> I find this aspect of the tech industry so gross that I'm considering changing careers.

What career are you considering? There are even high-end supermarkets. This is a human condition.

>Unless we as a society can get over showing off by buying things we don't need, I think we're in trouble.

Good luck with that. Maybe if you eliminated human sexuality first, somehow?

We've been "showing off" since we were cavemen. The iphoneX is just a really, really nice spear that you can throw further.

I don't disagree with you about what people should do, but the reality is that consumers have been this way for a long time, the only thing that changed is that phones shifted from commodities people bought for performance to fashion accessories. People pay more for cars, bags, clothing, etc. to elevate their feeling of status, now we can add phones to that list. Perhaps this has been Apple's greatest contribution to the hardware industry.

The part that irritates me is, I am actively punished for being someone who doesn't behave this way.

It used to just be the hidden surcharges that phone companies tacked onto my bill to cover the cost of the "free" phone, calculated from the assumption that I'd get a new phone each year.

Those surcharges are now gone. But they have been replaced with constant nagging to update the OS to a version that will harm the performance or battery life (or both) of a >2yo phone. They have been replaced with apps that will eventually refuse to stop working if I don't upgrade to a version that doesn't run on the older version of the OS that I used to use. They have been replaced with mobile sites that flat-out don't work on my older device's smaller screen.

Those updates are always optional, and also keep your 2+ year old phone secure.

As long as there have been cellular phones, they have been "fashion accessories". We all joke about the business guy with the giant phone, but that was the "iPhone X" of the 80's.

Consumers have this in them, but it’s conditioned by a couple of centuries of marketing.

I'm okay with this aspect of the iPhone X. People buying $1,000 iPhone X's subsidize the technology that goes into a $350 iPhone SE.

They also pave the way for the third generation of the iPhone X to cost $350.

> No one should feel bad for owning a machine that's a few years old but does everything they need. I'm not convinced that consumer gadgets fill a real need any more rather than just being new and shiny for the sake of being new and shiny.

I disagree that consumer gadgets, especially phones, don't fill a real need anymore. We have at least a good four or five years, minimum, for a lot more to be done in that form factor. It may not necessarily be new sensors, but significant improvement in what's available now. Things like AR and VR have quite a while to mature and bring about more practical use cases than we see now, and smartphones and devices associated with them will be the ones leading the charge there.

>No one should feel bad for owning a machine that's a few years old but does everything they need.

That doesn’t bother me as much as planned obsolescence. Here’s why I had to upgrade to the iPhone X from my iPhone 6.[1]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why-people...

You had to upgrade to a X when a 8 or a 7 was available - or even a new battery for $80?

When were you planning to upgrade your three year old phone? I upgraded for same reason as you (6 plus), but when I found out I could have paid $85 for a new battery to restore much of my performance my reaction was, meh. I would have still upgraded anyways.

Even if there wasn't CPU throttling to keep old phones usable, software marches on adding features and benefits.

iPhone 3: 256 Mb ram

iPhone 4s: 512 Mb ram, 490 multicore Geekbench

iPhone 5: 1 Gb ram, 1,203 multicore Geekbench

iPhone 6s: 2 Gb ram, 3,888 multicore Geekbench

iPhone 7 Plus: 3 Gb ram, 5,763 multicore Geekbench

iPhone X: 3 Gb ram, 10,108 multicore Geekbench

I have always been amazed at Apple's ability to shoehorn iOS versions and new features into such limited memory capacities (compared to Android for example). But there is always a limit to what can be done.

My daughter's iPhone 5 shipped with iOS 6, and is currently running iOS 9. Is it slower? Yes. Does it have more features than when released, heck yea.