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While Back in the Box does resell some Android devices, the majority are iPhones and iPads, said its chief executive, Ari Marinovsky. A big reason is that Apple

by bradfa 4y ago

While Back in the Box does resell some Android devices, the majority are iPhones and iPads, said its chief executive, Ari Marinovsky. A big reason is that Apple updates device software for more years than its competitors do. That seems like the key to all of it. A 2 year old iPhone (or to be fair, Google Pixel now) still has enough years of support to be worth spending hundreds of dollars on for budget minded buyers.

isk517 4y ago
Software no longer being updated and battery dying (and no longer worth the cost of replacement) seem to be the only reasons other than physical damage to replace a smartphone these days. Until I accidentally shattered the screen a month ago I was more than happy to stick with my Galaxy S9, my new phone is nice but other than the battery lasting the whole day and regular security updates I'm not seeing much difference from my nearly 5 year old previous phone.
- Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago
  Newer phones have bigger screens with higher refresh rates, far better cameras and are faster. Many people change their phone every year.
  - manv1 4y ago
    Most people at this level don't really care about specs like higher refresh rates. They care about cost and functionality. Hundreds of millions change their phones every year, which is why there's supply for the used market. Billions of people don't change their phones every year, because they can't afford to or don't care to.
  - belthesar 4y ago
    I think, to the GP's point though, that even though phones are having these significant tech refreshes, they're not significant enough to a growing number of end users to chase. I'm right there with him, tbh. I broke an iPhone 8's screen a couple years ago, and had to replace it. Had that phone not been damaged, I would have kept it for a couple more years.
    - bradfa 4y ago
      My iPhone 8 is still going strong! It has a bright spot in the middle of the screen, the battery isn't what it used to be, and the camera is clearly not as good as the newer iPhones that my extended family all have. But it's not bad enough to justify spending hundreds of dollars to replace it quite yet. Knock on wood!
  - joseph_grobbles 4y ago
    The refresh rate escalation is a complete jerkoff bit of tech spec nonsense. "Far better cameras" is an exaggeration, as most are marginally better. iPhones have been incredibly fast since the XR, almost five years ago. There was a period of dramatic progress but now things have largely settled. I recently replaced a 12 Pro with a 14 Pro and it is likely nothing at all changed. There is zero impact in my life. Have the 12 Pro waiting in my drawer for my son with an XR to upgrade, but he doesn't even want the hassle of doing the transfer and then setting up the apps that don't properly migrate data.
    - JustSomeNobody 4y ago
      > The refresh rate escalation is a complete jerkoff bit of tech spec nonsense. Exactly. "Oh look! It's so smooth when I scroll back and forth!" I actually stop scrolling to read, but I guess I might be in the minority.
  - wil421 4y ago
    AT&T offered me $1000 for a 2 year old phone. It only cost me about $200-$300 for my new phone with a much better camera sensor. I could care less about other features including speed but now that I have young kids my camera is important. The screen refresh and always on Lock Screen are added bonuses.
  - NDizzle 4y ago
    Perfect username for the reference you made in your comment. "Many people change their phone every year." I expect that to be one of the things that immediately changes with our current, fantastic economy in the US.
  - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
    I think many people in this forum don’t change their phones as often because we view phones as limiting computing devices. I am using a 2nd Gen. iPhone SE. The newer iPhones don’t seem so appealing that I feel left out.
  - rocket_surgeron 4y ago
    >Many people change their phone every year. Very few people upgrade every year. The average lifespan of a mobile phone is 2.5 years. In the late 2000s that length of time was lower because phones were improving by leaps and bounds every year but now phones are waterproof, have more resilient screens, cost more, and performance increases between models have slowed. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/smartphone-users-are-waiting-longer-before-upgrading-heres-why.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/smartphone-users-are-waiting... The lifespan increase pattern is mirroring the personal computer upgrade cycle, but more rapidly.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Many do. Most don't (at least from what I've observed around me). I've never replaced a phone sooner than 5 years after I got it, but I know I'm a weirdo.
  - isk517 4y ago
