Forced to upgrade

If you consider all users though, they most certainly do not buy/upgrade at the same time. So let's say a new generation is released every three years, for a given user when buy-time comes they'd be buying a brand new phone that is 1.5 years old tech on average, 2.9 worst case. Releasing a new phone each year means there is the opportunity to buy the up-to-date technology (whether it's a flagship or an economic version) at any particular point in time.

Opportunity does not mean necessity. By and large once people buy a phone and are happy with it they don't change it til it's dead or slow. Most I've seen keep it even way beyond the major version support threshold, or even security update threshold (which can happen faster than expected when people buy refurbs or older models, which they do). They're appliances. There are new models of cars or TVs or washing machines every year, yet virtually nobody changes those every year. One just buys the best one within their budget x identified use case at a given point in time.

In my experience the persona that buys a new phone every year used to exist in the early smartphone days, but today is by and large an outlier figure.

Not that mobile carriers like that, instead they try to keep the churn alive against the tide, because they want customers locked in so they have you buy carrier-locked phones at a rebate under a 1y contract and dearly want you to renew at the end, which means enticing you to get a new, carrier-locked phone.

The only ones I see changing phones regularly are the ones buying phones as consumables instead of appliances - less "washing machine", more "toilet paper", the kind of phone that is cheap and underpowered, borderlining on unusable (or outright so, which I consider to be defective by design) e-waste right out of the assembly line. They don't care about the device, so they don't pay attention, so they break it every rand(0..6) mo, and then the cost to repair is barely lower than the price new plus "it was so slow anyway", so they buy a new cheap one and the circle starts again; which doesn't quite work out financially of course, they'd be better off buying a good phone and paying attention to it (which they would simply because it's not cheap). But back to the point, this kind of persona doesn't care at all about the device "newness".

I feel the same way the author does. With a new battery the phone works fairly well and I don’t need to upgrade.

With the exception of the SE models, all newer models are too big, have a notch, and Face ID. There’s just no compelling reason to upgrade other than being forced by the company.

I don't think it's that obvious, and I don't think manufacturers count on it ("it" being short length updates)

Instead I think it's about handling competition: say a manufacturer updates their product line every 3 years, should a user that kept their phone for a while need to buy in the middle to last bout, they'll look at the market and see "oh that other manufacturer has released an update to their product line a month ago, so I'm going to buy that instead of a 2yo product from my current manufacturer". The comparison may be done on any kind of metric but it ultimately comes down to what's state of the art at a given point in time.

It doesn't mean the user hasn't kept their previous phone a long time. But to be competitive across the time continuum the product line needs to be fresh enough.

In that sense it generates sale, or rather, helps with retention, not by having one update every year or other year, but by creating the opportunity to stay within one's current brand.

I think leading manufacturers have realised a long time ago that satisfied customers are what generates reliable sales and growth long term. Even Samsung, king of the shiny "innovative"-but-useless bullet-point feature list have somewhat gotten their act together.

From https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Coolproducts-repo... (2019):

"Our analysis shows that a 1-year lifetime extension of all smartphones in the EU would save 2.1 Mt CO2 per year by 2030, the equivalent of taking over a million cars off the roads. A lifetime extension of 3 years would save around 4.3 MtCO2. And a 5-year extension would correspond to about 5.5 MtCO2."

The extra global warming contributions come from "manufacturing, transportation and end-of-life phases", and the increasing dependency on remote servers.