Why do we feel like we have to buy a new phone every year? Does a phone that looks exactly like its ancestor really differ? What would I lose if I lived my life with an older phone? Will there be a phone without AI (the one I talked about in the God AI post) in 5 years?
Some of these questions have easy answers, others are more of a wish. Before I can dive into why we feel the pressure to have new things, I decided to experiment: use a Moutfitoto G 2015 as my phone for a week. If you know Portuguese, I did a video to show day-to-day how it was to be in this experiment:
Experiment
The Moto G 2015 released in July of 2015 (duh) cannot be considered a flagship (top of the top) phone nowadays, and not even back when it was launched. The phone had a basic processor (Snapdragon 410), 1 GB of RAM (yeah, 1 GB…) and 16 GB of storage (oh boy).In other words, it is pretty weak, but back in 2015 it was an okay phone, it did most of what you needed, being also waterproof, and having an audio jack port and a tray for a MicroSD. The camera is 13MP, but feels like a good potato, in the sense that sometimes photos look good, but you never forget that it is still a potato. As a comparison, 2015 is the same year as the iPhone 6S and Samsung Galaxy S6 (funny how you can just swap the order of the letter and number…).
Knowing the specs of the phone can lead to the expectation that things would be extremely painful in 2024, but that was not the case. The phone that was released with version 5 of Android could be easily updated to version 9 without losing too much performance (since it had almost none), and if you are brave or patient enough, you could even update it to the latest version of Android, but I would not advise that. This update means that most of the apps are compatible with the phone, and in theory, you could use it like a regular modern phone.
The phone is fine
For the first three days I was living my regular life, but in stop motion. I could send messages through WhatsApp and Telegram, read and answer emails, watch YouTube videos, and even be on social media, like Instagram, as long as I could accept the fact that I would watch stories and reels in 0.5x of the regular speed.
In a way, the weak phone was great for the basics I needed, like communicating, and bad enough for the distraction that led me to use the phone less. People are paying money, to buy phones that are not smart and e-ink ones to help them avoid distractions, while I could do the same for “free” by using an old phone that was stored in a drawer.
The phone is on fire (not literally, 😅)
But like every dream, you have to wake up at some point. The phone is Brazilian, not in the sense it was born in Brazil since it was probably manufactured somewhere else, but in the sense that it was sold and designed for Brazilian cities. This leads to the data not working in most American network operators, such as T-Mobile. Some could still make it work, but in general, the phone is too old, and I was not going to spend time and money to make sure it could make a call (which it could), or use 4G out of home.
This problem was easily solved since I could test the phone in wifi areas, like my home (where I spent most of my time), or a cafe/supermarket/university/most places. What I was not expecting was that on the fourth day, the phone would be like “You know what, you think you can take me out of my retirement plan of doing nothing in a drawer and just go back to work? Nope, not me”, so it stopped connecting to wifi. I know, I know, it has no data, it has no wifi, it is dead for modern use of a phone. And I agree! I know I could fix this wifi issue too, probably by formatting the phone, since changing wifis, restarting, and doing the basics did not work. But I didn’t want to spend more time than a week on this experiment. The goal was to see what would happen, not to make it work.
The conclusion of the experiments was divided, though not evenly. In general, it was a failure. I could not use the phone for a whole week, only for three days. And that’s okay, because the idea was to use an old phone, and even though using a 10-year-old weak phone was too much, there were a lot of positive aspects. This old phone was capable of making video calls, posting videos in Instagram stories, and sending messages and emails like any other phone. Going to this extreme showed me that somewhere in between (like a 5-year-old phone or less) would probably have worked perfectly fine.
Marketing and capitalism
Okay, let’s recap. The experiment showed me that a 10-year-old phone would probably be too old to work nowadays, but a 5-year-old or an older flagship phone could do everything you need today without the problems the Moto G had. So why do we (not me, but we in general) replace our phones every one to two years? And the answer is the good old capitalism.
What is the advantage for a company that sells phones for you to use the same one for multiple years? How could they make more money (I will write a future post in this blog on other ways they are making money of out you and why)?
The best way to make sure everyone is okay with paying a lot of money every couple of years is to invest in marketing. Let me show you three out of the hundred ways they do that:
Last year’s phone is bad
Apple is one of the best marketing launch tech companies today and has been for quite a while. When you watch them launching a new product, you won’t see them comparing the phone to Samsung, because they don’t want you to be thinking about Samsung at all. They only want you to think about iPhones, so they only compare to themselves. This tactic is incredible, and at the same time, it serves a second purpose. When compared to the last generation, everything that you say is better in the new phone, you are automatically saying that is worse in the older.
For example, if they say “The photos of the new iPhone 15 look 50% crisper than the iPhone 14”, unconsciously, you look at the iPhone 14 in your hand and think “Wow, this piece of 💩 has worse photos than 15, I am going to throw it in the trash right now”. It is wild, but it works (for them, who make money from that, of course).
F.O.M.O.
F.O.M.O., or the Fear Of Missing Out, is a complex and profound term for you wanting to experiment with everything and have everything. And this feeling is even more strong when combined with jealousy when you see other people having something you don’t.
So when you see the tech reviewers, but even more, the celebrities, the influencers, and all the famous people with the last iPhone or the last Samsung phone, you start thinking that you are the only one with this outdated, boring-year-old phone. Humans do not like to feel isolated, it touches a survival instinct emotion. Being an outlier could mean death 300,000 years ago, and now it could mean social death.
Because it is a premium phone
The most boring and silly way of making you swap phones is to make them more breakable. And marketing does that by calling it “premium materials”. Not long ago, like for the Moto G 2015, phones back were made out of plastic, which meant that they did not shatter like modern glass phones when dropped on the floor. Even other materials, like metal in the, also 1-year-old, iPhone 6S were more resistant. But, being practical is not premium, premium is looking good, even though you will be forced to put an ugly case in your phone if you care for it or are not a millionaire who can buy a new one easily.
Another example is batteries, some of you may remember when we had removable batteries, which were in general worse than the batteries used today, but meant that when you have an older phone you could just buy a new battery and it would be okay, instead of having to charge your phone 4 to 5 times a day, because it is expensive to replace your modern phone battery and you would rather to buy a new phone with 100% battery.
When to move on
If the capitalist consumerist, the psychologically marketed world is the one we live in, how can I know if I need to buy a new phone, or if I am being manipulated to think so? My answer is pretty straightforward: Can you do the things you need with your current phone? If yes, keep it. If not, buy a new one. Don’t give too much importance to “but the new phone does it better”, focus on doing a task, you will know when your phone is limiting you from doing a task: either by not being able to complete it, or by taking too long to do it.
In a more practical sense, if your phone can communicate, by call, or messages, can take pictures and record videos, and allows you to use the apps you do, without being glued to a charging cable, why would you need a new one?
And if you feel like something is not right, take a look at how much it would cost to fix the phone, before defaulting to buy a new one. Maybe you only need to replace the battery or the screen, not the whole thing. And by the end, if you are sure you need a new phone, take a look at good used ones, refurbished and similar alternatives. The planet thanks you.
This classic from George Eliot in a new outfit: Don´t judge a
bookphone, by itscoverback.