The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016.
While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations.
Research released by the Federal Reserve last month concludes that each additional year companies delay upgrading equipment results in a productivity decline of about one-third of a percent, with investment patterns accounting for approximately 55% of productivity gaps between advanced economies. The good news: businesses in the U.S. are generally quicker to reinvest in replacing aging equipment. The Federal Reserve report shows that if European productivity had matched U.S. investment patterns starting in 2000, the productivity gap between the U.S and European economic heavyweights would have been reduced by 29 percent for the U.K., 35 percent for France, and 101% for Germany.
device hoarding
That is not what this is called.
Consumers are being Anticapitalist! This is not a recession! We didn’t fire half the country for people to spend less!! Think about our growing profits!!
Oh, look, another example of “competition” ruining another feat of humanity
Fuck the economy.
We should make devices lower quality to increase profits! More failures!
My phone can fuck right off. Other than GPS and music…its really not as valuable as I may have once thought
I think the economy has bigger problems than you not being a good little consumer.
My phone is 5 years old and I’m not giving it up until it’s bricked at this point. Shit is just too expensive to upgrade anymore.
People will loosen the purse strings once Trump is gone and stability resumes. If they have any money left after Trump is gone.
Holy shit keeping a device longer than 2 years is “device hoarding” now? Thats fucking nuts.
How do you invest so much money in a device like that and not make it last? I’ve got one phone I use for work calls thats 10 years old. People are still shocked I dont even have a case on it.
“device hoarding”
The article about generational wealth is right around the corner I’m sure!
This is blaming consumers for companies not doing a better job at planned obsolescence.
My last phone up until a couple months ago was from 2017, apparently I am just a mega hoarder. Don’t look at the pile of miscellaneous bits of tech, the Omnisiah demands I collect the shinnies.
Honestly, if I could just upgrade the CPU and replace the battery every once in a while, is still be using a Note 3 or nexus 5. Those first few generations of notes were awesome.
I still miss my Note 3 and Note 5. I’m using the Note 9 now, and even that is starting to become unbearably slow. Thankfully the battery is still good enough for me, but even Firefox constantly freezing is ridiculous
When every single business is slowly getting to the point where they need you to be a consumer whore just to survive, yes.
…hands up anyone using laptops or desktops older than 15 years?.. …right here, bitches…lol…
I got laptops from 2008 and 2013, still work just fine 😁
Yup got that too. Flipped it to Bazzite, and setting up an old laptop on Mint now too.
I’ve got a “refurbished” Dell laptop that’s about 15yrs old. Some ex-corp model. 4C/8T, 16" 1900x1200-ish display, Nvidia GPU, 20G RAM, and it’s still going strong except for the battery which stopped holding a charge. I could get a new battery but I use the system rarely and just for browsing/email so running it off the AC brick is fine. It’s been running Linux Mint for as long as I can remember. My phone is a cheapo model from 2021 and it is also fine. The only reason I might replace it is if the battery tanks like with my other phones (planned obsolescence) or if I finally decide it’s mandatory to up my security/privacy game and need a phone that runs GrapheneOS, which means a Pixel. An old used one.
Yeah, fuck that. I’ll keep my device as long as possible because of course I would! Try for five years.
“Hording”… The fucking nerve to say that… I am actually offended. Whatever happened to “recycle, reduce, reuse”? What could possible be more irresponsible than constantly replacing your devices?
It’s because economists haven’t got the memo yet that informs them that smartphones have been recategorized as, “durable goods”.
When you have some free time, you might find it interesting to read about Edward Bernays.
I’ve always been aware of propaganda, but had never heard of him. Thanks for that. Was an interesting and somewhat horrifying read.
I do everything in my power to avoid ads and develop an informed opinion but there is no escaping the influence of at least some social manipulations. I suppose its easy for me to forget sometimes how much others are influenced by that too.
Maybe don’t base the economy on e-waste?
Yeah but NEW SHINIES!
Sacrifice yourselves for the economy
And the planet.
What kind of twatwaffle writes this crap. Fuck your planned obsolescence.
…i believe only one country has “planned obsolescence” as an illegal business practice…
Bhutan?
After a quick search, it seems to be France. I wouldn’t have guessed that in a thousand years, judging their car industry…
Lol shots fired.
Accurate, correct shots…
Good old French engineering. Calculations say we need at least a 9mm bolt to hold on this widget, every other bolt on the car is 10mm or 16mm. 9mm bolt it is.
There’s something weirdly seductive about French cars though, they somehow manage to be extremely good at some specific niche feature and look nice and be just quality enough that you seem to talk yourself round to them.
Misha (ring youtuber/racer) recently drove a Xantia with the active suspension and said it was the best handling ever. And he has driven some exotics…
The French have a great history of hot hatches too,
205gti
Clio Williams
Clio 172/182
Clio V6
Megane Sport
Saxo Vts
Stellantis in shambles, or at least their manufacturing quality is
Maybe I’m old but it feels like the days of meaningful improvements have passed. Now it’s just a slightly different design for the sake of the annual release schedule. Why change when this 4 year old device is still supported and functions just fine?
I have a 6 year old iphone. And the literal only enticing feature of the new ones is that the base models have 4x the storage space lol
Phones are where PCs were ~20 years ago. We’re getting past the stage where it’s a piece of outdated crap after 6 months and the improvements now are incremental.
This is it, really. I used to upgrade every year or two and flash the latest and greatest ROM to be on the bleeding edge.
Now, none of that really seems like a huge difference anymore other than GrapheneOS for privacy and security.
It’s just incremental improvements and none of the reparability I want, so I wait until it’s really necessary to upgrade now.
Mine is now 3.5 years old. I bought a new flagship model with the idea it’d last a long time. Only now are new ‘features’ and updates coming out on new models, and even those are minor. Plus mine still has company support.
A new phone can cost over $1000 and the old one still works
I know, and I can’t believe they sell…No way i’m gonna pay that much for a phone !
When I was young, a phone cost $20 and lasted… well, until I replaced my land line with a smartphone.
“6G” will take care of that. The carriers will force you to upgrade and then charge you higher rates because for some reason they have to replace all their infrastructure every few years.
The infra replacement at least makes sense though, the bandwidth they have is limited and consumers want to squeeze more out of it (higher quality video, bigger files, high quality calls) so they need to repurpose the spectrum or use different parts of the spectrum.
Maybe the economy shouldn’t be so dependent upon disposable devices.
Yeah, my reaction was less about economics and more wondering why this wouldn’t be celebrated.
