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.
“Companies aren’t innovating anymore and it’s costing the economy” is what it should say. When late stage capitalism leads to consolidation and cost cutting, stock buybacks, and other short term profit when competition is no longer necessary, that’s what kills the economy. That’s why monopolies and anticompetitive behaviors are bad, but the US doesn’t punish that anymore.
Don’t forget aggressive rent-seeking behavior.
companies aren’t innovating anymore because physical limits have been reached. Moore’s law holds no longer true. Transistors can’t be packed more tightly into space anymore while also making the computer chip cheaper at the same time.
There’s lots of things that could be innovated without faster processors. I mean if we’re just talking cell phones, adding a camera was an innovation, adding a touch screen and eventually touch keyboards that actually worked, different form factors. These things were aided by faster processors, but not directly dependent on them. But these could be totally unrelated devices to phones or even computing at all. Innovation across the board including med-tech, business models, city planning, and tons of other industries have suffered from privatization, deregulation, and leading then to consolidation and thus little need to compete and thus little need to innovate.
Packing more transistors into the same space is not the same as “innovation”. There’s more innovation in late-90s-early-2000s handheld Windows CE 3.0 devices than there are between modern smartphone designs.
Take
these
for
example.