News

Oh no, the economy!

Oh I'm sorry AI can't buy devices, pay us bitches

Good. If the economy is designed to only survive with constant spending then fuck it

Perhaps it's all the cell carriers moving from 24 month device payment plans to 36 month terms. Flagship devices have become so costly that to keep the monthly device payment plan price the same the term needed to be extended.

Only two years? Seriously?

Why? It's not 2010s anymore, even 5-year-old devices still get updates these days. How are people affording to drop $1K on a new phone every two years? Or maybe the problem is that they're buying shitty cheap low-end phones that were obsolete out of the box. If you buy a good, used, last gen flagship, it'll last you many years.

I'm still rockin' my Galaxy S10 and the desktop I built in 2016. Both meet my needs just fine right now.

Won’t somebody please think of the economy?!?

I had my phone for 8 years until one day it bricked. That's the only reason i got a new one about a year ago. My wife is coming up on the two year mark and is asking for a new one and i have to keep reminding her that hers is fine.

One of the things the article says is that "most people want newer phones" (if they could afford it). Do y'all feel that way?

I think I wouldn't switch my 4 year old device even if someone gave me a new one for free. Just the hassle of changing to a new phone is not worth it when the new phone isn't that much better. I'm just so over "tech". I don't have that excitement of new gadgets anymore.

You know shit's bad when US media starts using the 'China bad' classic "but at what cost?" byline toward US consumers

Im guessing there's a sister article somewhere on Forbes reporting lower than anticipated earnings for US phone manufacturers

The phone contracts are now all 24 or 36 months I stead of 18/24. Hence the average goes up

Balls to that. You can pry my old devices from my cold dead hands.

This is the new avocado toast

Oh, look, another example of "competition" ruining another feat of humanity

Let's all feed the "economy beast" with fake, valueless, money tokens and buy hardware, while we all starve. Earn points!

This is utter bullshit. I've not bought a new phone in 7 years and even then the economic damage causes by my purchasing habits in those 7 years is an insignificant spec in the face of the economic damages wrought by the single Walmart in my home town each month.

This being next to this article https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984629/ram-is-so-expensive-that-stores-are-selling-it-at-market-prices.html

Is pure real life comedy gold.

My Pixel 6a has about 18 months of support left. I doubt I will be buying any other American based phone then so I'm seriously considering not having a smart phone. I think I have an old flip phone in the closet. It may come back into play.

Why are we always expected to change our behavior to benefit the economy? I need to buy more? The economy is all made up why can't it change to meet the needs of the people?

I’m on a 3 year cycle with the iPhone, now. Last one I held on to for 3 years and the 15 Plus I have now is going to be in use until, at least, the iPhone 18.

I don’t really give a shit about the impact on the economy.

Fuck the economy.

My phone can fuck right off. Other than GPS and music...its really not as valuable as I may have once thought

We should make devices lower quality to increase profits! More failures!

Perfectly happy with my iPhone 14 Pro Max, which has better build quality than the current offering, and my half decade old Surface Book Pro (running Linux, naturally) -- also built like a tank. When I need extra compute or storage, my NAS and home server await. For really serious stuff, I can always fire up an EC2 instance. Propping up the economy through consumerism is not my concern. This feels like a sponsored piece, akin to all of those articles after COVOD exhorting us to go back to the office full time.