Consumer spending power is decreasing. This is just the start.
When iPhones were selling like crazy they were sub $500. Now they are a grand and don’t do anything new. Gee I wonder why.
The market is saturated. Everyone has a phone, and only so many will need one next year.
I still have a 12Pro (and had a 6s until is started acting up), and its fine. The camera is kinda trash, but otherwise it’s never had an issue running any app I’ve tried.
I tend to ride with a phone until it dies, and I bet most people are the same way.
I have a 14 pro max. I’m getting the battery replaced in it soon. Probably will be waiting until the 18 pro max or whatever they call it in 2026
Same with my 14 Pro. I‘ll get a new battery this autumn since mine‘s at 84% capacity right now and maybe when I’m at <80% and <2yr they replace it for free (hopes in Spanish)
Maybe they can finally stop releasing new phones every year. We don’t have yearly game console releases.
I feel like that’s a bad example as consoles tend to be household items rather than individual ones. Regular releases mean that people can choose their upgrade schedule and always have a recently released product available. Good example is cars, manufacturers release a new version of each model every year, but the differences are fairly minor. Then every 5-10 years they do a major revision to the model that’s a significant change. This way most people don’t feel put off when they buy a 2-3 year old model and a revision come out the following year, but a person can buy a new model after 5-10 years and feel like they got a significant upgrade from the previous one.
I mentioned game consoles as an example of consumer electronics that function without having yearly updates. This is largely due to giving game devs a performance tagtet to hit, but it shows you don’t need marginal updates every year. Mobile app software could probably benefit from not having better hardware every year, forcing devs to write better software.
From a software standpoint, iPhones are locked down like gaming consoles, focused on consumption and not general computing devices. Apple controls what software runs on their devices just like Nintendo.
I think yearly car updates are also wasteful and the car industry has adopted a fashion style model where the changes are mostly atheistic and they try to make people’s cars feel outdated/obsolete and for them to buy a new model. Cars are viewed as a status symbol, so this works.
Apple has been applying the same play book as the auto industry, though they can actually obsolete hardware through their software.
