Economics

Noooooo the economy 😭😭😭

It's costing whose economy? Every purchase that anyone makes costs them more than it should, with that "more" going directly into the pockets of wealthy owners who provide little or no value. When people purchase less, they are primarily hurting those wealthy owners.

I’ll be using my 1TB iPhone 15 Pro for far more than 2 years. LOL

Good.

The fuck it is

I'll get a new cell phone when I find one that has feature parity with my current one.

Zero people really need a new phone every two years, that's crazy. This economy and sadly a lot of jobs are based on some wild idea of endless consumption which is just not sustainable, especially when your customer base is getting poorer by the day.

Ive had my phone for upwards of 4 years now, and I plan on keeping it for at least another 4 unless something tragic happens. Oops sorry I guess I can't afford food this week kids, those billionaires and investors might lose money so I have to go get a new phone

"cost the economy" when your economy is based on consumerism then not buying as fast destroys the economy.

Many workers report that aging devices stifle productivity, but like a favorite pair of shoes or an old sweater, they don’t want to give them up to learn the intricacies of a new device (which they’ll learn and then have to replace with another). Familiarity can trump productivity for many workers.

So first off I'm glad they mentioned this. However it's frustrating to see the first quote, "last month concludes that each additional year companies delay upgrading equipment results in a productivity decline of about one-third of a percent" which feels like real numbers versus the section I quoted which feel like vibes.

There is a cost in doing something and a cost in not doing something. Sometimes doing nothing is the best course of action.

(Now if getting a new device is a huge cost you should investigate where you can improve that process.)

The law of diminishing returns has entered the chat.

My internet service provider, for example, offered 500 MBPS and recently came out with a plan that was $20 per month cheaper and only offered 100 MBPS and I jumped on it as fast as I possibly could because I don't need 500 MBPS ever.

The only useful thing for new phones would be if there was easily discoverable good new games to buy with real pretty graphics. Instead the stores are adware platforms and phone cameras have been pretty good enough for a decade. Splitting hairs these days for improvements

The economy can burn

I bought my current smartphone in January 2022.

Oh no not the economy!

29 months is a lot shorter than I thought the average person switches phones. I’m still sticking with my IPhone X.

I'm still using a Galaxy S9+ from 2018! And yes, I still get over a day's worth of battery life with the original battery.

The section about buying new phones and the section about company investment appear to have nothing to do with one another.

The report by the Fed they cite is concerned with estimating the effect of capital reinvestment productivity gains by the firm.

Just breezing through the report it looks like the Fed is trying to explain differences in GDP between economies as a consequence of capital reinvestment. When firms buy new equipment, which could include IT equipment but also could include things like robots, backhoes, new looms, or any other piece of equipment a firm uses to produce goods or services, they should be more productive because their equipment has newer technology in it. The Fed reasons that if two major economies differ in GDP growth one of the potential explanations might be the rate of capital reinvestment firms in those economies engage in because newer equipment usually increases productivity. So more frequent investments in capital should yield faster growth in GDP. They present evidence in favor of that argument.

I don't know how reasonable their conclusion is because I am not too familiar with their measurements which are not direct measures of capital investment and don't really know enough about how GDP changes over time to know if this is a good explanation. It is clear, however, that the Fed is not arguing that consumers need to keep buying new phones every year or the economy will collapse or even be harmed. That is not even remotely what the report is about.