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Upgrades Cellphones United States Verizon Technology

Record Number of Consumers Waiting To Upgrade Their Cellphones (bloomberg.com) 191

Posted by BeauHD from the fewer-than-expected dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Wireless customers are hanging on to their old phones longer than ever. That's the message from Verizon, which said its upgrade rate fell to a record low last quarter -- a harbinger of tough times ahead for the iPhone and other devices. Faced with $1,000 price tags on moderately improved phones, consumers may be waiting to hear more about new 5G networks before committing to new models. The faster, more advanced services won't roll out in earnest until 2020. "Incremental changes from one model the the next, hasn't been that great, and it hasn't been enough of an incentive," Verizon Chief Financial Officer Matt Ellis said in an interview Tuesday after the company reported fewer-than-expected new customers for the first quarter. He expects replacement rates to be down for the year.
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Record Number of Consumers Waiting To Upgrade Their Cellphones More

Record Number of Consumers Waiting To Upgrade Their Cellphones

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  • replaceable battery (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @08:07PM (#58480256)

    Give me a replaceable battery and I'll upgrade.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lapm ( 750202 )
      Heck, mee too. I misstimes whenyou could just buy a battery and replace it yourself. No need to change phone because bad battery. I would even tolerate extra 5-8mm thickness if it gives me even bigger battery. Anyine else remember time when you had standard battery and high powerbattery you could buy on your phone.
      • Last month I bought a Galaxy J2 Prime for my wife, with a user-replaceable battery being the main requirement. It came with plain Android (no vendor branding) and joined right onto the AT&T network (we use Ting). Enthusiasts would would a better phone (the screen is not as good as my Galaxy S5)

        The crazy thing though is this phone is sold (on Amazon) as a gray-market import from Latin America where it is really sold. It is not marketed in the US. Why? It really feels like they are holding out on u

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by chrish ( 4714 )

      I just ordered a replacement battery for my LG G5 (obviously not a current flagship phone) for under $15 on AliExpress.

      It's really easy to replace, too, this is a fully supported-by-the-manufacturer process. There's a video on YouTube showing how to do it, and it's a minute long.

      Sure the line in the case where it comes apart would "ruin" the aesthetic of a featureless piece of glass/metal, but I'm happy to live with it. I keep mine in a case anyway. The button you use to pop it apart isn't a big deal either

  • Let me change the effin battery (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @08:12PM (#58480284)
    Last 2 phones I've replaced were due to the battery dying, and it costing more to replace the battery than to replace the phone. My 2 year old phone (bought 2/17)) now takes 4 hours to charge, and lasts for maybe 2 hours (playing games). When I bought the phone the battery lasted a good 6 hours.

    Oops, this completely fucks up the cellphone companies business model of selling as many phones this quarter as you can.
    • I hit save too soon. IMHO, requiring a glue gun and a decent chance of destroying my display, plus $xx bucks for "expertise", does not work. I want to slide a plastic cover off the phone, pull a connector, and pop in a new battery. I don't care about "water proof", I don't drop my phones in the toilet very often.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by green1 ( 322787 )
        No need to sacrifice waterproof, my old S5 was waterproof AND had a replaceable battery.

    • Re: Let me change the effin battery (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Should have bought an iPhone. The poor man buys twice.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Thought exercise: we've had the modern era of smartphones now for like 13 years, and all large-market manufacturers have abandoned replaceable battery designs. Don't you think that if there really was a market segment that cared about this as much as people on Slashdot always bleat on about, there would be at least one model available?

      The statistics would say that it's just not a feature that people find to be a deal breaker on a phone purchase. Or, that including the extra thickness of battery casing and

      • No way do I want to lug around a USB battery. I just want my phone to get through the day.

      • Give me a choice between replaceable battery and not, and I will certainly go with the replaceable. (And yes, I have replaced the battery on my current phone.)

        Phone thickness? Why on earth would I worry about that? Strikes me about like tail fins on cars.

      • Re: Let me change the effin battery (Score:5, Insightful)

        by astrofurter ( 5464356 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @11:17PM (#58480870)

        You seem to be under the misconception that corporate decision making is driven by customer desires. It is not. Corporations make decisions based on profit maximization. Sometimes, yes, that coincides with fulfilling customers' desires. But sometimes the way to maximize profits is to fuck over your customers.

