The iPhone is the greatest product in human history.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/ios-version-market-share/all/unit...
In many cases, they're not 'perfectly good'. Apple does backwards compatibility longer than most, but at some point, those old phones can't function as smart phones. Banking and health apps will require newer OS, and newer OS eventually means new device (for better or worse).
I just bought a 'new' iphone - used/refurb. Tru-depth camera broke. Replaced it ($170!). Whole phone broke a week after that anyway, out of warranty, and ... they offered to sell me a replacement for $399 (iphone 12 mini). I bought a refurb 13 mini from a 3rd party for $420, then got a $35 refund for minor cosmetic damage. That doesn't count in Apple's numbers, but I almost did. My 2.5 year old iphone mini wasn't "perfectly good" any more.
Also, for better or worse, people have multiple. Your employer may provide you with a work phone, and you'll have 2. It's not as prevalent as it used to be, but I still know a few folks who have a 'work' phone separate from personal.
It's still a lot of phones, no doubt. I don't plan to replace/upgrade mine for at least another 2 years, but my wife may need a new one should something happen to her iphone 11 in the next couple years.
To add to this, each annual release of iOS does typically add a new feature or two that works only on the newest model(s). Sometimes, this is enough to generate an upgrade.
There's also a large amount of people that essentially "rent" their phone through a consistent upgrade pipeline via their carrier or Apple directly (basically never paying off the device directly).
I am in no way saying the results are not correct. But there are all kinds of smart ways to report revenue, like mandating your suppliers to stock your product and reporting those as sales.Same way car vendors report sales, when the cars in reality are still sitting at the dealers showrooms.
From my random data sample of 20 contacts, around 80% have Android phones and the other 20% with iPhones, nobody upgraded in the last two years...
"How long do iPhone users take to upgrade their device?" - https://www.phonearena.com/news/How-long-do-iPhone-users-tak....
1. It continues to be true that a new phone is noticeably faster and has a noticeably better camera than a 3-year-old phone (regardless of how gross the reasons are).
2. Phones break.
3. Phones are lost.
4. Phones are given away.
5. Some batteries in the batch lose capacity faster than they should.
6. New phones are given as gifts to people who might have gone longer before buying a new phone with their own money.
7. Features.
Even regardless of all that, three doesn't seem unreasonable if you have the money. I seem to be able to go about five years before the battery life and performance become too painful (though it's hard to get an average with data points that far apart), and my tolerance for those issues is probably higher than a normal person.
At a replacement rate of 200 million per year, that’s 5 years to turn over the iPhone active install base. Replacing a 5 year old phone sounds pretty reasonable.
Earnings call transcript: https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/05/this-is-tim-apples-q2-202...
“The iPhone base is well over a billion active devices.”
You can separate eras in human history by the the dramatic jumps in the amount of people that can be fed by a set amount of human labour.
It has saved more lives than any other invention.
Thousands of times more (not an exaggeration) than the Polio vaccine and Penicillin combined -- and is largely credited for the making cities less deadly and allowing Babylon to exist (and have so many other advances for humanity)