I will bite : what's the point of upgrading at each release cycle ?

I am a mobile dev looking at my phone a lot .. and even in that case I am now changing phones every 2 to 3 years.

The ecological waste is one of my main motivations, but tbh I don't really get much from a new phone. It goes so slightly faster and that's pretty much it.

As a mobile dev for games/apps I like to have as many versions of devices as possible, newest one if possible.

However, the older phones/tablets/devices are best to start and do most of the development on, somewhat like making sure a game runs on an older PC or laptop.

If you tune your app to the lower end (older) devices, scaling up is easier than scaling down. If all you have is the latest devices it will lead to bloated apps and slow games.

Similar to how John Carmack does parallel implementations and starts with the lower end renderers in game engine design [1].

> However, some of my most effective uses of this strategy have been more aggressive. Over the years, I have done a number of hardware acceleration conversions from software rendering engines. In the old days, I would basically start from scratch, first implementing the environment rendering, then the characters, then the special effects. There were always lots of little features that got forgotten, and comparing against the original meant playing through the game on two systems at once.

> The last two times I did this, I got the software rendering code running on the new platform first, so everything could be tested out at low frame rates, then implemented the hardware accelerated version in parallel, setting things up so you could instantly switch between the two at any time. For a mobile OpenGL ES application being developed on a windows simulator, I opened a completely separate window for the accelerated view, letting me see it simultaneously with the original software implementation. This was a very significant development win.

[1] http://sevangelatos.com/john-carmack-on-parallel-implementat...

Camera upgrades are another major reason for phone upgrades. Processor bumps are nice, but the camera improvements are dramatically bigger and probably also more noticeable to your average user. To some extent the processor goes hand-in-hand with that, since Apple's new computational photography features are driven by their new processors.

I'm still running an iPhone SE, but if I were to upgrade it would be for the camera.

I held at the iPhone 7 until the XR. I didn't actually need to upgrade, but I knew I wouldn't upgrade to whatever they released this year if 5G and other nice hardware things were coming next year.

The 7 is fine. Went to my partner, could've gone to my teenager, but he's not interested in a phone.

The question I've asked myself a bunch of times in the past and which could be super relevant next year: if there's a 120hz iPad with 5G, I could absolutely live with that as my only device.

I barely want a phone these days and work hard not to pull it out. I do use it for running though (heart rate band). Easily replaced by something else, but I definitely don't want to just buy gadgets on an annual basis anymore.

> could've gone to my teenager, but he's not interested in a phone.

You’re going to have to explain this one.

He's homeschooled. He loves Minecraft and Kerbal.

But I think what did it the most is that the adults in his life are all self-employed and a bit stuck on their phones/laptops/tablets. I'm thinking this may end up skipping a generation.

The kids are going to be all right

Apple has a recycling program you might want to consider:

https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/

Don't, they'll just shred it. Sell it on Ebay and let it be harvested for spare parts.

Even if they reused the parts, the less wasteful phone is the one you already have.

I am not trying to be overly moralistic though .. just trying to understand if there is any value people see in getting a new phone each year outside of social/new and shiny.

It made a lot of sense 8 or 10 years ago where each year there was a big leap. But nowadays, even for e.g. camera, the improvements are very incremental at best (when they are not mostly algorithmic so backportable) .

You can do what you do because the old devices hold their value.

Buying last generation Apple stuff is a safe decision, so the constant upgraders get good prices when they sell their old stuff.

It’s also because spare parts are hard to come by, so Apple consumers cash in by selling their equipment as donors.

There’s nothing wrong with that as long as you sell or pass on the old device.

This isn't true... imagine half the population passing on their phones to get a new one, and the other half always getting used phones because the new ones are (say) too expensive to justify it. Versus another population where neither group gets new phones. They're quite obviously not consuming things at the same rate. And by passing it on, you're enabling people who might never cycle through phones to actually do that now. (Which is most definitely not to say that you shouldn't buy used or pass on an old device. 100% please very much do do so. You'll obviously prevent some folks from buying new, and it will obviously reduce consumption. Just don't come to the mistaken conclusion that it's equivalent to keeping your old device and not upgrading at all.)

I think you're wrong about this. The incentives are much better environmentally for a cascade of third party purchases, it creates an incentive for you to look after the phone, and to buy a phone which is robust, the manufacturer is incentivized to produce something long lasting, because otherwise the depreciation is too high for the consumer to justify buying it. The phone carries enough value so that it's worth repairing, even when it's 3-4 years old.

Cheap Android phones aren't worth repairing, people are validated to beat them up, their security updates run out within 1.5-2.5 years. Most iPhones are likely still to be on the market and being used after 4 years or more. If you buy an iPhone and sell it on you're clearly displacing another phone from being bought, which almost certainly would have a shorter lifetime before being scrapped.

If I understand correctly you're saying that people take better care of their phones because they want to be able to sell their old ones when they upgrade? Whereas presumably people who were just going to keep the old phone wouldn't look after it as well and would then break/damage it sooner?

I'm sure some fraction of people probably do what you day, but as far as I know, it is known that this is the exact opposite of what happens for a lot of other people (even iPhone users): they in fact tend to be more careless and break them more easily because they want to upgrade. [1]

Anecdotally, on a somewhat related tangent, I have found it curious that whenever I see a phone with a broken screen, it almost always tends to be an iPhone. I have no idea why this is, and I doubt it necessarily has to do with the above effect, but it does make me skeptical of the idea that people take better care of their iPhones because they presumably want to sell it later.

I'm also skeptical that most people go through the trouble of selling their old phones at all, even iPhones. Far, far more people seem to have iPhones than bother to try to sell their old ones, so I would guess a lot of people just do nothing with their old iPhone. Or trade it in. It's not exactly painless for everyone to sell their old iPhones.

Moreover, incentive-wise, like every phone company, Apple has every incentive to make everyone upgrade. Despite the continued support for old devices, you can imagine they pour a lot of time and money into making sure this happens, and judging from how well they've done, I'm not under the impression they've had massive failures on this front.

So I mean, it doesn't seem impossible that what you're saying could happen, and I'm sure it does for some subset of the population, but every evidence I've seen suggests it's far smaller an effect than would be necessary to compensate.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/when-people-want-u...

Apple just released an update for phones going back to the 4s which was released in 2011.