        • Re: Let me change the effin battery (Score:4, Insightful)

          by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @01:37AM (#58481222)
          If you fuck over your customers too consistently, they won't be your customers.
          • If you fuck over your customers too consistently, they won't be your customers.

            Go back and read the headline.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
              What so many people here fail to realize, is that your preferences are not necessarily indicative to the preferences of people as whole.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by green1 ( 322787 )
                The article seems to imply otherwise. If cellphone makers were making things that were desirable to the general population, you'd think people would be in a rush to upgrade. So either the average user has a DIFFERENT complaint that the cellphone makers are ignoring, or the people here ARE indicative of the general population on this one.

                Either way, it appears that the cellphone makers aren't making what the population wants.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by green1 ( 322787 )
            Only if you do it more often than your competition. If the competition is also doing the same, then there's no risk to you.

        • You seem to be under the misconception that corporate decision making is driven by customer desires. It is not. Corporations make decisions based on profit maximization. Sometimes, yes, that coincides with fulfilling customers' desires. But sometimes the way to maximize profits is to fuck over your customers.

          You seem to be under the misconception that desires of slashdot readers are customer desires. They are not. My wife doesn't want to change the battery, she doesn't want to root her phone, she doesn't care for 5G, and I have better things to do in my life as well, so I don't care for these things either. 99% of users don't care.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by green1 ( 322787 )
            She probably doesn't want to replace her battery, but I bet she does want it to make it through the day, and if she can have you buy a new one for her on Amazon for $10 and throw it in there, she'll be thrilled, if you tell her that her phone can't be fixed, she'll be less so.

            She also doesn't care about 5G, but she probably does want things to load fast, and for her videos not to waste time buffering.

            Sure, the average person doesn't care what technology accomplishes what they want, they may not know the di
    • Sometimes a factory rest can do miracles for battery life, years of upgrades and crapware can take a toll on your battery where a clean OS install can triple your battery life or more.

    • Re:Let me change the effin battery (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @09:34PM (#58480606)

      Oops, this completely fucks up the cellphone companies business model of selling as many phones this quarter as you can.

      I don't blame the cell phone companies for non-removable batteries. I blame clueless reviewers in the media and mindless buyers. Samsung tried for the longest time to retain a removable battery. Every review of their phones complained that it wasn't 1 mm thinner and that the removable plastic back felt cheap. And millions of idiot buyers parroted those reviews - they'd rather have something needlessly thin that feels good, but functions worse. These are the same reviewers who complained they wanted a "premium" metal exterior, then promptly covered it up with a plastic case to protect it. With Samsung's earlier phones, you could just buy a replacement plastic back for $5 if it got too scratched up. Eventually Samsung threw in the towel and went the non-removable battery route.

      I've had to buy cases for all my phones the last 8 years not to protect them, but to make them thicker so I wouldn't drop them so easily. I would much rather they had come with bigger batteries than be slightly thinner. (I'm currently on a Motorola Z2 Force which I bought only because it was heavily discounted. But after I found out about Motorola's mods, I added a battery Moto mod. It made the phone thick enough that I can hold it securely without a case. And it lets me go 3 days between charges. Almost perfect. The only drawback is they got rid of the headphone jack.)

    • Eventually cellphones will become commodity items, with tiny profit margins. It's the natural patern of stuff.

  • why would I buy a phone for 5g? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @08:16PM (#58480294) Journal

    In general, my phone is connected via WiFi almost everywhere I go except when driving. When driving, it only needs to handle maps and Assistant commands which it does very well, often even when there is no connection. Even when at a location with WiFi, I rarely browse because I'm old enough to need reading glasses, but when I do it is very fast.

    So, what is 5G going to give me?

    If they would simply stop killing my phone's speed with updates but continue security updates indefinitely, I'd have no reason to buy another phone until this one fails. And that is the way it should be. I'm OK with a phone being over $500, but a phone should not be a $500-$1000 per year device. At least give me the three years that my computers gave me even in their hayday.

  • Ha! Cellphones are "DOOMED"! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @08:16PM (#58480296)

    Remember when lots of folks were waiting to upgrade their PC, because video card and PC chip manufacturers were basically taking years off between major upgrades, and there was practically no new silver bullet software demanding an upgrade?

    Yeah - that's what this is. There's nothing sexy about a new cell phone now. An extra couple of gigabytes storage isn't going to buy you anything new you couldn't already do with your phone. No one's going to gamble a major software project on some little edge upgrade on some newer phone model.

