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.
People are returning to normal device lifecycles and the greed can’t cope
Oh no, we’re being so selfish. Why not buy a 10% performance upgrade every two years for $1000 while wages stagnate? Oh, and carriers don’t subsidize the cost at all anymore. They call it “free” then lock you into their most expensive plan so you spend thousands more on the plan than if you could have afforded to just buy the phone outright.
Fuck this out of touch reporting.
It’s all over the place. In the middle of the article they suddenly talk about how software updates, modularity and repairability is important so that old devices can be made to keep up with contemporary demands, blaming the fact that this is an issue on big tech.
Then again, other parts are completely nuts.
Noticing some em dashes in there, so at least some of this is AI.
The parts about corporate infrastructure sound like a c suite dipshit trying to sound like they know what they’re talking about.
“Our networks run slower because we have to be compatible with older devices!”
No, Judith, your IT department just keeps 2.4ghz wifi available for the old devices while also running 5ghz. Those devices stay slow, but it doesn’t impact anyone else.
“Back in 2010, 100Mb internet was the fastest! No one could imagine gigabit becoming widely available! Stuff needs to be upgraded to handle it!” Judy, tons of businesses were running gigabit in 2010, and common network gear has had gigabit ports for years. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Not saying you’re wrong (pretty sure you’re not) but important to remember that the reason LLMs use a lot of em dashes is because it features so prominently in journalism.
I would have little respect for a journalist who didn’t know how to use an em-dash, so I don’t think that proves anything. But I agree that there is a lack of coherent thought throughout, though that’s something humans are also fully capable of.
But yeah, fully agree. Never mind that network connection speed is not really the relevant bottleneck for most office situations these days. If Germans are less productive due to technology it’s because they still use freaking fax machines over there, not because employees are stuck with five year old smartphones.
I – to a certain extent – know how to use an em-dash.
(Source: Former journalist.)
Confirmed—only journalists would have the audacity to place spaces around an otherwise fine em-dash.
Let’s not get audio editing involved!
Those look like en-dashes.
That’s a Lemmy formatting thing.
Most word processors will auto-format to em dashes when they detect regular dashes in context of a sentence with a space on either side
That’s great with AP Style. MLA goes in a different direction regarding spaces.
Can we please stop with the em-dash bullshit? That’s a literary tool, not a sign of an LLM in play. That people did not encounter them ahead of ChatGPT speaks more to their news diet than the ability to be a literary critic.
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I’m not sure whence your animosity comes. I’ve been a columnist since the '90s, and I assure you: Em-dashes are on the menu.
To claim proof of LLMs is to say it was never done until then. It most assuredly was.
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Hold on, you can simply tack on 10-50 dollars to your cell plan and get a “free” upgrade every year instead!
Oh look, it’s the consumers who threaten the economy, not the fucking ghouls in the C suite, killing jobs and cutting wages. How dare they not having enough money? How DARE they?
I’d argue it’s actually more the fault of the politicians than the CEOs, because the politicians cut taxes for the rich and set the rules of the game for companies to operate in; companies merely take opportunity of the exploits presented to them.
I’d also say that companies have a so called “fiduciary duty” to maximize shareholder values, as typically understood by economy classes. the way to change that behavior is to change the rules to which the companies have to keep. that means, instead of exploiting workers, they should pay taxes and benefit the community that way.
Not every company is publicly traded, so no shareholders, and not every CEO has to be an asshole. Sure, the laws should be better, but they are not. And here it’s not a politician who cries about loss of sales.
Jesus Christ what a dumb take. But at least they didn’t say that millennials are killing the cell phone industry. I guess that doesn’t make for good clickbait anymore.
Reminds me if the parable of the broken window, in which French economist Frédéric Bastiat explains the painfully-obvious truth that breaking windows is generally a bad thing, even though it drums up business for the glass maker.
But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.
The oldest millennials are in their 40s. They’ve moved on to talking shit about zoomers. It’s kind of weird seeing everything repeat itself like that as I get older.
Nah, I’m collecting recipes for billionaire bacon.
I like the analogy with a surgeon or a firefighter.
Of course, the surgeon has to be available in case somebody needs an operation. But the best that can happen to society at large is that the surgeon is never needed because nobody’s sick.
Same with firefighters. Of course they have to be there to fight fires, but it’s better if houses don’t start to burn down in the first place!
