this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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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.
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.
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…
Next iPhone gets usb c.
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.
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.
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.
You are the minority then. If you do a poll on what would make people buy a new iPhone it will be the usb c connection.
Despite what they’d say on a poll, if you actually forced people to buy a new phone if they answered yes then a majority would stick with what they’ve got.
Buying a handful of spare chargers is much cheaper than buying a new phone.
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.
You don’t have a laptop? I think you are the minority then
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had it enabled for a bit and everything worked fine, but I was worried about accidentally triggering it so disabled it before hearing about the false alarms.
Here's an article from the CBC about it.
These are two separate features.
I doubt many people actually have a use case for satellite SOS though.
There's some pretty remote places in the US. So you don't need it 'till you need it.
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.
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.
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.
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. Not like you have the choice.
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.