    Nothing wrong with a bit of a 'mature' era for phone upgrades. Steady on, replacements and limited new customers are about what you can expect. That's still many, MANY billions of dollars - but it's no longer a gold mine for the stock market to throw parties over.

    Which unfortunately means about what it means for a while with the stock market - thirsty to draw extra blood from that stone, the 'innovations' the market will be deciding to encourage will be the really, REALLY stupid ones.

    Major manufacturers are going to start cutting off existing functionality to put basically extra toll booths and rental fees on existing crap. Why? Basically to give a mutual fund manager something to say in a meeting.

    And major names will basically be ruined by this - but that's what an itchy stock market does when the drug starts running out.

    But that's OK - new chips will eventually get 'sexy' again, and new form factors and product features will finally be possible. It just won't be for longer than we'd want again.

    But just because of what happened last several times the PC market went through this bullshit: "Haha, Cellphones: Officially dead."

    Did I do that right?

    Ryan Fenton

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LesFerg ( 452838 )

      But.. but... this new one is thinner!!

      Heh. Do the designers of these ever-thinner phones ever look at the sales figures for those silicon cases everybody buys to wrap around their phone just to make it feel bigger?

      • Do the designers of these ever-thinner phones ever look at the sales figures for those silicon cases everybody buys to wrap around their phone just to make it feel bigger?

        Of course they do. And they hope you'll buy that case at full markup price right off the rack at the Apple Store!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

          For anyone who doesn't know there are alternatives, the Monoprice web site is a good place (one of many) to find cases for less than $10, and my experience with them has always been good.

  • Samsung must feel vindicated in their pursuit of phones that can't fit in decent cases.

  • I had this problem for the last 6-months or so, my Nexus 6P was dying and despite the record high pricing very phone has fatal flaws: missing headphone jack, bad fingerprint readers (S10), missing fingerprint readers (iphones), crapware, performance (Pixel 3), mandatory gestures. After buying and returning an S10 after a single day I stumbled upon a Pixel 2 XL deal, while it is missing a headphone jack at 270 USD its hard to complain.

    • I'm confused, the iPhone's had a fingerprint reader for a while. I think the next phone I get will be an iPhone7. You know, the newest one with a headphone jack.

      The Pixel 2 XL sounds nice, but I don't get your acceptance of a missing headphone jack being okay because it's cheap. Every $20 phone I buy has a headphone jack!

      • Apple removed the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 Plus. Might want to verify it is still in the regular 7.

        IIRC the iPhone 6 is the last one that has the headphone jack.

        • You're correct, the iPhone 7 was the first one without a headphone jack,not the last one with it. It is also the oldest phone sold direct by Apple.

    • I replaced the battery on my 6P and it's still going strong. Using a custom rom called "Pixel Experience" based on Android 9. Mostly a stock experience. Obviously rooted.

  • My phone works fine. I plan on keeping it as long as it works. So no, I'm not "waiting to upgrade".

  • Like PCs 10 years ago, Phones are now good enough (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aberglas ( 991072 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @08:29PM (#58480360)

    Modern phones are amazing. How much they can pack into a small package. But they are good enough for most people.

    Slightly better cameras. Slightly faster apps. Slightly faster downloads. Slightly slicker packaging without that audo jack. Nothing of real value.

    Manufacturers need to figure out how to make an ultra slim battery that works brilliantly for 2 years and then dies by melting the rest of the phone around it.

    • " Manufacturers need to figure out how to make an ultra slim battery that works brilliantly for 2 years and then dies by melting the rest of the phone around it. "

      They should probably give Tesla a ring. I think they've almost perfected the very feature you speak of :P

  • Why Buy? (Score:3)

    by Humbubba ( 2443838 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @08:30PM (#58480364)
    If the old phone does everything I want, why buy a new one?
    • I have no idea. My sub-200$ is still doing great 2 years on, I see no reason to replace it as long as it's working?

