Or perhaps more positively, "e-waste production falls".
It's not surprising that the market would reach a saturation point; manufacturers are running short of ideas to improve their products, and even starting to resort to removing features.
Especially in the low-end/unbranded smartphone segment, I've noticed newer models aren't actually getting better. Several years ago they practically all had removable batteries, microSD, dual SIM, and a full complement of sensors; now it's nearly impossible to find such a complete combination anymore --- they're all missing one or two things.
I’ve even considered ditching my smartphone entirely here and there. I’m not convinced its utility outweighs its use as an ad-driven anxiety rectangle constantly vying for my attention. Combined with the steady loss of features, I’m wondering if this decide is really a tool or a burden. Something to ponder, I suppose.
Turn off all notifications. Delete all non-tool apps; you know, the apps that want you to spend time in them. Keep only the tool apps.
You won't spend 30 minutes scrolling through your navigation app, or your music app, or through the pictures you made, or looking at the weather forecast, or...
These are all very useful features. I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
The Galaxy S8* has a "Do Not Disturb" mode which allows you to whitelist contacts for incoming calls and messages, and apps that can create notifications.
It's meant to be a temporary setting, like to turn on while in a meeting or while sleeping, but I have it set to run 24 hours a day, only allowing people in my "favorites" to call me, everyone in my contacts list to message me, and only allowing notifications from a couple apps.
I just set it up a week ago, and I absolutely love how little I'm bothered by my phone now, including no more calls from bots, which I was receiving around 4-6 times a day.
* I assume most recent Samsung equivalents have this feature as well. My S6 had it.
LineageOS as well has this feature. Put it on a Oneplus (to get rid of Chinese Spyware TM), add an Adblocker and True Caller (leaks agenda information, but we used to have phone-number books) and you'll have an actually decent smartphone experience.
When I'm testing new smartphones in stores, I'm shocked at how crappy the experience is compared to the LineageOS, both in terms of UI, and in terms of interruptions and notifications and ads shoved down the user's throat
I often see complains about mail or bots spamers. But I don't get why? I use smart phone several years and rarely has a random phone call from an unknown number, which real person on the other site. And I never got call from bots.
Could you share your experience about bot phone calls? What in it for them?
Just like email spam, I assume there's enough benefit to be worth the cost, which is far less than it used to be now that, much like the transition from physical mail to email, a computer can do the calling for very little cost or effort.
I used to get a a few random spam calls from people a week, and still do from time to time. They're generally trying to sell me something; trying to ask for my vote; trying to convince me that I'm in trouble for one thing or another and I should give them some personal information or money to get out of it.
As for being called by bots, if I answer and I don't hear a human voice within a second or two, then I assume a computer just dialed me. It might play me a recording; It might connect me with a human. Regardless, it was a bot that called me to begin with, and I've no interest in speaking with or waiting for the unsolicited demands of computer programs.
I used to be able to keep a list of numbers to block with whatever dialer app I was using, but it's gotten incredibly easy for these spammers to spoof numbers. The big trend in the past couple months seems to be to use numbers that have the first six or seven numbers of my full ten-digit phone number. So if my number was 444-555-6666, I'll get random calls throughout the day from 444-555-6777. It's obvious when I see the number - especially since my number is from a city I haven't lived in since 2012 - but harder to block via standard phone apps.
This is why the white-listing of a "Do Not Disturb" mode better suits me.
As for why I get so many spam calls, it's hard to say. I've had this number for almost 20 years. I'm sure it's been sold and resold for pennies hundreds of times. I'm sure it's also on plenty of database dumps from various hacks as well. No matter, switching numbers seems to be more hassle than it's worth. I assume whatever new number I get would be just as bad.
What I _really_ want is for phone numbers to become obsolete. Just a random UUID that means "Call / Text / Message enobrev" in someone else's device, where I can maintain a whitelist of who can connect to my devices to talk / chat / etc.
