Hey, it was thanks to these kinds of people that I was able to buy a literally new Galaxy S24 for $300 like a month after release.
i refuse to upgrade, because newer phones are objectively a worse experience than older ones. They keep removing features in the name of “innovation” while putting more stuff in there that the market is actively telling them they don’t want.
I miss the 90s early 2000s, where every 2 years the new products were much better, not only specs wise but categorically so. and a new phone did not cost a month of rent.
I have a 2020’s phone, and besides battery life being weaker now. I see absolutely no reason to upgrade for a marginal spec bump.
When was the last time a new feature was added? like something that would make want to have it? they are afraid of any risk and so there is absolutely no innovation. the closest thing to any risk they took is when they removed the headphone jack to sell 300$ headphones.
The whole industry is being enshitified.
You might even change the phone because of the battery and find out that your new device has an absolute power hog of a screen with no battery upgrade to match and your battery life is even worse now
I love my flip open smartphone. That was a new feature worth paying for. It’s so small in my pocket.
If you want people to buy a new phone every year “for the economy”, the $1800 phone must be reduced to $50, and the quality stays at flagship levels. The citizens are not here to make the oligarchs wealthy. Fuck your economy.
For real… “device hoarding”. Lol. What about “saving”, “environmentally friendly”, NOT wasting resources for nothing"? No, we need a negative term for that!
Photographers are the worse. They are still buying lenses from 1930 and all the decades between then and now. Just because glass still works regardless of how old it is.
So it’s got some fongus dirt…opens it up, washes the glass and puts it back together!
So its got a scratch or the fongus ate the surfaces… No problem! Now it has character! Need more character? Add jelly! Its great for porn! Oh, I guess its good for porn in many ways. Jelly.
Will someone sell me one that is secure, doesn’t resell my data, isn’t preloaded with useless AI “features”, and doesn’t have Israeli Spyware on it?
I’m waiting for Canada to allow some of the Chinese models in Huawei looks great. They may still collect data, but not for the US tech oligarchs.
You can’t get Huawei in Canada then? I’ve had good experiences with them, also had a oppo that was great for its price.
IDK about Israeli spyware, but I’m running e/OS on a Fairphone, and it’s decent.
I want to get one, but it is over twice the price in the US
Tariffs or because of the different bands?
Frankly there is a way to get me to upgrade my phone from my current one but I can garuntee that there ain’t many companies making phones to my upgrade standards. But here’s a list.
-Easy to swap battery where I can just pop the lid and put a new one in.
-Aux jack because I want it.
-MicroSD card slot.
-Solid CPU, Ram, Storage, Et cetera.
-Give me actual buttons at the bottom you fucken cretins, I like my textile response you lousy motherfuckers.
-If you put the button on the back I’m breaking your back.
That’s all I need, ideally it’d also be modular and upgradable but I severely doubt I’m getting that anytime soon. A lot of the problem with phones is that you can’t really customize them to your needs, if I could I’d have a smartphone that’d look like it’s from mid 90s scifi where it’d have a big fuck you battery on it and a host of controls along the side for quick use, but noooo it all has to be overly generic hyper standardized crap. Fucken hate modern phones.
It sounds like the fairphone would fit most of your requirements except for the buttons.
The buttons are non-negotiable.
It’s also wrong that this has a negative effect on the economy. If people consume less and save more, those savings will be invested by banks in businesses.
Interesting thought experiment. but if hypothetically, we all stopped buying apple products, but instead using that money to buy apple shares (what a bank would do). Would that be better or worse for Apple? could they still pay their staff (ignoring the fact that apple would fire everyone and rake in the money).
You see, here’s the thing.
When this whole smart phone thing started, smart phones sucked. They ate a lot of power, so the battery didn’t last, they were slow, both in computation, and loading data, the screens were pretty trash (dim, low res, huge bezels)… Everything needed improvements.
Now-a-days, my phone, whether new, or a couple years old, has an all day battery life, it’s pretty quick and snappy, apps load quickly, data appears almost instantly on it, the screen is bright, with minimal bezel area… Nothing I care about changes.
So why am I upgrading? Slightly better camera? Slightly better everything else? Stuff I don’t perceive has been “improved” and I don’t actually give a shit.
My reason to upgrade isn’t there. Currently, my reason to upgrade is: this phone will no longer get upgrades, I should get something that will… For security. That’s it.
So why in the actual fuck, would I bother doing it if I don’t have to? AI? No thanks.
I had to buy a new phone recently. There were 4 or 5 different AI bullshit things trying to hassle me, I managed to remove most but one or two I couldn’t uninstall.
