What's the point of buying new phones every years?

Uluganda@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 469 points –

Other than your carrier give it for free or cheap, I don't really see the reason why should you buy new phone. I've been using Redmi Note 9 for past 3 years and recently got my had on Poco F5. I don't see the point of my 'upgrade'. I sold it and come back to my Note 9. Gaming? Most of them are p2w or microtransaction garbage or just gimped version of its PC/Console counterpart. I mean, $400 still get you PS4, TV and Switch if you don't mind buying used. At least here where I live. Storage? Dude, newer phone wont even let you have SD Card. Features? Well, all I see is newer phones take more features than it adds. Headphone jack, more ads, and repairability are to name a few. Battery? Just replace them. However, my Note 9 still get through day with one 80% charge in the dawn. Which takes 1 hour.

I am genuinely curious why newer phone always selling like hot cakes. Since there's virtually no difference between 4gb of RAM and 12gb of RAM, or 12mp camera and 100mp camera on phone.

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I mean, most of the population isn't buying a new phone every year, it's just that there are enough people using phones in general that at any given time there are people buying new models. It's the same reason why there are people buying cars every year.

I personally use my phones for about 3 years. Sometimes up to 4, but usually year 3-4 is when the battery degradation gets so horribly bad and performance stutters so much that I figure if I'm going to do a full reset and buy a new battery and all that, I might as well get a new phone.

See thats where im with OP.

Lots of people do switch every 1-2 years.

And swapping a battery costs idk 40€ and an afternoon, full reset costs nothing and takes 20 minutes. Why would i generate that much trash and spend a thousand bucks on the latest shit thats 99% the same instead?

Capitalism and Marketing, bro.

I know, thats why it's so annoying.
Just two more reasons not to do it.
I had a oneplus 2 since 2015 or so until upgrading to a 9 Pro in 2021.
Several important apps had locked me out and battery life slowly became a noticable problem. I would've been fine for another 3-5 years if the lineage image had still supplied android security updates.

The only reason I had to replace my OP3 was because the buttons and screen broke down after 6 years. Battery was max 1 day but it worked for me.

Yeah everyone I know charges their phone over night every day anyway.

I had a 4 year old phone that I had to charge twice a day. I figuered I switch the battery with an official branded replacement which had costed around 100€. The difference between the old and new battery were unnoticable and I still had to charge the phone twice a day.

tough luck. Sounds like it was straining to keep up with background apps / OS updates rather than a broken battery.
Guess trouble shooting is half the battle in these cases.

Perhaps the replacement battery was manufactured a while ago?

IPhone maybe? I know they restrict your battery capacity with software as your phone ages, so the short lifespan has nothing to do with the actual condition of the battery. Iirc some other brands do it to, but I don't know which ones.

It‘s the other way around. Capacity decreases on its own just through usage. What Apple (and other manufacturers, as you said) does is decrease clock speeds of the CPU and RAM to make degraded batteries last longer. Basically trading performance for battery life. And that feature should deactivate automatically if the device senses a new battery being put in. At least it did with my old iPhone 6S.

Not charging my old phone to 100%, rather to 85% or 90% has helped with battery longevity immensely. After almost 5 years in use, accubattery still shows 80% battery health, and even if that's not accurate, it still lasts quite a while. The SD625 that phone had was very sluggish though, so in the end I still replaced it

I used to do that, but it was a chore to keep monitoring my battery life. I wish there were a "charge phone to 80% and stop" option.

My samsung has the feature built in, but on that old phone I rooted and installed Advanced Charge Controller. (Not feasible for most people i know)

I don't know why Google hasn't put this feature directly into Android. It's honestly one of the biggest pushes away from Pixel devices for me and it's absolutely silly.

Samsung phones let you restrict the battery percentage to 85 percent. I think Apple does the same now.

There are apps you can install to manage it for you on android, automatically cutting off charging when a given percentage is reached.

Pretty sure this is root only. Normal apps don't have access to the charge controller and I've never seen an app that claims to do this without root.

...huh, i wish i knew that earlier. I'm gonna search for it now.