Every year around September, Apple releases their new phones and people flock to buy them. It used to make sense - the upgrade from the iPhone 4 to iPhone 4S (remember when they used to do 'S'?) was somewhat meaningful (significantly better camera and signal, better internal specs and support for Siri!)
Now it's hard to justify upgrading from the iPhone 11 to the new iPhone 17 if there's nothing wrong with your phone. The cameras, specs, display and software support on both phones are incredible. Apart from design and an aging battery, there's little reason for me to upgrade.
Here's a brief reflection of all my phones and why I upgraded:
- iPhone 11 Pro Max -> iPhone 15 Pro Max - performance and battery was significantly degraded. I considered replacing the battery, but decided but didn't want the hassle.
- One Plus NORD -> iPhone 11 Pro Max - met some Americans who refused to use WhatsApp so needed an iPhone for iMessage purposes. Ended up liking it and doubt I'll switch back for a while. The One Plus NORD battery was shot, so I bought a refurbished iPhone for cheap.
- Huawei P20 Lite -> One Plus NORD - After being laggy for a few weeks, the Huawei turned off for it's final time. I had just about managed to transfer all the contents before it departed. At this point, phones didn't have removable batteries and it wasn't worth repairing.
- Samsung Galaxy S4 -> Huawei P20 Lite: The S4 was magical. During an Information Technology lesson, my teacher was explaining megapixels and asked people to put their hand down if their phone had less than 1MP, 2MP, ...up to 8MP. My hand was still up because this beast of a phone had 13MP in 2013! It had some cool gimmicks like eye-tracking to control the phone hands-free. Today I would use this for scrolling reels and TikToks. It was ahead of it's time. After 4 years and a bunch of software mods like Cyanogen, this phone battery decided to inflate like a balloon. This was the era of very good "performance per dollar" Android phones, so I upgraded.
- HTC Desire S -> Samsung Galaxy S4: My mother had the first smart-phone in our family: the HTC Desire. I later got this as a gift when starting high school! It taught me a ton about tech and I even made a YouTube video about how to install a GameBoy emulator on it which garnered over 250,000 views!
- Before the HTC, I had random Samsung, Motorola and Nokia phones. These had full keypads and the coolest app was Snake 🐍
On average, my phones lasted for around 3 years before upgrading. Most upgrades were because the phone performance or battery was degraded. I don't intend on upgrading until my phone is seriously deteriorated again (currently the back has some cracks because I don't like using a case, so if that gets worse, I may have to upgrade.)
Unsurprisingly, all these phones were upgrades. This makes sense, because all the phones that would be available to buy after 3 years would be released after my older phone and even if I buy something refurbished, it would only be 1-2 years old. This might seem obvious, but I've seen trends going back to "dumb-phones". It's not something I plan on doing because the loss of connection is serious and it's very hard to do this with iMessage.
This is part of a series where I try to improve my writing.
- I performed well w.r.t starting with 'I'
- Wrote this pretty quickly and off-the-dome without overthinking the contents
- Managed to improve the writing with a quick second reading