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Why is it "time" after 3 years? They should hopefully still be getting software updates, at least security updates.

I'm on an iPhone 13 since launch (almost 5 years ago) and still see no reason to upgrade. There just hasn't been anything 'exciting' in phones in many years.

EDIT: should add, I've only used 50% of the 256GB storage and battery life is still fine (comfortably gets through an entire day+night). But I'm not a heavy phone user so that's perhaps atypical for a 5yo phone.

6 comments

Thank you. We need to hold corporations accountable to make devices that continue to work and don't include planned obsolescence. When people buy into the psychology of needing to buy the newest version every year or even that "it's just time" to upgrade without any specific need for it, they undermine that

So we're going to ask them to not advance their operating systems and apps to take advantage of newer hardware?

What?

It’s a fair question. The battery is on the border of needing to be replaced, which is a $79 repair and would probably buy me another three years or so. But at this point I want something a bit snappier and I’ll probably replace the battery and use it as a backup phone.

Not a fix for the battery, but if you're on Android, enable developer settings and change your animations to 0.5x speed (there are three settings to change). Every OS animation will take half as long. It makes an aging phone feel much snappier.

Won't 0.5x speed make it slower (Driving 20mph instead of 40mph will get you somewhere in double the time).

I just checked my phone, the phrasing is "Animation scale .5x" (Among other numbers), meaning it's scaled to take n times the time.

Thanks for the assist, I typed it up from memory.

This, but set it to disable all animations. It makes using the phone so much quicker, not having to pause for pointless animations.

There used to be a jailbreak app for iphone to increase animation speed, it was soooo nice, it felt like you were actually using the phone instead of the phone using you. Anything out there for iPhone right now? Edit: cowabunga on iOS 17 (broken in iOS 18+) https://cowabun.ga/

That really did make using my old phone less painful, thanks for the tip!

My iPhone 13 is likewise still ticking along, most nights I put it on the charger with over 70% battery remaining. Of course, about the only thing I use it for is reading e-books, which isn't very taxing. Also a little photography.

If the upcoming folding iPhone supports the Apple Pencil Pro, that'll be the first tempting phone feature in years. It would be fun to have a digital sketchbook in my pocket. Of course the price tag will probably cancel the temptation.

Part of me is sad to see so little innovation in new phones, but another part of me enjoys keeping my money.

I've upgraded from iPhone 12 to 17 a few months ago and I agree, I could have waited 1 or maybe 2 more years. At this point I just upgraded because I wanted to and could afford it, not because I needed to (even though I'm a heavy phone user, unlike you according to what you're saying).

The iPhone 12 was my first iPhone and I've been really impressed by how long it lasted, and I'm only hoping I won't need to upgrade before the iPhone 22 release.

Same here. Battery health is 84% which is not disastrous. But charging is a chore. The charging port doesn't work half the time (a problem in the car especially). I would also like it to be lighter, which I probably won't get.

The charging port might just need cleaning. I’m still using an iPhone 11 and the charging port was getting super unreliable. I cleaned it a couple of weeks ago - gently, with a toothpick and a flashlight, there was some lint stuck inside - and it’s worked perfectly since then.

This - I have the iFixit cleaning kit which has a really tiny plastic pick / brush thing - I think it might be a dental crevice cleaning tool, like floss but for bigger gaps. I got a wad of lint out of my lightning port and all of a sudden CarPlay works perfectly. Same thing happens to USB-C ports.

Is it just me, or was Lightning the most prone port to get clogged up with crap and have moisture end up inside it? Used to happen to me all the time, but USB-C hasn't been a problem at all.

>The charging port doesn't work half the time

Give it a blast with an air compressor.

If you like taking pictures with your phone, the cameras are still improving steadily enough that you'll see meaningful improvements if you upgrade every three years

Anecdotally, I can't tell much of a difference between the newer phone of my girlfriend (latest iPhone) and my iPhone 13. Maybe if I nitpick on it, but for my untrained eye they all look 'good enough'.

Plus, many people who take photos on their phone will upload it to a service like instagram/discord which compresses the photos so you lose some of the quality anyway.

I have seen huge improvements in low light performance. Not worth a brand new phone, but very cool.

Anecdotally, every iphone I've tried since my iphone 11 pro seems to take worse photos. I do take a lot of photos with a standalone camera though so I imagine I am biased.

I can't remember which generation exactly had this shift, but yeah around the iPhone 12 they went really heavy on the processing, so instead of a noisy but sharp image you got a smudgy mess. Later generations improved on that but you still see this when zooming in or in low light.

The processing pipeline also started imposing its own opinions on your photos, adjusting the brightness of dark areas and bright areas to even things out, increasing saturation, etc. This has generally trended towards more processing over the years.

In a picture from a standalone camera (or an old phone back when the processing pipeline was basically just debayering, white balance, chroma denoise, and a gamma curve), you'll actually have contrast between shadows and highlights, which, when done well, looks great. When done poorly, it looks terrible (blown highlights, noisy shadows), which is the whole point of the processing pipeline -- on average (random user, random scene), you're better off reducing the overall contrast in the image with local adjustments, even if that turns some excellent photos into boring ones, because it'll turn a lot more bad photos into acceptable ones.

I recently picked up an old Olympus OM-D EM-1 to play with, along with a couple of prime lenses. The photos it produces aren’t as high-resolution than those of my iPhone 16 Pro Max, but they look a lot nicer regardless.

Part of that is due to the larger sensor which no phone is going to be able to compete with, but it’s also because it allows contrast to exist and photos don’t turn into smudge/blotch soup when zoomed in a little. Thanks to that, its photos capture mood better and feel closer to what I see (or remember seeing).

I’ve toyed with alternative camera apps (of which many exist on iOS) and those are a bit better, but still fall short of an decade+ old standalone camera.

You can avoid a lot of the smudgy processing on an iPhone by shooting ProRAW with the default camera app, or using something like Halide to take a single shot RAW.

I used to adjust exposure a lot on phones like the iPhone 5s, so I would, for example, get the highlights exposed properly and have the rest be nice and dark. Can't do that anymore, or not as well at least, because my modern phone will bring those shadows back to make it all even. I really miss those older phone cameras.

I miss non-computational phone cameras. I remember really enjoying the camera in my iPhone 5s.