Most people use their phone for far more than SMS and "phoning" these days. You are an anomaly these days. That's neither good nor bad, it just is.

Most people in Europe only replace their phones when they die, get stolen, or lost.

Other than a few lucky ones, we aren't big fans of contracts, replacing phones every two years, we enjoy our pre-paid variants, and only replacing them when it actually is required.

Even when we use it for more than just SMS and calls.

Still happily using a Nokia which outlasted several iPhones (all of them had terrible microphones in my experience).

Is this based on your personal observations or can you back that up with any meaningful statistic?

I know both people that get the latest iPhone every year, and people still on a Nokia 3310(-equivalent), but the latter are in the vast minority in my circle of friends, also in Europe.

Personally, I've been upgrading every 2-3 years (not on a contract), and the phone was never broken.

I'm on my fifth smartphone (since 2009). But I've always used Android. It could be that iOS users are more inclined to replace perfectly working hardware.

Not all of us.

Gigantic phones are off putting. Every few years Apple tries making a mini and that’s the time to buy.

I’m fairly tall and have size appropriate hands (I think). I struggle to reach the top corners of my 12 mini. It’s very irritating.

Agree GP is an anomaly and will say 15 could be an exaggeration a bit. I don’t know really but iPhone has been around a long time now and people seem to replace typically every 1-2 years.

Not in most European or African countries, majority is on pre-paid, and phones only get replaced when there is an actual reason, not that two years have gone by.

~80 % market share for contracts (post-paid) in Germany: https://www.statista.com/topics/7772/mobile-communications-i...

I'm on a post paid contract but i haven't had a phone subsidy in a long time. If you want a "free" iphone/android you can lease the phone (effectively it's a personal loan paid back over 2 years).

I said Europe, not Germany.

~75%

And post-paid mobile contracts don't mean that the phone is paid for by the contract.

Like the others say, I too have a post-paid without a phone. I personally don't know anyone with a bundled phone, because why would you do that? I pay 8€ per month and change the phone whenever I want.

15th phone in total, would be fairly average for someone who has had mobile phones for 30 years. I suspect that's what the GP meant. Smartphone adoption is still not anywhere universal and many, many, are still on their first smart phone since a few years back.

He specifically said 15th iphone. iphones have been around for 15 years.

Yeah that was me, and I am talking iPhone. Don't try to overanalyze the "15". There's nothing scientific about it I just made it up and put the tilde in front. Didn't realize it would be the focus of such debate. It could be 10 or 20. Most people I know were early adopters and have replaced every 1-2 years and have also probably broken a couple along the way requiring early replacement. I'm also not claiming my observation is representative of anything other than that, I'm sure it wouldn't match some larger dataset. It's biased by a ton of factors. I was trying to point out 2 things;

1) we've used iphone's since the beginning and are pretty loyal, would likely never consider non iPhone

2) we don't tend to switch apps for "inclusivity" as the original comment parent stated. We blatantly exclude people that are not on the Apple product ecosystem by being rather inflexible to even try the universe of platform agnostic options (WhatsApp, etc).

This is my experience in the US. Basically, we're acting like the teenagers except in a not so mean and judgemental way.

I do, and I am still on my second...