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.

  • brap@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    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?

    • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      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 We’re getting past the stage where it’s a piece of outdated crap after 6 months and the improvements now are incremental.

    • karashta@piefed.social
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      3 hours ago

      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.

    • Carnelian@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      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

    • West_of_West@piefed.social
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      4 hours ago

      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.