You're viewing a single thread.
I'm going to go with a slightly unorthodox answer. Phones.
You don't need a new phone every year. You don't need a new phone every two years. You don't even need a phone every three years. Your old Galaxy S7 or iPhone 6 still works. Don't waste your money keeping up with the latest phone. So what if it has a slightly better camera? What are you taking pictures of? What does it really do that your old phone doesn't?
Once you properly consider everything you realise that you only really need to upgrade your phone every 4-5 years minimum. Many will last much longer.This is lacking a target. It's not an example of keeping up with the Jones, it's just an opinion. A rather wild one in which you judge other's motivations as invalid.
The whole thing about "keeping up with the Joneses" is inherently about judging others' motivations as invalid.
WIth a phone, there are various reasons to want a new phone. But you certainly don't NEED one. The year-over-year improvements have largely become trivial. Mostly, camera upgrades marketed for impressing your peers. In any case, this tendency is certainly based on norms set by the marketing, which people follow. And there is some portion of this that is just conspicuous consumption.
I can't think of anyone who upgrades their phone other than normal hardware reasons, i.e.; cracked screens, decreased battery performance, etc.
Perhaps your peer group has a higher level of vanity around their phones than normal.
Can you provide a specific of someone you know upgrading their phone because their neighbor did so?
People who complain about others upgrading their phones are actually half a version of keeping up with the joneses.
Spending mental cycles on the possessions of others is the first criteria towards keeping up with the joneses, the second half is the purchase to keep up.
I worked at AT&T and then AT&T for about 8 years. I'm not talking about the anecdotal evidence of personal friends. I'm talking about broader consumer data.
For your information, here's a statistical study: https://www.statista.com/statistics/619788/average-smartphone-life/
This indicates an average of replacing a phone every ~2.7 years. That means there's someone that replaces their phone every year for each person who keeps their phone for 4 years. And many people keep them longer than that. Obviously, I'm not saying that EVERYONE does this. But obviously this is not uncommon.
I don't typically complain about this; it happens to be the topic of conversation here. It just sounds like you're taking it personally for some reason...
I wait until the battery is no longer useful. Unfortunately, the iPhone makes it difficult at best to DIY a battery change, at worst expensive to have it done officially. Taking care of a battery gets it to about 4 years, and then you’re looking at Apple ending support not too long after that. Decent enough time to switch out phones.
With all my phones the battery and system just start going weird around the 3 year mark. That’s usually when I get a new one.
Yeah, my battery is down to about 4 hours of use. I wish I could just stick with this phone, but I can't keep up with its charging needs
I'm in this boat.
I got an iPhone free from work. Used it until it literally fell apart. (I didn't drop it or anything. The screen just slowly came off. Weird. Not a fan). Several years.
Bought an android for cheap. Used it until it wouldn't hold a charge. Also several years.
Bought a new android. Plan to use this until it falls apart. Several years and counting.
A new phone just isn't on my radar. There's nothing I need out of a phone that this one isn't doing.
I felt bad about splurging on a brand new phone after only 4.5 years. But it was a treat to myself.
I had a Nexus 5 that was old enough for my friend to give me for free, and I used that until the battery just wouldn't hold a charge longer than an hour idling.
The phone I replaced it with had specs that were ever so slightly lower than the Nexus 5.
It was a night and day difference when I replaced that phone with something actually good.
Do I use all the features? No. Should I have waited for a price drop? Probably. Do I regret it? Nah. Probably a once in a lifetime event for me, to allow myself to be excited for the launch of a new phone and to experience that much of a jump in quality.
I hope to get 7 years of life out of this phone even if it means getting the battery replaced (expensive...) and living without the top-of-the-line security updates (unfortunately).
Depending on the popularity of the model, you may continue to get updates through third party efforts such as LineageOS or PostmarketOS.
Good point! And that'd be more than enough to make me feel like I'm getting an "upgrade" if I'm feeling that itch after however many years
Just like a business that's finally "upgrading" to Windows 7 after being on XP for 10+ years!
I appreciate the comparison, but mobile devices go out of date far faster than desktop OS's, at least in terms of security updates.
I'm still using Windows 10 and getting security updates for a few more years.
Coincidentally, security updates for my phone and my desktop OS will run out at the same time, despite my desktop OS coming out more than half a decade earlier than my phone.
The phone market has been a lot like the PC market 20, 30 years ago.
Back then, you actually had an advantage by getting a new machine quite often, as the newer machine was so much better and faster than the model from the year before. It actually made a difference for 99% of the users: The text processing, calculating, or browsing programs ran way better and faster on the current model than on the one or two year older one.
Nowadays, any off-the-shelf PC fulfills the needs of 95% of the users. It runs Windows/Word/Excel (or whatever else they use) fast enough to not be an issue. The only people who still need the bleeding edge stuff are some high-end uses e.g. in engineering, and gamers.
Same with cell phones. Ten years ago, the annual new model actually provided a big leap of abilities and comfort. Nowadays, I'm replacing my 5+ year old model just because the battery is getting close to the end of it's usability.
Keep a phone as long as it gets security updates. A shocking amount of personal info is on your phone and you don't want it popped
My phone has started glitching a bit over the last month or two. I JUST reached the end of the point out was paid off under my plan, which is kinda suspicious to me.
In there past, I've always bought phones outright but this particular one there was a sale where it was cheaper to finance though my provider.
End of billing would be a coincidence.
I suppose it’s just a byproduct of the cellphone boom and how fast things changed. Almost feels locked in by default to upgrade if you started out with a brick phone, flip, camera, then finally smart, and smart phones advanced pretty well for a while, but feels like they’re all the same now, incremental upgrades. But here I’m am still stuck on this ride.
I hear that.
Send from my Android Pixel 12 (not yet released to the public, it's that advanced).
at the rate my $50 flippers fall apart, i need a new one every couple years or sooner. but i'm certainly not keeping up with anyone wrt my phone... as it's just a phone, not a pocket pc.
I was more referring to people who buy a new iPhone every year. If your phone does what you need it to do and you replace it when it no longer does that, I think that's the perfect way :)
Yes, but it depends.
We had S8s that were getting noticably slow. We upgraded to S21s when those came out and those are significantly faster and haven't slowed down.
We use our phones a lot, so significant slow down is noticable and annoying. But our phones are fine right now, so no reason to upgrade.