And if batteries were trivially replaceable, I'm sure they'd come up with a different excuse: not enough storage space, "it's getting slow", this year's model has a much nicer camera, blah blah blah blah.

It's not that I'm not sympathetic toward wanting the new shiny. I've been there and done that and generated my share of e-waste. But I've managed to (mostly!) get off that treadmill. I only got a new phone last year because my old one stopped getting security updates. The new one will (in theory) be supported for 7 years, so, barring loss or catastrophic breakage, I should be good until 2031.

I think this is changing simply because the rate of change for phones has slowed down like it did for computers. Just like a 2014 computer is a lot closer to a 2024 computer than a 2004 computer was to a 2014 computer in 2014, a five-year-old phone is a lot less outdated than five years ago.

> not enough storage space, "it's getting slow",

Surely wrinting better software will help. /s

>> And if batteries were trivially replaceable, I'm sure they'd come up with a different excuse: not enough storage space, "it's getting slow", this year's model has a much nicer camera, blah blah blah blah.

The phone I use is an HTC One-M8 I got in 2014. It is totally getting slow. I can hardly use Chrome and Google Maps anymore (the main reason why I need a smartphone in the first place) because they take forever to load new pages/maps and Google Maps hardly fits on the phone's screen nowadays. I updated the OS once to Android 6.0 Marshmallow and I can't update it any further because later Android versions don't support the device hardware. I've stopped trying to install new apps on it because they just don't support the OS anymore. The battery is pretty much dead, it may switch off without warning when it shows ~60% charge. Then when I plug it in to charge it shows it was really at 3% or something.

It's been like that for a couple years now but I've resisted getting the new shiny, first because I'm not that attracted to anything on the market to be honest (I don't look like anyone on the ads, regardless of race, age or sex; all those happy shiny people who live life to the fullest give me the creeps) and also because I can still use it for phone calls and messages. I use Whatsapp because it still lets me update it.

Also: I'm curious to see how long I can keep using it.

I guess I've made up my mind that it's time to get a new phone when I got myself a little toy robot doggie from Hiwonder and I couldn't run all the games on it, because the phone just crashes.

At the same time the laptop I got around the same time as the phone (I was starting a new job) is still used by my flatmate, who's a soft eng and it's her main machine. It's getting to look a bit battered now but it's a 4th gen X1 Carbon and other than appearance it runs smoothly; for a machine with Windows 10 on it anyway. I mean the OS sucks, OK.

Phones could absolutely be made to be as durable as (admittedly high-end ish) laptops. They aren't because a) people want to buy new ones all the time and b) companies want to keep selling them.

No lessons to draw from this. We all knew our economy is a very wasteful thing.

After happily replacing the battery in a ten year old phone, six months later it was obsolete due to the 3G network switch off; the device was no longer capable of one of it's primary functions; making and receiving phone calls.