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.
While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations.
Research released by the Federal Reserve last month concludes that each additional year companies delay upgrading equipment results in a productivity decline of about one-third of a percent, with investment patterns accounting for approximately 55% of productivity gaps between advanced economies. The good news: businesses in the U.S. are generally quicker to reinvest in replacing aging equipment. The Federal Reserve report shows that if European productivity had matched U.S. investment patterns starting in 2000, the productivity gap between the U.S and European economic heavyweights would have been reduced by 29 percent for the U.K., 35 percent for France, and 101% for Germany.
Holy shit keeping a device longer than 2 years is “device hoarding” now? Thats fucking nuts.
How do you invest so much money in a device like that and not make it last? I’ve got one phone I use for work calls thats 10 years old. People are still shocked I dont even have a case on it.
Yeah, fuck that. I’ll keep my device as long as possible because of course I would! Try for five years.
“Hording”… The fucking nerve to say that… I am actually offended. Whatever happened to “recycle, reduce, reuse”? What could possible be more irresponsible than constantly replacing your devices?
Sacrifice yourselves for the economy
Maybe I’m old but it feels like the days of meaningful improvements have passed. Now it’s just a slightly different design for the sake of the annual release schedule. Why change when this 4 year old device is still supported and functions just fine?
I have a 6 year old iphone. And the literal only enticing feature of the new ones is that the base models have 4x the storage space lol
Phones are where PCs were ~20 years ago. We’re getting past the stage where it’s a piece of outdated crap after 6 months and the improvements now are incremental.
Maybe the economy shouldn’t be so dependent upon disposable devices.
“The economy” can once again be replaced with “rich people’s yacht money”
Yeah, no shit. No one wants to buy a new $1200 phone that does the exact same shit as the last $1200 phone.
They could’ve also said CEOs are hoarding more wealth than ever and it’s costing the economy.
Also, phone manufacturers, for one, took my headphone jack, removable storage, removable battery, crammed in more crapware, made rooting even harder, and keep aggravating my RSI with bigger and bigger screens. Why the hell would I look forward to an upgrade?
Where’s that cartoon about financial news stories making much more sense if you replace the words “the economy” with “rich people’s boat money”?
This sounds a lot like something Richard Denniss would say. He wrote a book named Econobabble that explains a lot of this sort of thing.
Proper headline: Economy sucks, inflation is higher than ever, so people have to hold onto their devices longer.
Fuck the economy. It can eat my ass.
Also with moore’s law’s death, why the fuck would anybody believe this productivity bullshit? Any device from 5 years ago can do what a device today can.
One more thing, wtf is this entitlement from electronics importers. Apple, google, samsung, etc can all fuck off until they move manufacturing back to north america.
device hoarding
That is not what this is called.
Consumers are being Anticapitalist! This is not a recession! We didn’t fire half the country for people to spend less!! Think about our growing profits!!
wHy ArE mIlLeNnIaLs DeStRoYiNg ThE pRiCe Of ____?!#1
Because we don’t have any fucking money, idiot.
Good. If the economy is designed to only survive with constant spending then fuck it
C O N S U M E
Oh I’m sorry AI can’t buy devices, pay us bitches
