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.
Dude, my average phone age is 7 years. I'm now on my 3rd since smartphones exist.
What do US people do with their phones? Even my dad (a farmer) has them longer and he loses them sometimes in the field or drives them over.
Yank here. I dunno what these fucks are complaining about. All my phones have either been cheap, or refurbished secondhand. Hell, I even learned how to fix my own so I could make them last as long as possible. And when the OS gets too slow, I start throwing out old apps like I'm bailing a leaky ship. My average phone's lifetime is nearly five years. My laptop? Nearly ten.
You know what this smells like? Smells like rich people complaining about poor people being pragmatic and sensible. "Decreasing productivity by 1/3 of a percentage point." Spoiled little prince can eat my entire ass.
This. I'm just upgrading my galaxy s9 that was released in feb 2018. Although many parts of it are starting to die (e.g. screen burn in, a dew cracks), it's only because my service provider is killing it off because it doesn't support VOLTE (and I refuse to use the default Samsung OS).
Upgrading to a fairphone. You better believe that's gonna last another 7 years.
Right? My current one is from 2019 and I don't see a reason to buy a new one.
I have no idea.
Technically I’m here because I replace phones every 2-3 years, but it’s so I can give my teens good phones. I can’t afford to replace four phones at once so this lets me replace two. We keep phones in the family, in use, for a much more reasonable 5-6 years
Mine's lower, due to having one gotten stolen and another one crushed. My current one is five years old. According to the industry, we both are perverts or freaks that need to be eliminated.
I'd be using an S8 if I could
still fucking angry i can't use a Sony xzc2 in the US since 3G shutdown (it HAS LTE capability and network operators refuse to support it)
I'm only somewhat worse since early 2000s Windows phones were kinda trash and I broke my first iPhone. But after that, I run them until they start having trouble doing common things. I went from an iPhone 6 to a Pixel 6 which I still am using fine.