Poll: How long do you keep your phone? Longer than we expected!

May 2024 · 2 minute read

UPDATE: To my honest surprise, most people seem to hold on to their phones for quite some time! The top three choices - "two years," "three to five years," and "as long as possible" combined form 85% of your votes. Just 10% change their phones every year and 5% more than once a year. I have so many questions for the manufacturers this time... How's the market not saturated by now? What about electronic waste? Tons and tons of unbought Galaxies and iPhones must be piled up somewhere waiting to be recycled? And fairly new models too - this planned obsolescence thing has picked up speed in the past few years... Maybe we don't need four different flagship models each year? And like many of you have pointed out - phone prices have skyrocketed recently making $1000+ phones the new normal. 

It’s time for our inspirational, eye-opening Friday poll! I’m kinda joking here but seriously - we can learn a lot by doing this stuff.

With phone manufacturers dishing out new models every year (sometimes twice a year even) we’re up to a point where somebody’s bound to ask: Where do all these phones end? Are people constantly buying them?

I remember the times (old!) when buying a phone was almost a lifetime investment. Nowadays, though, people seem to upgrade their phones on a regular basis. How regular exactly? Well, we’re about to find out!

How long do you keep your phone? Do you change it every year when a new model enters the market? Many people get their phones with a plan and they’re sort of bound to keep them for two or three years until the contract runs out.

Software updates also play a big part in this. iPhones tend to do better on longevity - getting up to 5 years of updates and many people hold on to their iPhone 7,8, X devices until their batteries die or they absolutely need to upgrade.

There are also tech extremists who change their phones several times a year, although I can predict they’d be the minority in this poll. All this begs some really important questions. Questions about the environment, consumerism, smartphone evolution, the so-called planned obsolescence, serious stuff!


But we’ll delve more deeply into that after we've seen the results. Please vote in our poll and share your thoughts and comments in the section below.

You can find other polls below:

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