    My new phone has the same screen size as my old phone, and my old phone had a big enough screen that I'd need to sew custom pockets onto my pants if I went any bigger. New phone has a better refresh rate but all that does is kill the battery faster in exchange maybe things look slightly smoother when playing games, but the games I play on my phone don't really benefit from the increased refresh rate so I just keep it at the default 60Hz.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  Flash storage degradation is an issue for old phones as well and it's not fixable. It could be worked around with buying a phone with huge flash, but people usually prefer cheaper ones (and manufacturers charging 1000% premium not helping of course).
  - bradfa 4y ago
    I've never actually experienced this on a personal device (anecdata, I know). But my dayjob for many years has been in embedded systems and working with flash devices and even there, as long as you don't design the product to write to the flash in ways which will kill it (aka: Tesla logging and eMMC) then I honestly expect that modern flash devices have quite enough write endurance for >99% of customer uses. Yes, those 1% who wear out their flash are going to be furious and complain online and even just 1% of phone buyers is still millions of people.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      I used to always download lots of podcasts instead of streaming them and had a lot of Spotify auto-playlist saved locally. This used to cause a lot of write cycles on my devices. I would also usually end up with the smaller storage size version of the devices, so it would use a good percentage of the storage for this usage pattern. Eventually the read speeds would get intolerably slow. Launching applications or rehydrating them would take forever as the storage would just be so slow compared to when the device was new. Rebooting would take 10 minutes or more. This failure mode pushed me to upgrade at least twice. I now just stream the majority of my data, and on-board storage has ballooned so I don't end up rewriting that high of a percentage of the overall storage that often. It was easy to cycle through all the storage when the on-board was 16GB but at 128GB+ it takes a bit longer to burn through it all.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > I've never actually experienced this on a personal device I haven't, either. But then, I'm aware of the limited life of flash, so I only purchased phones I can put an SD card into, and then almost all of the data I store on the phone gets written to the card. I'd rather wear the card out than the embedded flash.
- bradfa 4y ago
  iPhone battery replacements, at an Apple store with 1st party parts and labor, now seem to be about $90 for many models. That's reasonable enough that I would definitely choose it over a slightly less expensive 3rd party repair or DIY and instead of buying a new phone if I was otherwise happy. iPhone screen replacements at an Apple store seem to be in the $200-300 range, which is expensive enough that I'd consider other options, including just buying a refurb phone from a reputable reseller.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > That's reasonable enough $90 to replace a battery seems outrageously overpriced to me.
    - mattl 4y ago
      What's a reasonable price for a new battery + labor to fit the new battery?
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Well, I've never hired someone to replace a battery, so I clearly don't know the going rates. $100 was steep enough that it caught me by surprise, though.
        mattl 4y ago
        I think most batteries are $49 + labor + tax. I had mine fixed under AppleCare and it took about 90 minutes so I can see $90 being about right.
        JohnFen 4y ago
        Fair enough. It's a "what the market will bear" sort of thing in the end. I wouldn't be willing to buy a piece of equipment that required such an expense just to replace a battery, but I'm certainly not going to say anyone else is wrong for being willing to. I just found it surprising that it was that steep.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  It's really a shame. I have a bunch of fully-functional phones and tablets laying around that work fine, even with strong batteries, but became forcibly obsolete due to Apple (and others) 1. dropping software support and 2. deliberately sabotaging the devices against being repurposed with alternative software. This never happens with computers. I have a computer from the early 2000s still happily plugging away running useful things on Linux. It is a disgrace what consumers have allowed phone manufacturers to get away with support-wise.
  - JoelMcCracken 4y ago
    I use one of my old iPhones to run under my pillow every night with a sleeping app, wrapped in a faraday cage pouch to reduce emf concerns. Works well for me.
    - nosecreek 4y ago
      Interesting, I've got a bunch of old iPhones in a drawer and would be interested in doing some sleep tracking. What app are you using/any idea how old of an iPhone would still work for this?
      - JoelMcCracken 4y ago