  • New features suck (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dracos ( 107777 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @08:30PM (#58480366)

    Namely pseudo-features (no-bezel, curved screens, folding screens) and anti-features (thinness, inaccsesible battery/SD/SIM) are all the handset manufacturers are willing to add nowadays. Consumers can sense that these devices are designed to be expensive, fragile, and decreasingly maintainable.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Add to that missing phone jack, screens way too wide, too big for pockets, crappy zillion megapixel cameras that poop out noisier pictures than the several megapixel cameras of five years ago. I don't want to pay multi hundreds of dollars to downgrade. 5G is nothing more but another way for the government to spy on us all since the technology needs to know the cellphone location in order for the cell tower to aim the beam. The biggest problem today is not the resolution or the quantity or the bandwidth b

  • Kill the notch and add a headphone jack (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kevin_j_morse ( 1282350 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @08:33PM (#58480378) Homepage

    I would buy one of the new flagships if they had a headphone jack and didn't have a stupid notch in the top of the screen.

    Also I don't need seventeen cameras...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There are phones that have no notch already. See: Vivo Nex, Oppo Find X, Xiaomi Mi Mix 3, and the One Plus 7 Pro which launches next month.

  • yeah, either that, or... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Kiss my buttocks AppleGoogleEtc.
    We Want Our Fucking Headphone Jacks Back!!!!

  • Verizon's CDMA system goes down at the end of the year, so someone will get to sell me a new one then. And maybe a new signal booster, given the way this house eats radio waves. I'll see what is on holiday sales.

  • I'll upgrade... (Score:3)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @08:43PM (#58480418)

    I'll upgrade when the magic smoke comes out. It's a 5S from Dec 2013. So far so good. The tablet I'm typing this on is from 2014. Works fine.

    • Yeah my 5S feels a bit slow occasionally but most of that I'd rather do on a 2in1 or a real desktop anyway. The biggest slowdowns it experiences are browsing ad infested websites, and I'm not upgrading just to load ads faster.

      • adguard on ios works fine. I don't see ads. But there is one page, cnn.com, that wrecks my phone and tablet, it just flat-out heats up the device and usually loads in sections. It's almost as if they're running a cryptominer or something.

        So now I got to fox and bbc.

        • Yeah I don't see them but they seem to do something that slows things down, I agree CNN is one of the worst I'd noticed. The WeatherChannel app runs like crap, too.
  • The $1000 price tag is so ridiculous, that naturally everyone will hesitate to upgrade. Battery life is good enough Camera is good enough Now its all about damage - still $800 cheaper to fix broken screen than buy new phone.

  • With pretty much every carrier doing away from the 2 year contract with higher service fees to subsidize your phone, it's little wonder people are holding on to their phones longer. It used to be you were dumb if you didn't upgrade your phone every 2 years because you didn't get a discount on service. Now that you get cheaper service but pay full price for the phone, it really takes a lot more for someone to need to upgrade.

    The only issue now is that all phones don't have replaceable batteries. And with

  • Cost is the big one. Apple learned this the hard way with their iPhone X.

    Market saturation is another.
    Lackluster variances from one model to the next. Most of the significant ones are negative.
    ( Headphone jack going MIA, non-removable battery, stupidly high costs of cellular / data plans )

    To be honest, they make terrible phones. I would guess the majority use them as a portable computing or information
    on demand device than they do as a phone.

    Other than the ability to hardware disable ( switch ) the camer

    • "hardware disable ( switch ) the camera, mic and GPS"

      I would pay for this, as would others. However I believe such hardware would be illegal to sell in the United States under (secret, but leaked) implementation regulations for Bill Clinton's CALEA law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act).

    • Cost is the big one. Apple learned this the hard way with their iPhone X.

      No, they didn't. Apple doesn't care about sales of one model, they care about total sales. The iPhone X had a huge revenue, and at the same time Apple continued selling iPhone 8, 7 and 6, which are not exactly cheap.

      Apple knows that if a phone costs $1,000, fewer people will upgrade, and people will hold on to it for longer. If you look at it not as a $1,000 phone, but as a $350 per year phone, Apple is doing alright.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Commercial disposable society expectations v. real (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @10:37PM (#58480788)

    My last refrigerator lasted 27 years before I needed to replace it. My furnace, also, ironically, 27 years. I still have some 15 year-old computers still running. My cars are about a dozen years old. Heck, I have an IBM Selectric typewriter from the 1970s that still would work just fine, if I wanted to use it. If it's working, why replace it?

    This suits me just fine. Being frugal is a worthy and in some cases, necessary for financial survival, trait and value. I've got more important things to spend money on than constant hardware replacement just to satisfy some dweeb's company's bottom line.

    My smart phone is five years old, and works just as well as the day I bought it. Why would I replace it? To me, it's brand new! See me in another 10 or 20 years for that.

