My current phone is an S21 that's facing a plethora of failures (screen damage, flaky USB-C connector, weak battery, back cover delaminating) that are all individually fixable, but altogether I also find it hard to resist the pull of getting a new phone at that stage.
But I feel increasingly really bad about not trying harder to go repair-first. Also because there's otherwise virtually no tech/feature reason to "upgrade" from something as recent as an S21 these days.
From a users perspective the question would seem to be whether they want to spend $89 for a battery or $890 (maybe minus that re-sale value of 200-300, so still around $600) on a new phone.
No, they can pay less than $120 on a new phone in the budget tier which will be at least comparable in capabilities to a 5 year old phone in any tier and also have about 2 years of life.
That works out to around fifty bucks per supported year, and you aren't creating a mountain of e-waste by throwing away a perfectly good phone every other year.
I think its great that phones are being supported for 7 years but in a way it is a marketing chip based on consumer's using unrealistic linear depreciation.
Some consumers can pass down, repurpose, or only need very basic things, but most consumers need much of the relative performance they first bought, break screens, can't handle embedded battery replacement logistics, etc, so most probably have replaced something like the iPhone SE before 4 years is up and are paying more than they would have expected.
The single core performance of the current Samsung A14 is about a third of the currently sold iPhone SE.
If you're going to keep the same device many years, don't buy something with slow performance right out of the gate.
A refurbished iPhone SE 2023 that has a new battery and working screen is probabilistically worth more than the iPhone 2023 you buy today, and will be less than $200 unless there's a serious shortage because they have a high failure rate?
In my thinking the cost of similar products in an industry like tech is the best available estimate of how much environmental damage is involved (I.e. upgrading tooling is itself likely to produce waste) so planning to buy a $400 phone once every 7 years and actually buying one every 2 is much worse than trying to get 3-4 years out of what people have tried to make with popular runs of somewhat outdated commodity parts.
Granted it might be faster (though looking at Geekbench scores between budget Android phones [0] and the 5-year-old iPhone XS [1] I’m not overly convinced of that either), but the price of manufacturing “nice” doesn’t drop nearly as fast as silicon.
Budget phones often compromise on build and camera and screen quality (even though the latter two often look great on spec sheets) and I think the average person would notice that far more than raw performance.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2900039
Aside from all the other problems a genuine pixel 3 battery is bellow 3000 mah, so like replacing your redmi battery with a defective one.
nobody's going to say that, for example, this isn't at least as good as a pixel 3: https://www.amazon.ca/OnePlus-Android-Display-Unlocked-Charg...
In terms of Camera, Haptics, Construction material it probably isn't
But say they do. You now need to find a 289-389$ phone (which will cost you 89$ out of pocket) that gives you the same experience.
But, let's go with this. After ~5 years, phones will sell for $990 (up from 5 years ago @ $890). 990 - 250 (splitting the difference) is what ... 740? That's a LOT more than $89 (or even 99 in 5 years).
If my phone is still up to date and performant enough for my tasks, I would be stupid not to pay 99 vs 740.
If we assume the user wants to buy a new phone in the same tier as the one they have now.
beat that big corpo licker.