Between the economy and cost of living, the high prices of phones, and lackluster releases these last several years (since 2020 at least), I don’t give this surprising at all.
I’m going to drive my iPhone 12 mini until it dies, then I’ll look at phones. Each year I look and there’s nothing new.
Here’s the upcoming release from all manufacturers in 2024:
the new Pro Phone Maximum Erection Pro Version in Pro Green (blue was so 2023) has a 6.7" SuperLiquidThunderCat™️ screen. The camera is even better, it’s Pro! With more AI it’ll fuck around with your precious memories so you forget you ever had that ugly cousin, you’ll be like “who’s that supermodel with the Halloween mask skin”?! The camera has 130 lenses and lens equivalents (that means preset zoom levels, for all you non Pros). The battery is even better this year, it lasts barely longer than your already good enough battery life, but now it’s Pro. And with these new AI features, your battery drains 30% faster, and we’ll scan every text message and photo you have and send it to the cloud for training. Pro! AI!
I literally just want a phone that fits inside my front pocket.
Things are slowing down a bit. Isn’t this a good thing for the planet?
Even my phone from 8 years ago was fine. My current phone has a nicer camera and is faster, but all the other stuff is not that important.
For me it’s just battery life at this point. Once that starts degrading significantly, I upgrade. It’d be nice if they still allowed you to access the battery easily.
I think phones from 8 years ago were fine, but phones from the last 3-5 years are in my opinion basically fully developed.
Good batteries, good cameras that are no longer really getting better (we’ve looped back to the megapixel wars), basically desktop class chips that can run full 3d games or even AR with on the fly ML. They’re waterproof, the glass is durable (I dropped a Pixel Pro down the stairs onto ceramic tile yesterday and it’s perfectly fine), antennas are super fast, NFC works, they support strong encryption quickly… The screens are all super high def OLED with HDR and amazing colour quality which looks amazing and I’ve never seen one burn in.
Really the only new stuff to add is generative AI for like text completion, and that doesn’t even run reasonay on 99% of desktops.