    The dweebs are so out of touch with how real people live, and how the financial pressures the income inequality, sucking sound money drain to the top, affects real people.

    Remember Tim Cook's expectation for everyone to replace their Apple computers every two years? Put down the joint, Tim.

    BTW, if anyone reading this thinks, "you're just poor," well, my family is considered upper middle class, with a six figure annual income that supposedly places us in the top 5% of income earners. But that doesn't mean I'm going to be stupid with my money, stupid like Verizon or Apple would like me to be.

    • I can virtually guarantee that the refrigerator that lasted 27 years cost you more in power than buying a newer and energy-efficient replacement.

    • Re:Commercial disposable society expectations v. r (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Azaril ( 1046456 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @05:51AM (#58481742) Homepage

      You realise your "frugality" is almost certainly costing you money and damaging the environment unnecessarily right?

      As pointed out below your 27 year old fridge was certainly cheaper to replace than to run.

      The most obvious thing here is the 15 year old computer. A mid tier pentium 4 from 2004 is slower than a raspberry pi 3. Your computer is almost certainly drawing 300-500W. The raspberry pi uses around 1W at max load. It costs $38. It will thus pay for itself in around 650 hours (probably a lot less as your psu is probably incredibly inefficent). Unless you are using your computers in lieu of space heaters, this is a terrible idea.

      Please actually do the maths, save money and help the planet.

      • Oooh, trotting out the 'Save the planet" argument. That creepy little dig that's replaced "but God would want you to", or " our class of people don't do things like that".
        Can't have the plebs not feeling guilty about something...

    • My smart phone is five years old, and works just as well as the day I bought it.

      My experiance has been that by the time I reached 5 years after buying my first andriod smartphone (a HTC wildfire S) it had gradually become less and less usable. I frequently got SSL errors in the web browser, apps that had previously worked fine randomly hanging, power button requiring unreasonable force to respond. The last straw was when I planned a trip to Canada and my research told my they were turning off their 2G networks and my phone didn't support the north american 3G bands.

      I agree buying top e

  • You'll have to pry my Nokia N900... (Score:3)

    by EzInKy ( 115248 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @11:12PM (#58480860)

    ...from my cold, dead hands. 10 years and still going strong!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DeBaas ( 470886 )

      ...from my cold, dead hands. 10 years and still going strong!

      I would, but for some reason can't get your thumbs to budge....

  • Why should I upgrade my phone, when there are very few new features worth getting? I'll upgrade my when when real 5G becomes available, maybe next year. Or the year after that.

  • How often would you, yourself, change your phone out of your own pocket?
    Why changing (not upgrading) is it works?

  • waiting for 5g. Why would I even want to go on a network that probably needs more battery and has fewer, and maybe even fewer reaching cell towers ? I just made a speed-test and got 37mbps down/15 up - not fast but more than fast enough. it does make zero difference whether I stream netflix, youtube or spotify at 37mbps or at 1500mbps - either way. they top out below 15mbps. And those are already my biggest bandwidth hogs and have been for years.

  • Out of touch with their customers. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jtgd ( 807477 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @04:01AM (#58481506)

    When you ask manufacturers what they think people want they say "Thinner phones!" (thus justifying non-replaceable batteries and no headphone jacks).

    When you ask consumers what they really want they say "Longer battery life. We don't care how thin it is"

    And I guarantee you no one ever pleaded with a manufacturer to take away their headphone jack.

    I find the newer phones to be less and less attractive. If I'm going to wait for that situation to improve it might be a long wait.
    (And don't get me started on how Android keeps getting worse and worse.)

  • I just ran a speed test on T-Mobile in a major east coast city.

    46.9 mbit down
    36.2 mbit up

    Ping 34 ms

    I know LTE can go even higher.

    5G? Who cares? Not me.

    • 5G? Who cares? Not me.

      Exactly. Articles claiming people are holding off upgrading until 5G is available are silly. 5G top speeds will be difficult to achieve in the real world due to things like structures, humans...pretty much anything that exists. Early adopters will also take a big battery hit.

      But this obscures an even bigger issue: what the hell do people NEED with all that extra speed? Are people really downloading multi-gigabyte files on their cell phones? Not likely. And while the hotspot idea would be a natural app

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by green1 ( 322787 )
        But I NEED to be be able to blow through my monthly data cap in under 30 seconds! Now it could take me MINUTES to do the same thing!

