Going to respectfully disagree here. Outside of my glasses, my phone is the tool I use most often, many times daily. It's worth getting a quality device, and if there's an issue with the current one (battery, cracked screen etc) it's worth replacing. But you're right, it doesn't need replacing just for the sake of newness.

I second this, especially with Android you can breath new life into a phone by installing a custom ROM

I'm on my phone 8 hours a day. Quality counts. Slow is bad. Lacking features is bad. Crappy cameras are bad. Get a good phone. Use it until one of the following happens:

• It no longer gets security updates
• There is a new built-in hardware feature that will actually improve the quality of your life because you've been wanting it forever
• You break it or the battery performance starts to suck too much.

Don't tell people that!

I always get a refurbished phone which are last years model that someone traded in when they got the newest and greatest thing. If people stopped doing this I might have to actually shell out for a new phone!

I usually try to stay about 3–5 years behind whatever the newest one is. It’s good enough for what I need and helluvalot cheaper than current phone prices.

It is the one device most people use literally all day everyday. Having a great one is worth the money. But it does not need replaced every year. Mine is 4 years old and still works like new (one battery replacement). I will likely replace it next year.

There's a reason my phone has no trouble with the Roku, works immediately when I use microHDMI, and gets updates for games on time and my roommate's does not. Hardly a day passes where I'm not convinced he's relegated to a worse quality of life because his phone just isn't allowed to do things right. His phone doesn't even run the transit app properly.

Now I'm not saying but a new phone every year for the incremental improvement, but don't get something from a crap factory pushing high volume for small margins. Get something good.

Lemmy hates Apple, but my five year old iPhone XS Max is still beastly fast, and I have like 40k pictures and all of my texts back nine years on it.

What phones would you consider worthwhile in terms of price, i.e. those you can cheap out on, but not suffer the consequences of it being slow even in the simplest tasks?

One Android phone I had, Nokia 5.1, had to be replaced in less than 5 years because it often froze and lagged when I had to make or receive a phone call, open a single tab in some light-weight browser, etc.

I'm not a big fan of the smartphone industry and especially the reviewers because they seem to have a very twisted idea of a budget device. Or maybe I'm a cheapskate.

I’ve adopted a policy of buying the latest iPhone every 5 years, which is about how long they tend to last in my experience. So far it’s worked out well.