That's basically the approach I use, though it helps that I'm a Facebook refusenik. I do have Firefox installed, but I generally only use it during downtime for a quick news skim, or to look something up. Otherwise, just about everything I install is a tool of some sort or other. And there's no way in HELL that I'm going to put anything financial or medical on my phone. That's just asking for trouble.
I've banished all apps that contain any kind of endless news feed. I still use my phone for messaging, hailing rides, maps etc but no longer have any reason to pull it out all the time to check for new junk information. I also worry a lot less about taking pictures because I don't have anywhere to post them.
In addition to this I've found disabling Safari on iPhone (Settings -> General -> Restrictions) has been the final step from turning my phone from a distraction device into a smart tool.
I've been using a Unihertz Jelly Pro for a while now. That's tiny and runs android 7.
The thing that has surprised me most is that it's all utility. I can run Google Authenticator, I can read what I need to read, I can find out when the bus leaves, but the phone is no fun. The tiny screen doesn't attract or tempt me.
I thought I'd get something small that fits in every pocket, but stumbled upon something else. Maybe more.
My last smartphone was an iPhone 5S (which IMO is the nicest of all iPhone designs). The battery eventually died... I still think about reviving it. In any case I then got a cheap (30 quid IIRC) dual-sim little Nokia which takes a French and a UK sim card (pay as you go) and quite cheap for regular calls. Works like a charm, the battery lasts for days, and I don't worry if I lose it.
Separately I have an iPod touch which gives me some control over smartphone addictive behaviour as it only has wifi. And it has the headphone jack :) I absolutely refuse to buy a device without one.
I used to joke with friends about "smartphone zombies" in the streets but now it is no longer a joke. It's genuinely scary to be on a train or subway and see everyone glued to their phone without looking up. Mothers and kids each staring at screens instead of interacting.
I was a big Steve Jobs fan when he was alive, but now wonder if the iPhone (and its competition) are destroying society the way automobiles destroyed much of the physical world.
I rarely see ads on my phone, I guess through a combination of using an adblocker in Firefox and mostly paying for ad-free apps. Is it really a major problem?
I replaced my smartphone with a wristwatch; that way I get rid of that stupid thing and I'm waaay ahead even of Apple in terms of removing features.
Its kinda funny how removing features is defended by "well it makes them simpler and lighter and smaller", meanwhile 99 % of all smartphones are basically tablet-sized nowadays with insanely large and unwieldy screens.
This is a really good point. Very few software developers or product designers will argue against simplifying their apps reducing complexity within their apps.
However, at the aggregate level, I.e. the device level, the message is the opposite. Apple, Google, and 3rd party devs and businesses keep promoting the idea of more apps which essentially eliminates and overwhelm the benefits a user may see from simplicity at the app level.
A good example are messaging apps. While each messaging app may have simplified (even as they add features) for a regular user, they have to worry about 3-4 different messaging apps as well as which contact has to be contacted through which app. Do I use iMessage, FB messenger, Hangouts, WhatsApp to contact a person?
This is something Apple and Google should be tackling at the platform level. Windows Phone, and WebOS before it, made some token efforts towards this through their hub concepts, but they were destroyed by lack of support, and lack of open standards.
We really need to be promoting more open standards to enable users to control their phones, instead of becoming slaves to them.
Any apps you have shouldn't rely on access to the Internet; they should make use of the hardware and resources you have. Remote into a "real computer" to do the important things.
In Energy and Civilization, Vaclav Smil points out that in terms of embedded energy, an automobile, with over 1,000x the mass of a smartphone, has only 100x the embedded energy.
Given replacement cycles, humanity now invests more energy in creating smartphones (life expectancy: ~2 years) than automobiles (~10 years). By year-of-use embedded energy, autos use only 30% of the resources of smartphones.
Very interesting, I guess that's another book on my reading list...
Do you know if this relates, in any way, to the energy economics and diminishing marginal returns from increasing complexity that Joseph Tainter[0] covers in The Collapse of Complex Societies[1]?
Generally, yes, though Smil doesn't really develop the concept of complexity and collapse as Tainter does.
