Honestly, today's phones are an overkill for most mobile computing tasks except for a very small niche of users who might run very high end games. And even there it's not a given.
My bigger issue is usually that the phones get so heavily outdated that banking apps stop working. And it's based on pure luck if the modding community build something great for my phone so I at least could use it as server, cam, or whatever. Also the charging slots breaking / turning unreliable which most wouldn't repair on a $100-$200 phone.
I fear it's not just about 3rd battery quality but the software driver side where calibration needs to redone for a new battery. If this is locked because of "security" or just inferior then oops, replacements never match first party.
Very hard to understand why that should be. Even the most scary conspiracy theorists would not claim that banks and govs try to force phone tech refresh... unless ... it is really about spyware bloat :)
I would like to use them for four or five years with a battery replacement at the midpoint.
As a result, all my phones end up looking pristine several years into them being used.
Modern devices are already massive, putting a case on then make them even bigger, and in my opnion more prone for falling from your hands.
And I have the extra-advantage of being able to easily locate my phone on family gatherings as I am usually the only one who doesn't have a case. :-)
They look pristine except for being wrapped in a case and a screen guard. It's a bit like how some people wrapped TV remote controls in plastic film.
Don't get me wrong, I also put a case around my phone, but it makes it look fugly from day one.
There's a myriad of small reasons, my last one was because my main payment app was taking 4s to create a damn QRCode while the casher and I stare at the blank page, and also for how hard it was to just answer calls from the notification screen as the phone was struggling at just multi-tasking.
And that was on top of the expending shutter lag and and many newer OS functionalities just not properly working.
And it's not the phone's fault per se, the most critical apps are really crappy. But there's also no incentives for them to be efficient, and they'll keep being crappier and crappier, and I'll probably need another phone in 4 or 5 years either way.
It is not like we live in the early 2000s where the heavy road warriors had to have a spare battery on their backpacks because the phones would be dead after a coast-to-coast flight.
The reason I upgraded was that I was wasting literal minutes per day waiting for apps to load. I live in China, and for some reason the apps here are beyond outrageous in the amount of resources they use. Showing a QR payment code in WeChat, or opening a shared bike in Meituan, frequently took on the order of 10 seconds. I assume the phone was just chewing on a terrifying amount of JavaScript.
I could only keep 2 of these monster apps open at a time. Opening a third would OOM kill one of the other two.
iPhone 16 pro and these actions are basically instant.
Fucking nauseating.