Honestly people who buy new hardware every year are not "into hardware", they are into wasting their money and finding a pretense to justifying it. Most of them are probably just bored or treat it like fashion.

This is roughly what I observe. With the exception of a subset of techies, the people I know who always have the latest and greatest also tend to make very minimal use of the latest and greatest features. I'm not convinced many of them are upgrading for any purpose other than retail therapy.

A secondary hypothesis is that there is a contingent of people who buy and install smart home devices just to annoy their non-tech-inclined spouses. That one's not mine, though, I got it from one such spouse.

I know a guy who buys a spec'd out MacBook Pro each time Apple updates the line. He uses them to check his email and Facebook.

I think I can agree with this with regard to modern phones, but not universally.

For instance, in the early days on the iPhone, anyone who upgraded every year was getting a huge improvement each time. The iPhone 3G brought 3G support, so you could actually download things at a reasonable speed. The 3G S had a huge and very noticeable performance increase across the board, and the 4 was the first with a Retina screen.

Another example... for PC games, I really wish I could upgrade my GPU each gen. Especially when you're in charge of adjusting your own performance settings, the extra headroom you get from a new card always feels super nice. (Whether the increase is really all that noticeable is perhaps debatable, which I suppose would go to your point...)

I'm a little different, but same result. I buy the best thing out at the time, then use it till it dies. It's because it's a tool, and these modern tools take a while to set up, and that's a task. Had a nexus 6, rooted, custom rom with unneeded crap disabled. It died last year when I finally broke the screen. It was running fine, and the battery got me through the day w/o a top-off.

I picked the max config pixel2xl for over thousand bucks, put a custom rom on it w/o google crap, and that's going to last me till it physically dies.

My boss on the other hand, gets both the pixel and the iphone refresh every year, and fiddles with each for an hour each day for weeks. Screw that. End result though - both you and me aren't as good a customer as companies want - they want my boss.

To address your point, which I cannot relate to. If money is the limiting factor and you still think the new stuff is cool - why not just buy a $200 phone every 3 years? the top of the line stuff is overpriced, but the margins are close to zero on everything else, and specs and features, at least for android, are pretty much the same.

Well, you are into hardware, so you only use stable products :-D

As industrial engineer I know what it takes to develop any new product. The real world is enormous and you will always face the unexpected when releasing something new. People is going to buy your product and travel to Siberia or the Sahara desert, or to the beach, and discover things about your product you could not plan.

The fact is that early adopters usually are "long tail beta testers".

So when I buy a product is 2 years or so after it was first released and never have the problems that my friends that are early adopters have.

The problem for me is that the iPhone SE suits me much better than new generation phones.

Maybe if they made an SE-like phone with a better camera, I would buy it: but instead they discontinued the SE.

I was really surprised Apple discontinued the SE. I'd expected them to quietly update the internals again.

The people who own SE's all seem to love owning an SE.

I was in this camp too, but bought iPhone X and very satisfied. Bigger screen and easier to read. It’s interesting that iPhone XR has some other virtual resolution, so text on the default settings is actually smaller than on iPhone SE. Don’t tell me about font settings and accessibility controls, it looks awful. :(

I use a separate Roku box from the TV so the TV can't spy on me with their frackin' microphone. I don't plug the TV into the internet. Haha, take that, N SA!

At least in the case of a Roku TV, it's the exact same Roku hardware just strapped onto the board of an off-the-shelf flat panel display. The only real difference is that the UI has selections for the TV's inputs. There's no microphone unless you use the phone app to yell at the TV or buy a different remote than the one supplied.

That's why I have a Roku TV (well that, and I like the Roku software better) versus one of the other smart TVs. I'd have a Roku anyway so this just frees up an HDMI port.

Same. For me I think part of the reason is that the more I get to know the intimate inner-workings of technology, the more I realize how incredibly brittle and unreliable new technologies can be. So if I have something that is reliable and working great after a year or two, I'm very hesitant to part with it. Plus these days what's passing for 'cool new features' is pretty underwhelming. I'll keep my stuff that works for now, thanks.

If its about saving money I wonder how much you wasted on powering that tube tv.

$5/year or something like that.

It’s about efficiency too - I love skipping generations but usually I go for the max every time I skip, so that I have peak performance for a couple of years. How does an iPhone se even work efficiently? I could not stand my 6+ because it has become too slow to do anything, and just got rid of it this month for an xs.

As a software developer at startup I don’t have time to go on a trip. :-(

I've been where you are... I hope you get more than a salary. "Time-for-money" only scales for the very top ! (Beyonce, Brad Pitt and some NetFlix engineers). Takes this time to skill up in everything! (full stack and the business) so when you get out you can build a business.

Be very careful with this, work-life balance is more important than any startup