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Vodafone Finds Brits Keep Mobile Phones for 4 Years Instead of 2 (www.ispreview.co.uk)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 93 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Not surprising. I used to update every 2 years but my last couple have had a 3 or 4 year gap.

As it should be really. These can be very expensive devices that only make sense if you get a decent life out of them.

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  • [–] 55 points 3 years ago* (4 children)

    I just don’t see the point of upgrading every two years, and even if I did I’m buying used at this point.

    I’m on iPhone and despite all the fanatics creaming their pants over each release, very little actually seems to change.

    I know a guy with a 6 year old phone, and when he listed off the features it made me realise how little things have actually changed since it was released.

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  • [+] 20 points 3 years ago (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah, marginal camera improvements are kinda meh to me. Has there really been anything that significant since Face ID?

    5G is the only thing that springs to mind for me, but I’ve honestly never felt that 4G held me back on a phone considering it works perfectly for playing videos…

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Next iPhone gets usb c.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    That’s great, but considering everyone’s already got the cables they need, for most people it’s not really a feature to upgrade for.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Most people have 1 cable they need for their phone and a lot of usb c. Upgrading means no more going to find that 1 unique charger.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah, it’s nice, I just don’t think that feature is worth upgrading for most people.

    Face ID and Apple Pay were jumps forward in the way that people use their phones and were quite exciting, introducing USB C is just backtracking.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Absolutely not. I don’t have a laptop, have a family group that have between us, iPhone X, XS, 11 and an old 7max. All chargers I have owned for the last 10 years are USB A at the charger. So the cable will be USB A to lightning for all the phones and to something else, like micro usb for other devices like a rechargeable bike light. USB C is just to cause e-waste and of no practical use.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    You don’t have a laptop? I think you are the minority then

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    Got three macs and a pc, playstation and my work laptop is the only thing that has usb-c on it. But it’s off no interest when not working, I just can’t think why usb-c is so important to some people. It seems like if you had been upgrading constantly on android phones, there’s the driver. The only person I work with that keeps banging on about usb-c is the Android phone guy.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Android has gotten high refresh and variable refresh which is great for battery life. Other than that just raw speed, which is usually just throttled down for better battery life and monstrous huge screens.

    As far as I can see on the apple side they haven't seen anything but incremental, and sometimes increments in the wrong direction, changes in the last 6 years.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Emergency satellite SOS was a massive selling point for upgrading to the iPhone 14 to a lot of people. To your point though, my 2015 iPad is just now being dropped from future updates.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Meanwhile in Canada it's being recommended to disable emergency SOS on both iPhones and Androids because of how many false 911 calls they end up placing, causing first responders to waste time on non-emergencies.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Very interesting, do you have any source or references that springs to your mind? I have emergency SOS enabled, but it never happened to me that it has been falsely triggered. And I can’t imagine many scenarios were it would be.

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  • [+] 14 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 13 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    They need to give us back the headphone jack, that's a feature worth getting a new phone for, but then again we can just use an old phone instead.

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  • [+] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago

    Have a framework, probably the 1st gen.

    It had a big bug where it would go to sleep and never wake up, but I finally found a firmware upgrade and it's been perfect since, maybe a bit on the power hungry side while asleep.

    You might want to consider a used thinkpad, they last literally forever and you can get a decent one for $500 or so.

    Just my thought, the fw is great, tempted to upgrade the mobo at some point, or get the 16, but it's not cheap, it's more about being able to upgrade and the flexible i/o, which is actually cool.

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  • [+] -6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Or you could put a usbc dongle on all of your headphone cables for $1 each and finally move out of the 80s tech bubble.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    You say it's from the 80s like it... matters at all whatsoever. It works, and it works well. It doesn't stop me from adding an extra useless bit of cable on the end of them either, if that's what i really wanted to do.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    When smartphones first took off, each new one was a large upgrade. But each passing year sees new phones being more and more iterative. There's hardly any difference at all anymore between individual years.

    I'm at the point now where I keep my phones until they break or stop getting security updates.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    When smartphones first took off, each new one was a large upgrade

    And they were subsidized by the cell phone company, so they only cost $200 (In many places in the US, at least).

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Yeah definitely this is a big factor.

    I have a small pot I save into for my phone upgrade each month. Waiting longer means I get a shiner new phone when I do finally decide to upgrade.

    And once I have it I want it to last as long as possible!

    When it used to be just part of your contract you wouldn’t think about, just get a new one when your contract said it was time.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    There wasn't even a maximum on the contract. When I got my first two phones, I agreed to a 2-year cellular contract. If I closed my account or moved providers before that, I had to pay AT&T some amount of money to kill the contract. After those two years were up, I could do whatever I wanted. I was then on a month-to-month payment, like standard cell plans today. They just wanted to make sure to recoup their money over 2 years for subsidizing my cheaper phone upfront.

    Now, the subsidization is more like a subscription fee, where there are additional fees on the bill each month toward the phone and the cell phone company encourages you to get a new one once it's paid off. You're still paying full price for a phone. Possibly forever.

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