  • Yeah right. "Waiting To Upgrade" is sales-speak, implying people want to constantly ditch the phones they have right now. Perhaps many people are perfectly happy with the phones they have right now and just don't want a new one unless the current one breaks? "Waiting To Upgrade" sales-speak doesn't include that possibility.

  • Why upgrade? (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @07:21AM (#58481982)

    Cell phones have arrived at a point where PCs (and their OS) have been for a while now. The "good enough" point. Windows 3.11 to Win95 was a huge leap. Win95 to 98 again. 98 to XP again, but XP to 7 was already a drag. 7 to 10 is still something a lot of people postpone to when they can't avoid it anymore. 7 is most definitely "good enough".

    Phones have arrived there too, no later than 2014. You can do phone calls, you can text, you have a navigation system and you can play some games. Now what does the new one do that the old one cannot? And let's face it, gimmicks like a fingerprint sensor or face recognition are not worth half paycheck to the average consumer.

  • Less preloaded junk (Score:3)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @07:37AM (#58482024) Homepage

    Everyone is saying they want removable batteries, which is my #1. But the other thing that will force me to upgrade eventually is that I can't uninstall the preloaded apps that occupy 80% of the space on my phone. My Galaxy S5 has so many preloaded apps that unless I go through and manually delete junk files (I used to do that on Windows too, when Windows apps were crappy like Android apps are today and left files in temp folders all over the place.) just to install an upgrade. Most of the preloaded apps either never worked, or are abandonware. So eventually I will have to root my phone to get rid of that stuff, then it will be like a fresh new phone again! That should buy me a few more years. Hopefully, someone will make a phone with a replaceable battery and no notch again by that time.

  • Want people to upgrade? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by prisoner-of-enigma ( 535770 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @08:10AM (#58482140) Homepage

    Here's a radical idea: give them what they've been asking for all along. Things like:

    - Larger battery. Who wouldn't choose a phone that's 1mm thicker but has 50%-80% more battery life? I've never heard a single human exclaim "my phone is too thick and my battery lasts too long!"
    - Quit removing useful ports and acting like people were demanding it. They weren't.
    - Quit making the phone bigger and bigger just to say you've got a bigger screen than last year. People's hands aren't magically getting larger.
    - Quit mandating useless, sub-par features (*cough* Bixby *cough*) and pretending it's an improvement. It's not.
    - Quit charging hundreds of dollar more for a phone that adds 32GB or 64GB of flash over the base model. You could buy a high-end 1TB NVME SSD for the premium most phone makers charge for this.
    - Stop making phones out of the most fragile substance known to man (glass). Yes, it looks pretty...for the few moments before it's covered in greasy fingerprints and subsequently shattered in a minor mishap. If people have to put cases on their phones because they're so fragile, what's the f-ing point of all that gorgeous glass? You only get to see it when you unbox it and when you trade it in.

    • In addition to these reasons, from the iPhone side, I am waiting for them to drop FaceID. Or at least give a different option. Same reason I haven't updated my iPad.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by green1 ( 322787 )
      Mostly spot on, but I did notice one inaccuracy in your list. Phones aren't getting bigger anymore, only the marketing number for the screen is. By switching from 16:9 to 2:1 or even worse aspect ratios, they've managed to actually shrink phone screen areas, while getting a bigger number to slap on the sales brochure.

      My Note 4 had a larger screen than any of the current phones, and at 16:9 was far more useful too.
    • "Stop making phones out of the most fragile substance known to man (glass)". I agree - let's make the front and back out of polished aluminum! Oh wait...

  • The reason phones are slowing down is because the phones manufacturers make now are flat out stupid.

    Do I need ML-managed animated poop emojis? No, I do not.

    Do I want to play cool games on my phone? Sure! Wait, they expect me to run software that will guarantee the battery will drain in a couple hours, and be completely useless in 6 months, but not make it easily replacable? Yeah, I don't need cool games that badly. Ditto for ANY software that is heavy-resource.

    Manufacturers have made devices that are p

  • If your phone works, does what YOU want it to, why upgrade? Over expensive. "but what about the updates?" Personally, pretty much everything from Marshmellow has been more blah than anything else. Just more bells & whistles. Functionality wise, other than a better camera, better/faster processor My Mate2, could still hold it's own.
  • "The product is a great success! People are staying away in droves!!"

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