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.
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.
“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.
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
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.
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
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.
Edit: Archive of the page
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.
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
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.
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.
Oh no, we’re being so selfish. Why not buy a 10% performance upgrade every two years for $1000 while wages stagnate? Oh, and carriers don’t subsidize the cost at all anymore. They call it “free” then lock you into their most expensive plan so you spend thousands more on the plan than if you could have afforded to just buy the phone outright.
Fuck this out of touch reporting.
It’s all over the place. In the middle of the article they suddenly talk about how software updates, modularity and repairability is important so that old devices can be made to keep up with contemporary demands, blaming the fact that this is an issue on big tech.
Then again, other parts are completely nuts.
Noticing some em dashes in there, so at least some of this is AI.
The parts about corporate infrastructure sound like a c suite dipshit trying to sound like they know what they’re talking about.
“Our networks run slower because we have to be compatible with older devices!”
No, Judith, your IT department just keeps 2.4ghz wifi available for the old devices while also running 5ghz. Those devices stay slow, but it doesn’t impact anyone else.
“Back in 2010, 100Mb internet was the fastest! No one could imagine gigabit becoming widely available! Stuff needs to be upgraded to handle it!” Judy, tons of businesses were running gigabit in 2010, and common network gear has had gigabit ports for years. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Not saying you’re wrong (pretty sure you’re not) but important to remember that the reason LLMs use a lot of em dashes is because it features so prominently in journalism.
I would have little respect for a journalist who didn’t know how to use an em-dash, so I don’t think that proves anything. But I agree that there is a lack of coherent thought throughout, though that’s something humans are also fully capable of.
But yeah, fully agree. Never mind that network connection speed is not really the relevant bottleneck for most office situations these days. If Germans are less productive due to technology it’s because they still use freaking fax machines over there, not because employees are stuck with five year old smartphones.
I – to a certain extent – know how to use an em-dash.
(Source: Former journalist.)
Confirmed—only journalists would have the audacity to place spaces around an otherwise fine em-dash.
Let’s not get audio editing involved!
Those look like en-dashes.
That’s a Lemmy formatting thing.
Can we please stop with the em-dash bullshit? That’s a literary tool, not a sign of an LLM in play. That people did not encounter them ahead of ChatGPT speaks more to their news diet than the ability to be a literary critic.
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I’m not sure whence your animosity comes. I’ve been a columnist since the '90s, and I assure you: Em-dashes are on the menu.
To claim proof of LLMs is to say it was never done until then. It most assuredly was.
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Most word processors will auto-format to em dashes when they detect regular dashes in context of a sentence with a space on either side
That’s great with AP Style. MLA goes in a different direction regarding spaces.
Hold on, you can simply tack on 10-50 dollars to your cell plan and get a “free” upgrade every year instead!
Oh my bad, I need to consume more to increase shareholder value. Almost forgot
Good.