        The app I use is called "sleep cycle"; it is old. I don't know if i'd be able to download it now from the app store, honestly probably not, I haven't tried, but I already had it downloaded onto the phone. basically, the app judges your current phase of sleep by sensing your movements, and purports to wake you up at the optimal moment. It seems to work for me, which is good enough for me, after all. YMMV? But if you're unable to download it now, I don't have a good solution for you, sorry. I hope you figure it out!
  - dorianG4 4y ago
    “This never happens with computers.” Smartphones are computers. Creating artificial product categories, taxonomy, is why we’re in this predicament. Semantic woo is leveraged to decide a smartphone is not a general purpose computer such that corporate entity can label it new thing and set new expectations. Intellectual property law and protections need to be thrown in the garbage, no device sold without being unlocked. It’s thought policing when I’m convinced a general purpose computer (smartphone) is something else altogether. We live in a carceral society that’s extracting our agency to coddle a handful of replaceable figureheads. War is peace. Apple is anti-1984.
- jeffwask 4y ago
  Imagine if your PC or Laptop just stopped working every 4 years and you had to buy a completely new one even if the current one meets all your needs. How we allowed this to be the case for our pocket computers is beyond me.
  - isk517 4y ago
    I'm in the process of replacing my 7 year old personal computer but it is completely my choice to do it. My old PC is perfectly functional and is going to reused for a different purpose. If it wasn't for the fact that I have something to do with the old machine I'd probably put off buying a new one for another year or two.
- nine_k 4y ago
  RAM size, too, sadly. You want the two of your heaviest apps you want to use together to fit in RAM, to be able to switch between them.
  - isk517 4y ago
    Honestly, the increased RAM is probably the nicest part of my new phone and not having to wait for large apps to reload has been the biggest quality of life improvement. That said, I don't feel like it justifies the price of a new phone by itself, mostly because large apps are usually games and if I have to switch back and forth between a game and some other app constantly then I probably should not be playing games.
- _piif 4y ago
  Yup, also still very happy with my Galaxy S9, now running an unofficial version of LineageOS 19 (though I am still rocking the original battery from 4 years ago and it shows, I need to look into replacing it soon). Really want to hold off replacing it for as long as possible as with phones nowadays there always seems to be a catch like either no headphone jack, no sd card slot, a notch, etc. while this one still does it all.
kramerger 4y ago
That explanation is a bit outdated. With Project Mainline most modern Androids will receive many system updates via the store. https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/android-common https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/and... But usually after 3 years (5 for tablets) the thing is too slow to use anyway.
mdasen 4y ago
> A 2 year old iPhone (or to be fair, Google Pixel now) still has enough years of support I think part of it is also that older iPhones still have good processors due to Apple's substantial lead in mobile CPUs. An iPhone 12 (2.5 years old) will Geekbench at 2,000 single-core. The latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (a month old) will Geekbench at 1,700-1,900. Apple's phones just really hold up performance wise for a good while. A Pixel 5 from October 2020 will Geekbench at 770 compared to 2,000 for the similar-age iPhone 12. Even a Pixel 7 Pro from October 2022 hits 1,400. When Apple is shipping CPUs with a multi-year head start, older devices are still going to be pretty good. Snapdragon 888s from 2 years ago hit 1,200-1,300. Those devices aren't going to feel as snappy as long as a 2.5 year old iPhone 12 getting 2,000. Apple's software commitment is a big part of it, but the fact that their devices are years ahead CPU-wise also matters. The Android ecosystem also means that there are budget, non-used phones out there which compete and drive down the price of used devices. Do you want to buy a used Galaxy S21 or would you rather get a new OnePlus Nord or Moto G? Apple doesn't offer you a lot of choice in new phones at a budget price. There's no $150 new iPhone out there, but there's plenty of new budget Android phones ready to take your dollars instead of buying a quality used Android phone. Why should I pay $350 for your used Galaxy S21 when I can get a shiny new phone for less than that? Yes, the new phone might have a slower processor and worse display/camera, but it's new! Even if you would buy the quality used device, many wouldn't which will drive down the price (due to increased competition from substitutes).
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  > I think part of it is also that older iPhones still have good processors due to Apple's substantial lead in mobile CPUs. I'm still using the iPhone X I bought at launch. Performance is not an issue at all. Aside from a cracked screen and camera glass, the only real driver for me to replace it is the lightning connector. When they add USB-C I'll probably get a new phone - not before then.

