We’re already keeping phones until they break, by handing them down through the family. I’ve bought 5 iPhones and all but 2 of them are still in use. In fact the second one, a 3GS, was only fully retired at the beginning of last year.

The upgrade cycle has really just been a process of filling up the market. In fact I’d argue there are still a lot of old devices still in use beyond an ideal lifespan. There’s still going to be a much quicker refresh cycle than desktops for a while, but they’re likely to converge gradually.

What we might see is high end users keeping their flagship for longer, and refresh phones ‘downstream’ in the family to more recent midrange devices rather than passing on their own device and getting a new flagship. In fact, that’s what I just did for my teenage daughters.

Problem with mobile devices is they long outlast their manufacturer's software support. My iPad, for instance. The first device was announced in 2010, and software support ended with 5.1.1 in 2012. Two measly years of updates. This thing has not had an official update (including security updates) in nearly 6 years. Your 3GS hasn't been supported for 4 years. Whereas, I can keep a desktop computer for 20 years and update its software throughout that time.

We should be able to keep our devices until they die, but without regular software updates, you're playing with fire.

Keep using a computer for 20 years? A 20 year old computer is not going to run the latest version of Windows.

Now I do have a 10 year old Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 4GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and a nice 1920x1200 display serving as a Plex Server. In day to day use, the only time I can tell the difference between that and my modern laptop is when I try to run too many things at once and that could be alleviated by upgrading the RAM to 8GB.

As far as the iPad 1st generation, it's true that you can't get software updates -- I have one too -- but you can still download the "last compatible version" of apps for it. I reset mine last year and re-downloaded and ran Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Google Drive (for reading PDFs), Spotify, Plex, and all of Apple's iWork Suite.

It still supports AirPlay and prints to all of my printers. I can check my Exchange email at work. The browser on the other hand crashes constantly.

In Europe, where most of us use pre-pay without major subsidies, everyone uses them until they break or get stolen.

I think that very dependent on the target demographic and country. Also definitely some delusion in it too, many people I know will go on about planned obsolescence and so forth in a put the world to right speech and then whip out the latest iPhone or Samsung flagship to call an Uber that they have on contract.

Intel gave up too early in my opinion, the Zenfones (pre-Snapdragon) were great phones, I just don't think Asus alone had enough penetration to make it worth their while.

What was the difference between Zenfones pre-Snapdragon and post?

The Intel CPUs were performance-competitive with the SD8xx chips at the time but most of the newer zenfones use slower SD6xx chips.

My experience with the Zenfone 2 was not very positive though. It seems to have been more Asus's fault than Intel's, but also Intel could have done a better job with their kernel. Yes the CPU was fast relative to its price (because Intel was dumping them) but almost everything else about it was not very good. Battery life was poor, seemingly because Intel never got core parking to work in their Android kernel (I also owned a Lenovo Atom tablet which had the exact same problem so I'm going to blame Intel here). Most apps ran pretty fast but anything with ARM binaries ran very slowly in emulation or in a few cases didn't work at all. ASUS's Android skin was terrible and had an obscene amount of preinstalled bloatware. There were loads of bugs, and installing updates was always a guessing game of whether it improved things or made it even worse. Sometimes GPS wouldn't work. The Marshmallow update was both extremely late and extremely buggy. The plastic back started developing cracks after about a year without ever dropping it.

The ability to run windows software in either Wine or a VM was a rather cool-but-useless novelty.

Thanks for the info.

Subsidies baked into the cell plan are mostly gone in the US too, replaced with monthly installments that superficially are the same but in practice allow you to pay up front and then only pay for cell service on a monthly basis.

Not everyone, but many people do.

Even today I see an increasing number of friends moving from 2 years cycles to 3 year cycles.

The "killer app" for smartphone refresh rates staying low are (1) battery degradation and (2) forced OS updates for app updates, which in turn slows the phone down to compel an update[1].

[1] I'm actually curious if OS updates slow down older phones these days. This was the case 5 years ago but perhaps things have changed/

I have a Nexus 5X that was 2 years old late last year. At that time I git it's last major OS upgrade. (It will continue to get security updates for another year or so.) This is as good as it gets in the Android world.

It was hobbled at the outset with 2GB RAM. At introduction performance was adequate. It has degraded since then. There are times when I exit an app and it takes several seconds before the home screen is populated. Navigation normally runs in the background but if I open a different app, it may get bumped and disappears from notifications. I listen to podcasts frequently and its background process (the part that keeps audio going if I open other apps) gets bumped.

These are not related to processor horsepower but I believe are symptoms of insufficient RAM. It could also result from additional installed applications, but I have uninstalled more than I have added and it seems not to improve.

Maybe it's time to look at third party ROMs.

I had a 5X that I recently replaced due to the common boot loop failure.

