Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever before, and while it may be consumer smart, it comes at a cost to work productivity and the U.S. economy.

The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016.

https://archive.is/1M6A1

    • Grapho@lemmy.mlEnglish
      24·
      14 days ago

      I wish they were forced to make them user repairable enough to change the fucking battery and the charging port, which is what always fails first. There’s zero reason for me to change this phone until it legitimately becomes unusable and zero reason for it to stop receiving security updates in a year.

      • moss_icon [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        11·
        14 days ago

        I remember it came out that Apple was intentionally slowing down their older phones every year purely to try and incentivise people to buy the latest model.

    • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      14 days ago

      The source article didn’t have this level of breakdown, but my suspicion is there’s a U-shaped data distribution here. There’s the conspicuous consumption crowd replacing their smartphone every year, then there’s most everyone else using theirs until it stops functioning properly, and thus there’s probably a large divergence between the mean and the median.