by bradfa 4y ago

isk517 4y ago

Software no longer being updated and battery dying (and no longer worth the cost of replacement) seem to be the only reasons other than physical damage to replace a smartphone these days. Until I accidentally shattered the screen a month ago I was more than happy to stick with my Galaxy S9, my new phone is nice but other than the battery lasting the whole day and regular security updates I'm not seeing much difference from my nearly 5 year old previous phone.

Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago
Newer phones have bigger screens with higher refresh rates, far better cameras and are faster. Many people change their phone every year.
- manv1 4y ago
  Most people at this level don't really care about specs like higher refresh rates. They care about cost and functionality. Hundreds of millions change their phones every year, which is why there's supply for the used market. Billions of people don't change their phones every year, because they can't afford to or don't care to.
- belthesar 4y ago
  I think, to the GP's point though, that even though phones are having these significant tech refreshes, they're not significant enough to a growing number of end users to chase. I'm right there with him, tbh. I broke an iPhone 8's screen a couple years ago, and had to replace it. Had that phone not been damaged, I would have kept it for a couple more years.
  - bradfa 4y ago
    My iPhone 8 is still going strong! It has a bright spot in the middle of the screen, the battery isn't what it used to be, and the camera is clearly not as good as the newer iPhones that my extended family all have. But it's not bad enough to justify spending hundreds of dollars to replace it quite yet. Knock on wood!
- joseph_grobbles 4y ago
  The refresh rate escalation is a complete jerkoff bit of tech spec nonsense. "Far better cameras" is an exaggeration, as most are marginally better. iPhones have been incredibly fast since the XR, almost five years ago. There was a period of dramatic progress but now things have largely settled. I recently replaced a 12 Pro with a 14 Pro and it is likely nothing at all changed. There is zero impact in my life. Have the 12 Pro waiting in my drawer for my son with an XR to upgrade, but he doesn't even want the hassle of doing the transfer and then setting up the apps that don't properly migrate data.
  - JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    > The refresh rate escalation is a complete jerkoff bit of tech spec nonsense. Exactly. "Oh look! It's so smooth when I scroll back and forth!" I actually stop scrolling to read, but I guess I might be in the minority.
- wil421 4y ago
  AT&T offered me $1000 for a 2 year old phone. It only cost me about $200-$300 for my new phone with a much better camera sensor. I could care less about other features including speed but now that I have young kids my camera is important. The screen refresh and always on Lock Screen are added bonuses.
- NDizzle 4y ago
  Perfect username for the reference you made in your comment. "Many people change their phone every year." I expect that to be one of the things that immediately changes with our current, fantastic economy in the US.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  I think many people in this forum don’t change their phones as often because we view phones as limiting computing devices. I am using a 2nd Gen. iPhone SE. The newer iPhones don’t seem so appealing that I feel left out.
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  >Many people change their phone every year. Very few people upgrade every year. The average lifespan of a mobile phone is 2.5 years. In the late 2000s that length of time was lower because phones were improving by leaps and bounds every year but now phones are waterproof, have more resilient screens, cost more, and performance increases between models have slowed. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/smartphone-users-are-waiting-longer-before-upgrading-heres-why.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/smartphone-users-are-waiting... The lifespan increase pattern is mirroring the personal computer upgrade cycle, but more rapidly.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Many do. Most don't (at least from what I've observed around me). I've never replaced a phone sooner than 5 years after I got it, but I know I'm a weirdo.
- isk517 4y ago
  My new phone has the same screen size as my old phone, and my old phone had a big enough screen that I'd need to sew custom pockets onto my pants if I went any bigger. New phone has a better refresh rate but all that does is kill the battery faster in exchange maybe things look slightly smoother when playing games, but the games I play on my phone don't really benefit from the increased refresh rate so I just keep it at the default 60Hz.
vbezhenar 4y ago
Flash storage degradation is an issue for old phones as well and it's not fixable. It could be worked around with buying a phone with huge flash, but people usually prefer cheaper ones (and manufacturers charging 1000% premium not helping of course).
- bradfa 4y ago
  I've never actually experienced this on a personal device (anecdata, I know). But my dayjob for many years has been in embedded systems and working with flash devices and even there, as long as you don't design the product to write to the flash in ways which will kill it (aka: Tesla logging and eMMC) then I honestly expect that modern flash devices have quite enough write endurance for >99% of customer uses. Yes, those 1% who wear out their flash are going to be furious and complain online and even just 1% of phone buyers is still millions of people.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    I used to always download lots of podcasts instead of streaming them and had a lot of Spotify auto-playlist saved locally. This used to cause a lot of write cycles on my devices. I would also usually end up with the smaller storage size version of the devices, so it would use a good percentage of the storage for this usage pattern. Eventually the read speeds would get intolerably slow. Launching applications or rehydrating them would take forever as the storage would just be so slow compared to when the device was new. Rebooting would take 10 minutes or more. This failure mode pushed me to upgrade at least twice. I now just stream the majority of my data, and on-board storage has ballooned so I don't end up rewriting that high of a percentage of the overall storage that often. It was easy to cycle through all the storage when the on-board was 16GB but at 128GB+ it takes a bit longer to burn through it all.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > I've never actually experienced this on a personal device I haven't, either. But then, I'm aware of the limited life of flash, so I only purchased phones I can put an SD card into, and then almost all of the data I store on the phone gets written to the card. I'd rather wear the card out than the embedded flash.
