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Comment by camhart | Hacker News Reader

I don't know a single person using an 8+ year old phone. I'd guess 99% of the population makes a phone last 2-4 years.

Wow, I don’t think that’s true at all. Most people can’t afford a new phone that frequently. I know amongst my techno elite friends your estimate holds, but for almost everyone else I know they rarely upgrade and it’s more about when it physically falls apart than any desire to participate in an upgrade cycle.

In the US, all of the major carriers offer 0% interest payment plans. Even the MVNOs offer low end iPhones “for free” with a contract.

We don’t have to limit it to people you know

People upgrade their phones about once every 2.5 years

https://www.refurb.me/blog/how-long-does-a-smartphone-last-r...

My carrier offers them 0% interest, rolled into your phone plan payment.

But, go figure, the sticker price is like 10-15% higher than on the Apple site.

They just hid the interest in the price.

That isn’t true for T-mobile. But even so, you can always just buy from Apple with a 0% interest payment plan

iPhone 14 128GB on t-mobile’s site: $829 (zero-interest roll-into-your-phone-bill financing available)

Same, on Apple’s site: $699

IDK, maybe apple price-dropped today and T-Mobile hasn’t caught up, but that’s similar to what I’ve seen in the past when I’ve looked at buying through them.

0% interest isn’t $0/m. When you live paycheck to paycheck, as most Americans do, that’s a very important detail. Most people don’t have disposable income.

But even that do they don’t value phone upgrades. When I see their ancient phones I sometimes remark they can get a phone with monthly terms and they just shrug and say the sad device with cracked screens and ancient cameras and crap display resolution and brightness is good enough for them. It baffles me, but most people just use their phone for texting, occasionally a map, and a crappy camera. Only in my tech friend circle do people keep up.

Most Americans aren’t living paycheck to paycheck where $20/month is going to mean they starve.

You can easily look up the average time between phone upgrades is between 2-3 years.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/31/share-of-americans-living-pa...

64% are living paycheck to paycheck, now whether they opt to get a new smartphone or not is not clear.

What is clear is the statistics you linked and I could find were polls of either people buying a new phone, which would be structurally biased towards people who are buying phones make frequently and are not buying used phones, or they were surveys of people with some relationship with a mobile or tech related site or product. These don’t seem like very unbiased surveys - but they do seem like sources apple or a phone maker would care about. “Of the people we care about in our marketing, they buy every 2-3 years.” I know in my family my wife’s family inherits our old phones and would ever show up in such a poll, nor do people buying off eBay, or even used from Amazon, etc.

Maybe a single mom working three jobs to raise their five children really does feel compelled to have the newest iPhones and puts her kids needs behind a high resolution screen, but I somehow believe she’s just not counted in market surveys of phone buyers.

Regardless the average isn’t 99%.

Living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t mean there isn’t room in there budget to do anything else. They may spend $20 less per month on food to buy a phone. Do you really think that households who are making six figures “who are stretched thin” have no discretionary income to reallocate?

If given a choice between every single citation I could find on the internet and your anecdotes of what your family does, which one do you think is more reliable?

I already cited why I don’t believe the sources I could find as well as those you provided are reliable of a common experience as they’re clearly designed to be market research among those people who regularly upgrade smart phones. That’s a much more useful metric if you’re a smart phone company than a census style survey. They aren’t trying to make a social statement but optimize their release cadence. What people do who don’t upgrade regularly or buy their products new aren’t interesting to them, so they aren’t designing these surveys to capture people not already in their product cadence orbit. But, I suspect I can guess which you consider more reliable.

I’d not the median household income is 70k, which means half of all households make less than that. The median personal income is $40k.

Again, we aren’t getting remotely close to 99% of people are upgrading every 2-4 years.

> I already cited why I don’t believe the sources I could find as well as those you provided are reliable of a common experience as they’re clearly designed to be market research among those people who regularly upgrade smart phones

On the entire internet every source cites 2-3 years but you choose not to believe it because it doesn’t support your worldview?

And in the US, even the MVNOs that are targeted toward lower income buyers subsidize phones where you get them for “free”.

But you’re telling me on the entire internet you can’t find one statistic that supports your claim?

Not sure about 8 years, but I know at least 3 people who use iPhone 8s still and have no intention of stopping, so that's 6 years. I know at least one person who had an iPhone 5 until it broke earlier this year.

I guess this will only lengthen as we go forward, as the initial jumps between successive phones were large, and they are much more incremental nowadays. An iphone XS is good for 5 more years easily.

I try to use mine for 5 years each, I jumped from the 8 to the 14 earlier this year

I only stopped using the 8+ because it got destroyed, and "upgrading" to a newer used one was almost the same price. Otherwise I'd still be rocking that touch button.

Father as business development manager manages with iphone 7

The lifespan of those phones remains for the people that buy them used/refurbished. There is a strong secondary market for iPhones.

Anecdata: I have a friend who refuses to update from an original iPhone SE because he hates the larger form factors AND because it functions perfectly fine for his needs.

I know multiple people still using an iPhone X (2018), for whom cost is not an issue.

The main reason for the majority of the general population to upgrade is because the phone literally breaks (screen, stops charging, radio malfunctions, etc)

My iPhone 7 will be 7 years old in a few days, so close. I haven't found the need for anything that has gone into new phones since then that would justify the cost.

Hah, I just upgraded my iPhone 7 to the 13 Mini. It's definitely better, but I probably could have held on for another two years.

On a 6 year old iPhone 6 here. Solid, charges quick, no battery issues, good pics, you name it. I may upgrade to go all USB-C but may wait to see if the 15 has issues.

My daily driver phone is an iPhone 7+, which Wikipedia tells me is from 2016. It works great and people often compliment the pictures from its camera. That's not "8+ years old" but it's in the ballpark :)

Weird, I don’t know anyone that keeps their phone for less than five years.

And I’m sure you don’t know “anyone that still watches TV” like the old Slashdot meme.

It’s really not that hard to find statistics. It’s 2.5 - 3 years

https://www.refurb.me/blog/how-long-does-a-smartphone-last-r...

https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-2-year-mobile-phone-upgrade-c...

You said "I'd guess 99% of the population makes a phone last 2-4 years." Which is obviously false if the average is 3 years. An interesting data point neither of these articles have is the standard deviation. One of the articles says 8% of people wait more than 5 years.

I never said any such thing about “99%”

Ah sorry, I replied to the wrong comment.

I'm at 5yrs(iPhone XR), though I do plan on replacing my phone with a new iPhone 15 later this year or early next.

Mine is 6 years old, my wife and son are both using 8-year-old iphones. They still get security updates.

But why?

It seems the only progress is the camera and the CPU, but for what more CPU speed? The camera?

Several of the phones I've upgraded from were due to the onboard storage wearing out. A couple were because of water damage, which is less of a concern these days.

For me at least the battery seems to degrade significantly after 2+ years. I have a OnePlus 7t that is 3 years old and I use it heavily almost every day. I should consider wiping it to see if that improves battery life.

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