Which externalities exactly?

With battery replacements and iOS upgrades improving performance, it seems like nobody has done more than Apple here, and indeed their stock price is even suffering for it.

What more are you looking for, honestly?

The end of marketing phones as fashion devices. Phones should be seen as tools and they should be expected to last about 8-10 years. There is no reason they can't other than apple and the rest make a lot of money on people throwing out working phones to stay on trend.

Ok, should we end the marketing of cars as fashion devices? So many things could be seen as utility rather than fashion and yet here I am overpaying for tacos in the hipster part of town.

Someone is going to do it and make a lot of money, I'd prefer it to be the company that isn't actually an advertisement company pretending to be a phone manufacturer.

Yes, the economic incentives of the world are totally fucked. Do not mistake what we have currently for the best situation or acceptable. What apple and almost every phone company does is immoral and completely unacceptable.

Immoral and unacceptable according to whom and which value framework?

Even the tools you buy are, to some extent, the result of marketing. They are just marketing to different demographics. DeWalt et al. are mostly differentiated by marketing and business strategy than the innate quality of their tools. Why do you think they have such a strong yellow branding on all of their devices? There is no world where marketing is not Paramount, and furthermore it's not evil-often it serves and important function.

Marketing is fine. If I buy a drill because of an advert I won't feel compelled to buy a new one next year because it has a slightly different shape and my current one got artificially limited.

I just don't see phones regularly lasting 8-10 years. I use my iPhone daily and don't have a strong urge to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading, but even I tend to replace my phone ever 2-3 years - it just makes financial sense to do so, and battery replacements can only go so far with that.

As phones become more and more powerful over time, I can see my phone replacing my iPad or (perhaps) even my laptop - but I don't see them lasting as long as that. They're smaller (and therefore more prone to being dropped), with you constantly, and are mostly glass. Even with technological progress aside, I would expect most people to go no more than five years between replacements.

You know, not all phones are like the iPhone. There are baseline/midrange phones with more battery charge capacity than even an iPhone XS Max! And a headphone jack! And an IR blaster, even. And an OEM system which can be officially unlocked! (which might help you make the battery even more long-lasting, by keeping its state of charge well below 100%.) Yes an iPhone will have a planned time-in-service of a mere 5 years no matter what, but a modern baseline/midrange phone can be expected to last a lot more than that. (Aside from factors that can't be meaningfully planned for, such as changes in mobile network standards.)

Just about anything can last that long if maintained. Current phones struggle to last that long simply because that's what works best for companies and there is little consumer demand for change.

Our current lifestyle of buying a new phone every 3 years is incredibly selfish and is destroying our planet.

Actually I think buying a new car every three years is much worse.

iPhones are mostly glass, due to the inexplicable decision to make the back out of glass - a material so fragile as to be a metaphor for fragility. Most phones only use glass for the screen.

I always joke that the next iPhone will probably be made out of porcelain. I'm not even sure that would be worse.

This won't happen as long as we have an economic system based on capitalism: companies will always seek to increase their revenue. Increasing replacement rate leads to higher revenue. Hence yearly new car models, tv models, clothing trends, etc.

Also, are you willing to accept increased unemployment when less employees are required due to diminished demand?

This is the most bullshit answer. By that logic we should all just be buying things non stop just to throw them out because it gives more people jobs.

When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.

There are unlimited jobs that require virtually no consumption in areas like research, art, teaching, music, wildlife conservation and so many more.

I'm not saying it's good, i'm just pointing out that we might need to reconsider capitalism as the main tool to structure our economies.

Most of the areas you mention are funded by other revenues, either directly by companies, or indirectly by governments taxing revenue or income. Without revenue most of these areas will also see reduced budgets.

Continuous growth is not possible on a finite planet.

Compared to all the things you consume, a new 6oz phone every 2 years has a rather small impact on the world. I'd start with the bigger things.

New phones' impact on the world is substantially more than the percentage of landfill it makes up. For example, look at it from a financial perspective. Suppose you spend 1/6 of a premium smartphone's price per month on food. You buy a new smarthphone every 2 years. So for every dollar you spend on food, you throw 25 cents at a smartphone company. Considering the regularity with which we have been doing that, how can that not have a significant impact on society?

Then again, one of the pillars of the consumerist dogma is that you can change yourself and the world by changing how you consume, which, in my opinion, is false, at least in our current socioeconomic reality. So while I think it definitely matters where you put those 25 cents, consumerism as a whole is as much a distraction as a problem.