Towards the end of its life its performance had degraded to the same point you experienced. Multiple seconds for the home screen to populate, camera lag, etc. It's crazy that a cell phone with 2GB of ram is incapable of running recent versions of Android with decent performance and even crazier when I'd open up a task manager and see mandatory things like Google Play Services consuming almost 60% of the ram on the device.

Could it be a case of degraded battery like the iPhones? If the battery can't supply enough current, the system has to slowdown to avoid a hard crash.

As a grumpy Moto G 3 owner, I would love for an OS update that slowed my phone down.

Short support cycles seriously dent the feasibility of keeping the same phone for even two years...

Switch to LineageOS. The Moto G series is well supported up to Nougat. It will not be any slower either.

I assume aftermarket ROMs are a non-option for you?

As a Verizon customer:

- Devices that support Verizon's bands & CDMA are mostly only sold as Verizon branded devices. (CDMA is less important every year but I still occasionally need 3g)

- ~All Verizon phones have locked bootloaders and no official way to unlock them.

- Manufacturers don't make the easy mistakes which let you unlock their bootloaders anymore.

I will not be a Verizon customer for much longer.

Depending on your device, installing an aftermarket ROM can range from "easily accomplished from initial query in a search engine to ROM installed within 1 hour" to "I am stuck in a nightmare of poorly written, contradictory forum posts written in a mishmash of languages with lots of instructions that say 'this is easy, but WARNING COULD BRICK YOUR DEVICE'." Who has the time or patience for such confusion?

I've been doing a variant of the 3 year cycle: buy a year old model (e.g. I bought an S7 just after the S8 came out), and then keep it for 2 years (it's even possible I'll be able to keep this one longer. It's not feeling slow yet).

Advantage is that you buy for half the price of a new flagship.

for me the camera is one major reason to upgrade every 1.5-2 years. But I buy a phone(asus) that is at least 50% cheaper than most of the high end phones so I figure I'm coming out ahead. They probably have better cameras but mine has been good enough until the next refresh cycle

For me, cameras have become good enough in around 2014, before then, smartphones cameras tended to turn low light pictures into a blurry mess.

Things will always improve, but for cameras, we are getting to the point where if your smartphone camera isn't good enough for you, you are probably at least an enthusiast and you probably want to get a real camera.

Since then, I've seen absolutely no game changing improvement.

> if OS updates slow down older phones these days

On the Android side, it's sorta debatable whether Google Services is really part of the OS or not, but in any case, a Galaxy S4/5 with the latest google SW is a performance disaster. Maps regularly freezes for like 3-5 seconds at a time; its sluggishness is almost certainly causing additional auto accidents. Pretty much every other G app takes more than a second to open, despite being compiled-to-native-code during installation. Disabling airplane mode will cause 100% CPU on all cores for like 15+ seconds. Performance was certainly better when the phone was new 4-5 years ago.

I have an iPhone 6S - I'd say OS updates do slow the phone down, but they also tend to be really buggy and generally rubbish for a while. I think it's probably more bad engineering and software quality than anything nefarious.

My experience with Android is the opposite, it's gradually better and faster with every release.

Apple is intentionally slowing down phones with every OS upgrade to "preserve the battery" [1].

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/technology/apple-slows-down-...

That's not at all what they said.

The said that as the battery degrades, they limit CPU spikiness that can abruptly kill the device even with a non-trivial amount of juice left.

That's not nearly the same as "slowing down the phone with every upgrade".

Often people have reported better performance after an OS upgrade, although obviously results may vary, and subjective impressions are always, well, subjective.

How many times have you had to replace a PC because you dropped it, left it in a cab, etc.?

I haven't broken a phone yet, but I doubt I could keep using a phone for 10 years anytime soon.

With the new anti-theft systems on smart phones I can imagine laptops experience theft more frequently than smartphones.

In aggregate? There are far more smartphones in use world wide than laptops.

Even if not, most phones being sold worldwide are cheap Android phones that don't have sophisticated anti-theft technology.

Phones are carried and used in places and situations that a laptop is not, this creates a lot more opportunities for theft.

Phone: 1 (dropped; screen broke but I was able to repair it)

Laptop: 1 (spilt wine on it, was not able to repair it)

I agree for desktops, but laptops regularly get broken and stolen.

Something you keep in your pocket along with your keys, that will be dropped ten times, and on which you will regularly sit will inevitably have a shorter life than a laptop. And for the rare people who take good care of their smartphone, there is the matter of non replaceable batteries on a non fixable device.

On the other hand, all of the above are also reasons why - one could argue - the mobile market is going to be commoditized more and more.

>Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break.

That's basically me right now, still have my trusty sgs2 running lineageOS and will continue to have it till it breaks

I'm most of the way there now. Honestly, all I want is call, text, email, web-browser, and PDF docs.