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has adopted a fashion style model where the changes are mostly atheistic and they try to make people’s cars feel outdated/obsolete and for them to buy a new model.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.