As someone who makes enough money to buy a new phone every year if I wanted, I typically upgrade my phone (iPhone for what it's worth) every 4 years. My experience is that this is about as long as it takes for enough new features to accumulate to make me excited about an upgrade. By the end of this 4 year period, my phones are in a sufficiently good state to be sold, or passed on to a family member.

The idea that a typical person is expected to upgrade their phone every 2 years or so is almost incomprehensible to me.

Damn. I don't think I've ever had a phone for less than 5 years before I was forced to replace it.

I know some people that like to do this for their own entertainment in real life, i guess they could get a job writing for cnbc

This constant consumerism is destroying our world.

The main topic the article is talking about is a drag on business efficiency from a slower upgrade cycle and running workloads less efficiently on old equipment.

>Small businesses, in particular, lose valuable hours each year due to lagging systems, creating what economists call a ‘productivity drag,’” Benabess said. On a national scale, this translates to billions of dollars in lost output and reduced innovation. “While keeping devices longer may seem financially or environmentally responsible, the hidden cost is a quieter erosion of economic dynamism and competitiveness,” she added.

Of course it's on CNBC for writing the article this was. It likely never would have made it here without that spin however. State of the media environment.

Or I got a computer with a larger hard drive. Less mental overhead in managing files.

I loaded my macbook pro from 2015 recently and it runs great (though past security updates). But the fans spin, as they did in 2015 as well. Newer Apple Silicon blow it out of the water, including on say video editing or other areas where bloat isn't the issue.

There's a lot of genuine technical improvements in ten years that aren't just keeping up with bloat. These are prosumer use cases above but the same sort of thing applies to corporate systems.

https://theofficialjohncarpenter.com/they-live/

In Germany, repair cafés are quite common.

Laptops, PCs ? I am on 10 year old Laptop and that works just as good as any modern system. I do not use any Microsoft products so there is no need to upgrade. Plus, any new system will probably not work with my preferred OS for a couple of years, that means if I buy, I always buy used.

Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the (Apple) investors

I fixed it.