The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016.
While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations.
“Economy” is almost always corpo newspeak for wealthy people’s money. If they actually meant the economy as in everyone’s stake in the economic system the phrase “cost the economy” would be meaningless. Buy devices second hand direct from individual seller markets or older models. The article also quotes multiple CEOs but no labor leaders.
The nerve of CNBC to use the word “hoarding” and and not mention the actual cause of the problem being the declining wealth of the median household relative to wealth hoarders.
X to doubt.
About the “hurting the economy” part. Replacing more stuff = more economy is a well-known economics fallacy and they should know better.
Quickly and people, you need to become more wasteful again, you’re hurting the economy
Smartphone companies are trying to push phones with planned-obsolescence on people sothat people buy new phones more frequently, and that’s a bad thing for the consumers because they have to spend more money.
The best way to respond to that is if consumers prefer buying smartphones from companies who have produced long-lived smartphones in the past. That means if company A produces shitty, short-lived smartphones, people indeed buy a new smartphone after a short while but from another company B who is willing to develop better quality.
From a macroeconomics perspective, the best way forward is to give people money (handouts) so they can buy more stuff. More consumerism -> hotter economy.
Edit: Archive of the page
The person who wrote this must be absolutely insane. How I’d it a bad thing for the world that people are holding on to their devices? Less e-waste and people don’t spend impulsively. It’s also very logical: smartphones reached a plateau and people aren’t exactly swimming in money with the rising price of everything.
The person is writing from a business prospective. If people are replacing their phones less often, it means that fewer phones are being purchased each year. If your company makes phones, that means adjusting to a shrinking market no matter what your company does.
that means adjusting to a shrinking market no matter what your company does.
Which is good. Markets are supposed to go up and down, and responsible businesses would have the capital reserves to weather the troughs, but no (public) companies are responsible anymore, and they waste any capital reserves on appeasing short-term shareholders who don’t give a rat’s ass about the long-term prospects of the company.
I am not an economist. I am not an expert on anything consumer. It is, however, plainly obvious that companies are trying to squeeze blood from a stone at this point. They can’t make money anymore with pay to own and innovation like they used to for a variety of reasons. From greed to enshitification. If you look at it with a different view, everyone is poorer because they are greedy, they’ve ruined everyone’s lives but must make numbers go up. So they find new and terrifying ways of screwing you over for diminishing returns. Like this. Relying on turnover sales and nothing else.
Relying on turnover sales and nothing else.
The best way to grow the economy is to develop spaceflight. If you fly to mars, there’s millions of acres of free real estate waiting for you. Time to construct and grow the market.
There’s no more meaningful growth on Earth possible, because the physical limits have been reached. This effect has been predicted as far back as in 1970 with the report: The Limits To Growth. We’re finally seeing the effects of that now.
From greed to enshitification. If you look at it with a different view, everyone is poorer because they are greedy, they’ve ruined everyone’s lives but must make numbers go up…
This is the leading concept behind Capitalism. It’s a self-devouring system. Every. Single. Time.
Yeah. I’d even say we went beyond late stage capitalism. We are now on the cusp of a feudalistic society more akin to the corporate dominance in Blade Runner or Eve Online, maybe The Expanse, then anything resembling capitalism. Corporations are more powerful than nation states, many people are indentured to their workplace via healthcare needs or non competes, etc. So there’s that. This is an entirely new thread though so I’ll stop it there. TL;DR - This shit sucks.
Not close enough to CP2077
While it may seem to be a smart money move, it can result in a costly productivity and innovation lag for the economy.
For the love of god! Won’t somebody think of the economy?!
Another example of “the economy” meaning the ultra wealthy’s bank accounts.
Oh look, it’s the consumers who threaten the economy, not the fucking ghouls in the C suite, killing jobs and cutting wages. How dare they not having enough money? How DARE they?
I’d argue it’s actually more the fault of the politicians than the CEOs, because the politicians cut taxes for the rich and set the rules of the game for companies to operate in; companies merely take opportunity of the exploits presented to them.
I’d also say that companies have a so called “fiduciary duty” to maximize shareholder values, as typically understood by economy classes. the way to change that behavior is to change the rules to which the companies have to keep. that means, instead of exploiting workers, they should pay taxes and benefit the community that way.
Not every company is publicly traded, so no shareholders, and not every CEO has to be an asshole. Sure, the laws should be better, but they are not. And here it’s not a politician who cries about loss of sales.
29 months is too long??? I consider that the absolute minimum.
If my device doesn’t last at least 36 months I look for a new company. I aim for at least 48 months.
I refuse to buy Samsung or Google devices anymore, since they definitely did not meet my 36 month criteria. They didn’t even make it to 24. Google did at first with my Nexus 4 and I loved it but they shit the bed real quick after that.
Either I’ve had weirdly good luck with Samsung, or I’m exceptionally gentle on phones. I expect 6 years minimum out of my Notes, and so far that’s held up.
i had a samsung s4 mini (one of those really old phones, which are closer to a nokia brick than a modern smartphone IMHO) for years and it worked well. it lasted for 5+ years minimum. i bought a new samsung smartphone in 2022 (second hand though) and it shipped broken. randomly shut down, some kind of power issue. i never bothered to return it because it was rather cheap anyways and i had installed a custom OS on it at that point, which voids the warranty.
I bought a motorola afterwards but am only semi-happy with it. everything seems to work well with it, but i don’t feel like it’s a good phone. it feels kinda sleazy, somehow. i’m not sure whether it’s only because of the color scheme it uses or sth else, but it doesn’t feel alright. i’m still looking for a new phone.
any recommendations for long-lasting phones?
for desktop computers it used to be acer (laptop) for me. i bought one in 2012 and it lasted close to 10 years, which i consider really long. even then, i didn’t buy a new one because of hardware defects, but because the hardware specs were long out of date. i bought a new acer (laptop) in 2021 and it enshittified heavily, lasting only 18 months before i had to buy a new computer.
then i bought a thinkpad (laptop) and have been happy with it ever since. it’s been running for at least 2-3 years by now and shows no signs of aging at all, even though it’s already second-hand. great device.
I bought an older Samsung and only use it for doom scrolling, 2FA, and podcasts. Its fine stripped down to nothingness. My next purchase, once the cracks from me dropping it spread, will be an older Pixel so I can run GraphineOS. I’m hopeful that like my Linux experience, it’ll extend the devices life given my use case. Like buying old laptops and kicking windows to the curb in favor of Linux buys you tons of time and product life.
People are returning to normal device lifecycles and the greed can’t cope
Good.
kill the job market, ramp up inflation… who could have ever seen this coming.