bradfa 4y ago
iPhone battery replacements, at an Apple store with 1st party parts and labor, now seem to be about $90 for many models. That's reasonable enough that I would definitely choose it over a slightly less expensive 3rd party repair or DIY and instead of buying a new phone if I was otherwise happy. iPhone screen replacements at an Apple store seem to be in the $200-300 range, which is expensive enough that I'd consider other options, including just buying a refurb phone from a reputable reseller.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > That's reasonable enough $90 to replace a battery seems outrageously overpriced to me.
  - mattl 4y ago
    What's a reasonable price for a new battery + labor to fit the new battery?
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Well, I've never hired someone to replace a battery, so I clearly don't know the going rates. $100 was steep enough that it caught me by surprise, though.
      - mattl 4y ago
        I think most batteries are $49 + labor + tax. I had mine fixed under AppleCare and it took about 90 minutes so I can see $90 being about right.
        JohnFen 4y ago
        Fair enough. It's a "what the market will bear" sort of thing in the end. I wouldn't be willing to buy a piece of equipment that required such an expense just to replace a battery, but I'm certainly not going to say anyone else is wrong for being willing to. I just found it surprising that it was that steep.
ryandrake 4y ago
It's really a shame. I have a bunch of fully-functional phones and tablets laying around that work fine, even with strong batteries, but became forcibly obsolete due to Apple (and others) 1. dropping software support and 2. deliberately sabotaging the devices against being repurposed with alternative software. This never happens with computers. I have a computer from the early 2000s still happily plugging away running useful things on Linux. It is a disgrace what consumers have allowed phone manufacturers to get away with support-wise.
- JoelMcCracken 4y ago
  I use one of my old iPhones to run under my pillow every night with a sleeping app, wrapped in a faraday cage pouch to reduce emf concerns. Works well for me.
  - nosecreek 4y ago
    Interesting, I've got a bunch of old iPhones in a drawer and would be interested in doing some sleep tracking. What app are you using/any idea how old of an iPhone would still work for this?
    - JoelMcCracken 4y ago
      The app I use is called "sleep cycle"; it is old. I don't know if i'd be able to download it now from the app store, honestly probably not, I haven't tried, but I already had it downloaded onto the phone. basically, the app judges your current phase of sleep by sensing your movements, and purports to wake you up at the optimal moment. It seems to work for me, which is good enough for me, after all. YMMV? But if you're unable to download it now, I don't have a good solution for you, sorry. I hope you figure it out!
- dorianG4 4y ago
  “This never happens with computers.” Smartphones are computers. Creating artificial product categories, taxonomy, is why we’re in this predicament. Semantic woo is leveraged to decide a smartphone is not a general purpose computer such that corporate entity can label it new thing and set new expectations. Intellectual property law and protections need to be thrown in the garbage, no device sold without being unlocked. It’s thought policing when I’m convinced a general purpose computer (smartphone) is something else altogether. We live in a carceral society that’s extracting our agency to coddle a handful of replaceable figureheads. War is peace. Apple is anti-1984.
jeffwask 4y ago
Imagine if your PC or Laptop just stopped working every 4 years and you had to buy a completely new one even if the current one meets all your needs. How we allowed this to be the case for our pocket computers is beyond me.
- isk517 4y ago
  I'm in the process of replacing my 7 year old personal computer but it is completely my choice to do it. My old PC is perfectly functional and is going to reused for a different purpose. If it wasn't for the fact that I have something to do with the old machine I'd probably put off buying a new one for another year or two.
nine_k 4y ago
RAM size, too, sadly. You want the two of your heaviest apps you want to use together to fit in RAM, to be able to switch between them.
- isk517 4y ago
  Honestly, the increased RAM is probably the nicest part of my new phone and not having to wait for large apps to reload has been the biggest quality of life improvement. That said, I don't feel like it justifies the price of a new phone by itself, mostly because large apps are usually games and if I have to switch back and forth between a game and some other app constantly then I probably should not be playing games.
_piif 4y ago
Yup, also still very happy with my Galaxy S9, now running an unofficial version of LineageOS 19 (though I am still rocking the original battery from 4 years ago and it shows, I need to look into replacing it soon). Really want to hold off replacing it for as long as possible as with phones nowadays there always seems to be a catch like either no headphone jack, no sd card slot, a notch, etc. while this one still does it all.

