My Apple buying habits
A few days ago, I sent this tweet:
“The reality is many consumers are quite content with the iPhone they have and they will only get a new one when it breaks or slows down...”
— Sam Hardacre (@nocturnalmonkey) January 26, 2019
☝️ yup, that’s the case for me https://t.co/LPb9tS3AKH
I began to elaborate further in a string of tweets but decided, as I'm trying to write more, I'd keep it for a blog post so here it is!
The last iPhone I bought was the iPhone 7 in late 2016. For the two or so years prior, I'd been using an iPhone 5C which was a fairly decent phone. It had most of the features I needed regularly but it only had about 4GB which didn't leave much room for storing stuff. Over time, this became the biggest pain for me because it couldn't store more than a couple of photos without kicking up a notification. I had to had to remove apps, keeping it to the bare essentials. Had it not been for the lack of space, I probably would have hung on to it for a bit longer, in all other aspects it was still in pretty good nick. Batter life was pretty good, camera was decent enough and the software wasn't feeling laggy at all.
After a few frustrating months dealing with those "clear some space" notifications, I decided it was time for a new phone. I didn't immediately look at the 7, I considered older iPhone models because they all came with vastly more space than the 5C so would have easily solved my main problem. The reason I went for the 7 in the end was simply because I figured buying the latest model would get me an extra year or so of iOS updates before the handset became unsupported.
Fast forward just over 2 years, and the 128GB iPhone 7 is still going strong. The battery life is starting wear so I have to charge it a bit during the day, but I do use it for a good portion of the day so I can't complain too much about that.
I wasn't particularly surprised by what the FT article was saying. From Apple's perspective, I'm part of their problem. I'm not drawn in by the flashy new hardware and my next phone will be driven once again by necessity.
To me, Apple and other tech companies need to bring something new to the table, not just small increments. Truly innovative stuff that will tip the scales back to desirability over necessity. That's the only way they're going to get me to replace devices sooner than every 3+ years.