The iPhone is no longer Apple’s most important product

Re:The iPhone is no longer Apple’s most important product by mehrdadn on Thursday August 01, 2019 @03:54PM (#20587650)

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.)

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Re:The iPhone is no longer Apple’s most important product by Brakenshire on Thursday August 01, 2019 @07:57PM (#20589514)

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.

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Re:The iPhone is no longer Apple’s most important product by mehrdadn on Thursday August 01, 2019 @11:00PM (#20590405)

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...

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Re:The iPhone is no longer Apple’s most important product by scarface74 on Thursday August 01, 2019 @09:55PM (#20590156)

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

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