Tainter is cited in the book, though unfortunately the citations / notes format is one that makes it exceedingly difficult to sort out where (this is one of my few complaints with this book, and Smil's writing generally -- he follows a social sciences citations format of (Author <year>) inline, which makes finding, and identifying, references tedious -- I'm the sort of cat who really likes either section-based endnotes or page-based footnotes for tracking things).
That said: Smil's citations are excellent, and his books are worth buying for the references alone. They're also far more worth buying (or reading) for the actual text, but good refs are a very strong bonus.
If you're interested in Tainter's view, I would suggest taking a look, if you can find a copy, at Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power, published in 2009, and covering much the same concept. Weissenbacher's approach is similar to Smil's, and the latter cites Smil's earlier book, Energy in World History (1992) extensively. Weissenbacher looks far more into the political aspects of energy regimes, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, and arguably to a fault.
The book is also extensively researched, though far-less-evenly written than Smil's. Neither author is a native English speaker, but Smil has a far better command of the language, and the discipline and/or editorial assistance to tighten up and clean up his writing. That said, despite the similarities, the works do complement one another.
Another author I'd recommend is William Ophuls, particularly Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977, revised ~1994), which predates but also anticipates much of Tainter's work. Ophul's background and focus is politics and polity, but through the lenses of ecology and Limits to Growth particularly. His forecast of political developments strikes me as particularly good, capturing much of what actually did transpire, with few failures, save the quite notable one that we have so far managed to avoid an absolutely devastating general famine. But his national / regional assessment strikes me as pretty true -- it's based on the US, EU, USSR (still a thing, though he saw trouble for it), China, India, Africa, and Latin America, generally.
All fascinating, though I can't believe that we'll have devastating general famines. Agriculture is a technical problem, and the trend has been increased yields and decreasing prices, despite the many awful choices we've made at times.
Solar energy, cheap desalination and bioscience are likely to make food ever cheaper and more abundant, wouldn't you think?
If a car is 100x the embedded energy and lasts 5x as long, then the car takes 20x as much energy per useful year. This doesn't count the energy to run each of them, which is more lopsided obviously.
So, I managed to goof the account above a few ways.
First, cars weigh 10,000 times, not 1,000 times, more than a cellphone.
Embodied (not embedded) energy is 100x greater for the automobile.
The units produced annually is a major factor: 2 billion for mobile phones, 72 million for automobiles. That plus product life skews the number toward phones a lot.
I did manage to get the bottom-line value right: autos use 0.72 exajoules of energy per year of use, 30% less than mobile phones.
A longer version of the example was published in IEEE Spectrum in 2016:
Interesting article, thanks for posting! A few things to add.
Your article actually says that cars use 7x as much embodied energy as devices, (7 to 1), but then corrects both for lifetime (10 and 2 years), thus you get 0.5 vs 0.7 for devices vs cars respectively, not 1 vs 0.7.
The article then concludes cars use 40% more embedded energy than all devices on the planet, not 30% less.
Then, we're talking about phones here, the article about devices, including 60 million laptops which the article assumes use 18x the embodied energy of a phone. i.e., next to the 1.9 billion phones, the article essentially adds in 1.08 billion phone-equivalent laptops, which carry a worse energy/mass ratio, but aren't adjusted for a much better lifetime than 2 years average. Same for smartphones, btw. The article leaves out embodied energy of cars and just assumes a car to perform without any repairs or maintenance for 10 years, like a phone does for 2 years.
It also doesn't really explicitly mention the context which is that it's a comparison is between more than 2 billion devices servicing an approximately similar amount of humans, vs 72 million vehicles.
The article does mention that a phone's energy use in 2 years would add, at most, 8% to its embodied energy, for an indexed figure of 1.08. A car uses 5x as much of its embodied energy, for a total figure of 6x. Again, this is without figuring in maintenance. In short, for a real impact figure you'd multiply the 0.72 by 6, and you end up with energy to 72m cars using more than 8x as much energy than 2 billion smartphones and more than a billion phone-equivalent laptop/tablet devices, at minimum.
The book and article differ on the 30% / 40% point, and Smil is IMO not entirely clear here (or I'm up too late reading this).
