For a long stretch of my life the answer was obviously yes, and I lived it. From about 2010 to 2016 I upgraded my iPhone every twelve to eighteen months without thinking twice. Back then it made sense. Each new model was a genuine leap: a better camera, a screen that made the last one look ancient, enough extra speed that the old phone suddenly felt slow. Upgrading constantly was not vanity. The hardware really was improving that fast.
Then, somewhere along the way, that stopped being true. And I only noticed because I got a little lazy about replacing things.
The phone that changed my mind
The turning point was an iPhone 7 Plus. I did not plan to keep it long, I just never found a reason not to. A year passed, then another, and it kept doing everything I needed. That was the first time it really landed for me that a phone could last for years and still be good, not merely tolerable.
So I leaned into it. In 2020 I got a OnePlus 8, and I held onto it until early 2024. Four years. I did not finally upgrade because it felt slow or because I was jealous of some shiny new model. I upgraded because the battery had degraded to the point where it could not keep up with the frankly ridiculous number of notifications I put it through in a day. That was the whole reason. The phone was still perfectly capable. Its battery was simply tired.
That turns out to be the normal story now, not the exception. Survey after survey finds that a worn-out battery, not a craving for new features, is the single most common reason people finally replace a phone. The industry has quietly noticed that we are all holding onto our devices longer, and it worries them more than they let on.
The math nobody talks about
Here is the part that actually changed my finances, not just my habits. I buy my phone and pay it off within about twelve months. After that, I have years of no device payments at all, just the plan.
Compare that to the way most people do it. They are perpetually mid-contract, rolling one financed phone straight into the next, so there is always a device payment baked into the bill. The “free” upgrade every two or three years is not free. It is a subscription to newness that never ends. By keeping the OnePlus 8 for four years, I spent roughly three of those years paying nothing on the hardware line. That adds up to real money, quietly, in the background, which is my favorite way for money to add up.
None of this required suffering, either. I was not nursing a cracked, wheezing phone to save a buck. I was using a good phone that happened to already be paid for.
It is not just phones
Once I started noticing, I saw it everywhere in my setup.
My cameras are DSLRs that are over a decade old, and I bought them used. For what I actually shoot, they perform arguably as well as the newer, pricier bodies I could talk myself into. My daily driver is a 27-inch 5K Retina iMac from 2019 that I picked up secondhand, and it handles genuinely demanding work without complaint. My laptops are from 2021 and still run great. I stream on a 2018 iPad that I keep partly because it still works fine and partly because it was my mom’s, which is the kind of value no spec sheet measures.
Not one piece of that is the latest or the greatest. All of it is more than enough for what I ask of it, and I ask a lot.
Why this works now when it did not before
The reason my old every-year habit made sense and my current keep-it-for-years habit also makes sense is that the ground shifted underneath both of them. Hardware stopped improving in giant, obvious leaps. The jump from a five-year-old phone to a brand new one today is real but modest, where the jump from a 2011 phone to a 2013 phone was night and day.
The companies themselves have conceded the point, whether they meant to or not. Google now promises a full seven years of software and security updates on its recent Pixel phones, and Samsung matched it on its flagships. Apple supports iPhones for roughly five to seven years, and even OnePlus now offers six years of patches on its latest phone. When a manufacturer is comfortable supporting a device for the better part of a decade, that is a loud admission that the device is expected to stay useful for the better part of a decade. You are no longer being quietly nudged toward the door at year two.
There is a nice side effect, too. Every year you keep a working device out of a drawer or a landfill is a year of e-waste that did not happen. The frugal choice and the greener choice turn out to be the same choice here, which never hurts.
So, do you need to upgrade?
Honestly, usually not on the schedule you have been sold. If your device feels slow because the battery is shot, that is often a battery problem rather than a whole-device problem, and sometimes a cheap replacement buys you another couple of years. If it is genuinely struggling with what you need it to do, or it has aged out of security updates, then yes, upgrade, and enjoy it.
But upgrading on a timer, every two or three years, simply because that is what you do? The technology stopped requiring that of us a while ago. I run a demanding workload across a stack of hardware that is, in tech years, ancient, and all of it works beautifully. The newest thing is lovely. It is just rarely the necessary thing anymore.
Sources
- Google, Learn when you will get software updates on Google Pixel phones (7 years of OS and security updates on Pixel 8 and later)
- Additional context, attributed inline: recent consumer surveys (including Allstate’s 2025 mobile survey) consistently find battery degradation is the leading reason people replace a phone, and industry analysts note that replacement cycles have generally lengthened as people hold devices longer. Samsung’s 7-year flagship commitment, Apple’s roughly 5-to-7-year support, and OnePlus’s 6 years of patches are each attributed in the text.