kramerger 4y ago

That explanation is a bit outdated. With Project Mainline most modern Androids will receive many system updates via the store. https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/android-common https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/and... But usually after 3 years (5 for tablets) the thing is too slow to use anyway.

mdasen 4y ago

> A 2 year old iPhone (or to be fair, Google Pixel now) still has enough years of support I think part of it is also that older iPhones still have good processors due to Apple's substantial lead in mobile CPUs. An iPhone 12 (2.5 years old) will Geekbench at 2,000 single-core. The latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (a month old) will Geekbench at 1,700-1,900. Apple's phones just really hold up performance wise for a good while. A Pixel 5 from October 2020 will Geekbench at 770 compared to 2,000 for the similar-age iPhone 12. Even a Pixel 7 Pro from October 2022 hits 1,400. When Apple is shipping CPUs with a multi-year head start, older devices are still going to be pretty good. Snapdragon 888s from 2 years ago hit 1,200-1,300. Those devices aren't going to feel as snappy as long as a 2.5 year old iPhone 12 getting 2,000. Apple's software commitment is a big part of it, but the fact that their devices are years ahead CPU-wise also matters. The Android ecosystem also means that there are budget, non-used phones out there which compete and drive down the price of used devices. Do you want to buy a used Galaxy S21 or would you rather get a new OnePlus Nord or Moto G? Apple doesn't offer you a lot of choice in new phones at a budget price. There's no $150 new iPhone out there, but there's plenty of new budget Android phones ready to take your dollars instead of buying a quality used Android phone. Why should I pay $350 for your used Galaxy S21 when I can get a shiny new phone for less than that? Yes, the new phone might have a slower processor and worse display/camera, but it's new! Even if you would buy the quality used device, many wouldn't which will drive down the price (due to increased competition from substitutes).

cassianoleal 4y ago
> I think part of it is also that older iPhones still have good processors due to Apple's substantial lead in mobile CPUs. I'm still using the iPhone X I bought at launch. Performance is not an issue at all. Aside from a cracked screen and camera glass, the only real driver for me to replace it is the lightning connector. When they add USB-C I'll probably get a new phone - not before then.