It may be an unfortunate relic of the carrier upgrade economics. Most people, in the US at least, on a subscription phone plan get essentially a new phone for free every 2 years. Things are changing a little lately and now it’s not quite a free phone but a heavily discounted one, but it’s still pretty reasonable to expect most of your uses won’t have phone much more than a few years old.
I guess that means if we want to see this change we need to stop trading up every other year. Which would mean carriers need to stop charging $70/mo for a phone line. Etc. I don’t upgrade my thermostat yearly, the economics are different, and so the product approach is too. My thermostat also doesn't come everywhere I go on a daily basis and doesn't run apps (it’s not a general purpose computing platform that needs to grow more powerful as software becomes more demanding.
Also I have to add: phones are a fashion statement. Old phones do work, they’re just not cool. Nobody cares about the AV receiver sitting in your tv console as long as it’s amplifying audio. The tech hasn’t changed in years. Well unless your receiver does video, in which case I am certain your 15 year old audio receiver is not capable of 4k 120 HDMI handling. Update that TV to a 4k panel and your receiver will need a bump too.
Of course. Either way you’re getting what you pay for and there’s no way to select “I don’t want a free phone every two years take $15 off my monthly payment please”. It kinda is moving that way now, though. The monthly cost for new hardware is increasingly more optional and better delineated from the phone service. But thats’s new stuff—it will take awhile for things to percolate down.
They still offer(ed) you a new phone after two years. The “payments” are(were) hidden costs. I thought that was what we agreed on. 15 years ago there were no other options unless you did pay-as-you-go. Recently, yes, there are plans that let you skip the subsidized upgrade. They don’t cost any less than the plans that have upgrades did in the past though, they just cost less than other plans from the same carrier.
Not true at all. Where are you that is the case? I’ve done this in Canada, Australia, Iceland, the uk. Plans with a “free” phone every two years are something like 50% to 100% more expensive than if you walk in with a phone and don’t want one or upgrades and just get a plan.
That’s not how it worked in the US. I also stipulated that I’m talking about contract plans not pay-as-you-go. From my time in Europe I recall pay as you go being much more of a prominent option.
I guess that means if we want to see this change we need to stop trading up every other year. Which would mean carriers need to stop charging $70/mo for a phone line. Etc. I don’t upgrade my thermostat yearly, the economics are different, and so the product approach is too. My thermostat also doesn't come everywhere I go on a daily basis and doesn't run apps (it’s not a general purpose computing platform that needs to grow more powerful as software becomes more demanding.
Also I have to add: phones are a fashion statement. Old phones do work, they’re just not cool. Nobody cares about the AV receiver sitting in your tv console as long as it’s amplifying audio. The tech hasn’t changed in years. Well unless your receiver does video, in which case I am certain your 15 year old audio receiver is not capable of 4k 120 HDMI handling. Update that TV to a 4k panel and your receiver will need a bump too.