Other than your carrier give it for free or cheap, I don’t really see the reason why should you buy new phone. I’ve been using Redmi Note 9 for past 3 years and recently got my had on Poco F5. I don’t see the point of my ‘upgrade’. I sold it and come back to my Note 9. Gaming? Most of them are p2w or microtransaction garbage or just gimped version of its PC/Console counterpart. I mean, $400 still get you PS4, TV and Switch if you don’t mind buying used. At least here where I live. Storage? Dude, newer phone wont even let you have SD Card. Features? Well, all I see is newer phones take more features than it adds. Headphone jack, more ads, and repairability are to name a few. Battery? Just replace them. However, my Note 9 still get through day with one 80% charge in the dawn. Which takes 1 hour.
I am genuinely curious why newer phone always selling like hot cakes. Since there’s virtually no difference between 4gb of RAM and 12gb of RAM, or 12mp camera and 100mp camera on phone.
I feel like when I was younger and phone tech was changing a lot in the early days of the iOS and Android the difference even 1 year made was sometimes huge. Nowadays it’s much more incremental. A slight processor boost here, a couple GB of Ram there. I think a large part as to why that is is two things.
One, the tech has stagnated to some degree. Innovation doesn’t exactly sell a phone to regular non tech folks, a stable “don’t have to think about it” experience is what most people are after.
Two, a lot more issues with the cell phone platform are solved with software rather than throwing around more powerful hardware.
All that being said when I was younger I loved the idea of bleeding edge tech in my pocket, I upgraded all the time. The appeal was more customization at a lesser cost to performance, I wanted all the bells and whistles and less of the jank that came with it. I’m a little older now and lean much more towards the “give me something that works and doesn’t crash for the 10 minutes I have to look at my phone” club.
For those that upgrade to the latest iPhone/Pixel every year no matter what, I chalk that up to lots of expendable funds. It doesn’t appeal to me any more but I can also recognize that there are probably plenty of people out there now, like I was 10 years ago, so it could also be a general interest in the tech and how the bleeding edge keeps pushing for faster, more efficient technology.