This is such an absurd attitude to have, on a site for startup news, no less. Having a frequent, iterative release cycle has a number of benefits: - Everyone i

This is such an absurd attitude to have, on a site for startup news, no less. Having a frequent, iterative release cycle has a number of benefits: - Everyone in the ecosystem knows the rough cadence of when releases will occur - The people and companies involved in those releases have a steady stream of work - If something isn’t ready, it can more likely be dropped without the consequences becoming overwhelming, which would force the company to push back a release and screw up the schedule of many other things - If something isn’t working, it can be quickly removed in a subsequent release rather than having to push out an out-of-band release - There will always be people looking to casually buy a phone, and this ensures they’ll probably always get something reasonably current rather than it depending greatly on when they buy. - People are much more likely to delay a phone purchase for most of a year rather than switch ecosystems for a killer feature. If it’s two years, they’re probably more likely to switch ecosystems (and if it misses that next release, they would have to wait four) - Holidays come annually, this ensures gifts are “this year’s watch” and not “last years’s watch” Really, I think Apple should be commended for tweaking and refining things, rather than making big BS lateral changes to justify a product release. Also, not all the changes were “incremental”. The camera changes and SoC improvements are pretty significant for people who make use of them. I saw 30% and 2x bandied about for some things. As for “she opens it and presses the shutter”. That’s pretty much the optimal UI for a casual user, no? There’s a ton of work going into making it that easy to use for everything that goes into the picture that comes out. The whole point is that people aren’t aware of it. They don’t know how fast the lens is or the resolution of the camera, they just know if they get a newer device the pictures will be a little better than the previous device. And that’s probably all they care to know. No one is making you or your girlfriend upgrade every year. It looks like phones as far back as the 6s or the 8 are still supported, so by all means, keep using a phone until it’s 8 generations old. As others have pointed out, you can replace the battery for a reasonable cost, too. Of course Apple doesn't want to - their whole business position is that it’s a premium product for people who are purchasing an “experience”. They’d rather have the freedom to customize the internals to optimize performance than be limited by affordances sufficient to allow non-tech-savvy users to replace the battery. The latter of which is probably at odds with it being simple, waterproof, durable, and thin (eg a tiny screw or some kind of latching mechanism ).