If you turn your phone off at night and just leave it unplugged the majority of the time, it will last for many, many years.
So why in the actual fuck, would I bother doing it if I don’t have to? AI? No thanks.
Hell yes.
Brick phone plus tablet is the combination I am using currently, the tablet was £15 second hand. I could consider spending a bit if I got a significant upgrade out of it but probably not/can’t be bothered to.
Yeah, I only use my tablet to read e-books and stream video, so it’s pretty cheap too. No need for anything more.
I’d start questioning an economy that relied on getting rid of perfectly good things.
I haven’t intentionally got a phone to upgrade in well over a decade. I get a new phone because the last one no longer works in some way that matters enough that I will go and get a new one to replace it. The most expensive phone I have ever bought is a Pinephone.
Also 1k or more? Fuck that. I usually get 1 to 2 year old phones. My pixel 6 pro is still doing well.
Same. Plus you’re upcycling.
It’s been that way for a long time. I went Nexus 6P -> Pixel 2 -> Pixel 6
I don’t break my phones, so I basically buy the device with the longest software support and keep them as long as support lasts.
Apple is gonna make a new campaign about how only poor and dumb people are holding on to their phones for more than a year and americans will camp in front of apple stores again.
Their phones are already a status symbols, the marginal changes in the design each year is so people know that you bought the latest one.
Maybe if any of the good features coming out today wasn’t paired with the monkey’s paw that is:
- it’s behind an app
- it’s a subscription service
- it’s planned obsolescence
- I can actually fix it with third party vendors
- it’s selling your data
Maybe then consumers would actually get excited by new developments. All these trends are doing is turning the new generations into luddites.
I love it when people are called “Luddites” for hating the enshittified tech because guess what? The OG Luddites weren’t actually “Luddites”, either. They weren’t afraid of progress per se, but its use against the average person. Unfortunately, the propaganda against them worked too well.
I’ve learned so much about the Luddites in the past couple of years. I’ve found it super useful to connect our current struggles to historical analogues.
It makes me think of the writings of philosopher and political theorist Frederic Jameson. He argues that one of the best ways we can resist the cultural logic of late stage capitalism is by making these connections to history — a quote he’s known for is “always historicize”. By reclaiming and reconnecting to our history, it’s easier to understand it as a dialectical process.[1]
[1]: this isn’t the best summary of Jameson’s points. He’s a pretty dense writer, and I’m still working through his stuff. If you’re someone who enjoys videos, Michael Burns is an ex-philosophy professor who has a few good videos on Jameson
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So we aren’t spending our minimum wages on $2000 phones often enough, because we’re wasting it on steadily rising costs for food, housing, utilities, and health care?
Well, they can just go fuck themselves.
They last increase in the Federal Minimum Wage was in 2009, when it was raised to $7.25. it’s only been raised twice since 1997, for a total of $2.10.
The original iPhone was released in 2007. So while smart phones have become so ubiquitous that every person requires a phone just to navigate modern society, the wages required to afford both the phone and a monthly plan have not kept up.
We now have to purchase and carry a device that did not exist 20 years ago, and yet even minimum wage workers are expected to have a cell phone to communicate with work, get their schedules, etc.
And now their complaining that we aren’t coughing up an extra $2000 every year?
Can we get a headline about bazillionaires hoarding wealth?
Better yet, let’s get the heads of those bazillionaires and put them on pikes, and then run headlines about the excellent new trend of beheading the rich and putting their heads on pikes.
They all have a severe case of OCD, manifesting itself in hoarding behavior. If they hoarded cats as intensely as they hoard money, we would take ALL their cats away, redistribute them to more responsible owners, and hospitalize the OCD victim until their medication kicked in, and they can contribute to society in a positive manner.
They don’t hoard cats, they hoard money, but the solution is the same - confiscate their stolen treasure, redistribute it to the people they stole it from, and incarcerate them until they learn to behave positively among society.
Some journalist should start calling them all Smaug. The problem is a bunch of us asshats would then be like “Smaug did nothing wrong!”
Why should dragons pay tax. He earned that gold fair and square!
#temporarilyembarrasseddragons
That’s full-on Newspeak, is what that is.
Yeah, the title (from the CNBC article) is completely wrong. Device hoarding means that they are buying many phones and hoards all those phones in their place.
I didn’t think it was real.
But there it was…the network who some right wingers will say is a leftist cesspool…engaged in full-blown end-stage capitalism.
I mean…it still seems like satire. The article talking about how using your phone for 22 months puts strain on the network because it has to become backwards compatible…or how the repair market is unregulated (ie a black market) and therefore damages the economy.