“Companies aren’t innovating anymore and it’s costing the economy” is what it should say. When late stage capitalism leads to consolidation and cost cutting, stock buybacks, and other short term profit when competition is no longer necessary, that’s what kills the economy. That’s why monopolies and anticompetitive behaviors are bad, but the US doesn’t punish that anymore.
Don’t forget aggressive rent-seeking behavior.
“Companies aren’t innovating anymore and it’s costing the economy”
companies aren’t innovating anymore because physical limits have been reached. Moore’s law holds no longer true. Transistors can’t be packed more tightly into space anymore while also making the computer chip cheaper at the same time.
There’s lots of things that could be innovated without faster processors. I mean if we’re just talking cell phones, adding a camera was an innovation, adding a touch screen and eventually touch keyboards that actually worked, different form factors. These things were aided by faster processors, but not directly dependent on them. But these could be totally unrelated devices to phones or even computing at all. Innovation across the board including med-tech, business models, city planning, and tons of other industries have suffered from privatization, deregulation, and leading then to consolidation and thus little need to compete and thus little need to innovate.
please continue to “device hoard” folks
While it may seem to be a smart money move, it can result in a costly productivity and innovation lag for the economy.
For the love of god! Won’t somebody think of the economy?!
Another example of “the economy” meaning the ultra wealthy’s bank accounts.
Why would that hurt the economy? If you want people to spend money, make things affordable and useful. They make things shittier and more expensive and then wonder why people aren’t buying
Whoa, whoa, whoa … expecting utility out of a product? That’s socialism!
At this point my phone from 2022 is way overpowered for every use case I have for it. So why upgrade? It was a bit different years ago, when new phones actually did exciting new things older phones couldn’t do. But now the technology has pretty much matured, and upgrades are incremental at best.
I am typing this on a 5 year old Android phone. It has 128GB of memory and 8GB of RAM, very decent cameras, a beautiful OLED screen and a processor that is more than fast enough for everything I do with it. And even now the battery still lasts two days with normal use. It cost me about €300 at the time.
Unfortunately the Android version is getting so far behind that some apps are starting to get a few issues, so I have been checking out some black Friday deals for new phones, but they look very disappointing.
In the current market it seems like I’d have to pay about €500 to effectively just get a side-grade. All €300 offerings look like just a straight up downgrade in any way apart from the more recent android version.
So I think I’ll hold on to this one a while longer. Hardware-wise it’s still in perfect condition, and if software support really becomes an issue then perhaps I’ll try out a custom ROM.
Also if you keep it for longer, the performance boost from a new one is noticeable. If you replace every 2 years, you get an imperceptible change and have to waste more money for it lol
That’s not even 3 years, gotta get those rookie numbers up
Fr, my phone was over 3x as old when I traded it in, and it wasn’t even broken. I just knew I had to replace it in the next 4 years and didn’t want to get hit with tariffs.
2 years is a good start for people who trade in annually, though. Gotta start somewhere!
I’m on a 5 year old iPhone SE I’ve owned for 4 🫡
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especially if it’s a windows computer :D
Kevin Williams, the author of this article is a very special breed of stupid.
yeah…his previous article just before this one was “Americans are heating their homes with bitcoin this winter”
you’re a couple years late to that hype cycle, Kevin.
Kevin, if thats even a real person at this point in media, is just pushing stories and discourse aligned with corporate speak. Let’s consider it less stupid and more complicit, which I argue, is even worse.
I dislike having the comma of direct address thrown at me. At least close the aside!
Nah they’re referring to a different Kevin Williams.
That at least skips the need to legally change my name.
capitalist propaganda
The person who wrote this must be absolutely insane. How I’d it a bad thing for the world that people are holding on to their devices? Less e-waste and people don’t spend impulsively. It’s also very logical: smartphones reached a plateau and people aren’t exactly swimming in money with the rising price of everything.
The person is writing from a business prospective. If people are replacing their phones less often, it means that fewer phones are being purchased each year. If your company makes phones, that means adjusting to a shrinking market no matter what your company does.
that means adjusting to a shrinking market no matter what your company does.
Which is good. Markets are supposed to go up and down, and responsible businesses would have the capital reserves to weather the troughs, but no (public) companies are responsible anymore, and they waste any capital reserves on appeasing short-term shareholders who don’t give a rat’s ass about the long-term prospects of the company.
Good.
