[fatfingerd]

> whether they want to spend $89 for a battery or $890

No, they can pay less than $120 on a new phone in the budget tier which will be at least comparable in capabilities to a 5 year old phone in any tier and also have about 2 years of life.

[deergomoo]

I don’t know how happy many people would be going from a $900 flagship to a base-tier budget phone.

Granted it might be faster (though looking at Geekbench scores between budget Android phones [0] and the 5-year-old iPhone XS [1] I’m not overly convinced of that either), but the price of manufacturing “nice” doesn’t drop nearly as fast as silicon.

Budget phones often compromise on build and camera and screen quality (even though the latter two often look great on spec sheets) and I think the average person would notice that far more than raw performance.

[0] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/13300565

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/8426067

[fatfingerd]

Pixel 3:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2900039

Aside from all the other problems a genuine pixel 3 (or iPhone XS) battery is bellow 3000 mah, so like replacing your redmi battery with a defective one.

[GeekyBear]

If they are price sensitive, they would have gone for something like the $399 2016 iPhone SE, which is currently in it's seventh year of support, having gotten another security update last month.

That works out to around fifty bucks per supported year, and you aren't creating a mountain of e-waste by throwing away a perfectly good phone every other year.

[fatfingerd]

Buying something like the Samsung A14 every 4 years would cost about the same and seems a lot more realistic than aspirational.

I think its great that phones are being supported for 7 years but in a way it is a marketing chip based on consumer's using unrealistic linear depreciation.

Some consumers can pass down, repurpose, or only need very basic things, but most consumers need much of the relative performance they first bought, break screens, can't handle embedded battery replacement logistics, etc, so most probably have replaced something like the iPhone SE before 4 years is up and are paying more than they would have expected.