there, but there's plenty of new budget Android phones ready to take your dollars instead of buying a quality used Android phone.
Why should I pay $350 for your used Galaxy S21 when I can get a shiny new phone for less than that? Yes, the new phone might have a slower processor and worse display/camera, but it's new! Even if you would buy the quality used device, many wouldn't which will drive down the price (due to increased competition from substitutes).
I'm still using the iPhone X I bought at launch. Performance is not an issue at all. Aside from a cracked screen and camera glass, the only real driver for me to replace it is the lightning connector. When they add USB-C I'll probably get a new phone - not before then.
My daughter currently has my old iPhone SE2. Coupled with a cheap 365-day eSIM, and it's perfect for a young teen.
https://esimdb.com is a good resource.
My kids are usually on wifi at school or home, so the esim doesn't need to have much data. Just want enough to be able to text them, use "find my iPhone", etc. So a 365-day eSIM is great, and cheap.
Downside for the Hong Kong sim is that TikTok doesn't work on the phone at all if it detects a Hong Kong sim. That's fine for my youngest, but it was a deal killer for the others. So now they have an eSIM from Orange in France via Keepgo.
It's amazing that these eSIMs work fine in North America, and are so cheap. For Canada, especially, it's amazing I can get service for my kid for $3-$4 a month.
I don't think teens (at least in this part of Canada), even know their own phone numbers, let alone make traditional voice phone calls :-)
I know the desire to hoard electronics. I have all my early smartphones cause they are special. Current phones are boring and not worth collecting. What changed my mind was breaking a cheap phone while fixing it, it instantly became trash. I don’t know if could throw away working phone but broken ones are garbage.
Sure, with a working battery it can still be useful to somebody but it has very little remaining market value.
So Apple has rigged the deck in their favor? Usually that gets a government investigation in the US.
If you can find someone who will pay more than $30 for your 6s, you are free to do so.
Click the toggle to show yearly pricing and the url is updated, but you can still press back to go to whatever previous page you visited.
Then, this page DOES update the history stack when the url changes: https://wakatime.com/dashboard
Click the date range and select a new range, notice the url changes but also you can press back to go to your previous date range.
1. Go to page you came from prior to that site
2. Go to the top of the page, stay on the site
If you picked 1, then "without putting it on the history stack" is the correct choice.