The general upshot is that silicon is very energy-intensive stuff -- to manufacture, and to operate. Several authors (including Smil) have noted that the highest energy use densities, in terms of watts per unit-mass of equipment, are seen in information systems. There's a reason for all those massive cooling systems at datacentres.
(And yes, I've just shifted the discussion from embodied energy to operating energy, in the interest of the general point of energy consumption of information systems, not trying to confuse the two points, though that has been done several times already in various parts of this thread, including your own response above.)
That density still doesn't necessarily imply greater total energy use, though it starts getting you that way.
As for transport vs. information: a further point to consider is that there are constraints on moving people around in a physical environment, imposed by mass, air, rolling resistance, and braking (or regen) losses. We're relatively close -- definitely within an order of magnitude, and possibly a power or so of two, to those limits. For information, the theoretical efficiencies are high (Feynman did work on this IIRC), but our technology is nowhere near that bound, and we seem quite good at throwing additional tasks and requirements on our computing systems as efficiency improves. (This is also true of transport -- both are subject to the Jevons paradox.)
This also gets us to a sort of Amdahl's Law problem: as the operational energy of computers falls, the embodied energy costs seem to increase and become a larger portion of the overall expense. Since the operating cost == marginal cost, this also means that market dynamics alone, which function based on marginal costs, are exceedingly unlikely to discourage this trend. It's another zero-marginal-cost dynamic (see Jeremy Rifkin's recent book).
Smil has a great deal of expertise and experience here, his writing is usually pretty clear, and I'm inclined to credit his claims. Though I may need to evaluate this particular one more closely. Though at some time when my neurons are not in isolation cells....
These calculations are pretty hard since cars are all different and so are phones. We do know that the auto industry is about 1.7 trillion dollars per year, and the phone market is about 500 billion. This suggests to me that autos are likely more. In total lifecycle though the energy used by autos is far far greater than by phones as well.
Thanks for the education; that's a useful concept.
> Embodied
Do you mean "embedded"? I'm not nitpicking; I want to make sure I understand.
Where does one find the embedded/embodied energy for a product? I'd be surprised if it can be calculated - the energy required to mine, transport, manufacture, dispose every bit of every raw material that eventually goes into all the parts of an automobile (or other complex modern device)? It would be a very valuable but daunting task. How is it done and who does it?
> In Energy and Civilization, Vaclav Smil points out that in terms of embedded energy, an automobile, with over 1,000x the mass of a smartphone, has only 100x the embedded energy.
Assuming embedded energy means "battery / fuel capacity" this seems very wrong:
"Embedded energy" is the total energy of manufacturing and processing, not the energy storage of a device or vehicle itself. On that basis, the automobile has many, many, many times the storage of a cellphone.
I have the same impression recently. It's nearly impossible to get a good compact phone.
My last one was Sony Xperia X Compact. XZ1 Compact is basically a clone with slightly better specs, no point to upgrade. XZ2 compact while getting beefier lost the headphone jack.
I'm basically waiting and hoping for Xiaomi to release some nice compact in 2018.
Another thing I hate seeing is that even when you have an unlockable bootloader (like my LG Stylo 2 Plus), good luck finding a custom ROM for it. LineageOS? I can only wish. For the most part, only LG's flagships get any love - and even if it became available I'd have to hope that it doesn't implode the way CyanogenMod did. I don't have the free time to port it myself, either.
At least LG's Android skin isn't bad.
I spent a while on XDA, and that whole scene seems horribly broken. I ran an older phone rooted for a while, but keeping up with root and security updates got to be a real pain.
The overall rate of growth declined, but from the article: "For the full year, smartphone sales increased 2.7 percent to 1.5 billion units"
This really seems like we're just hitting a saturation point in terms of physically putting these in people's hands. From that stat, we're talking about 20% of humans in the known universe getting a new smartphone in 2017. Some significant chunk of them probably handed their phone down to someone else (or sold it), some much smaller percentage went from a feature phone to a smartphone and a big chunk of people just held onto their current phone because it does what it needs to do and smartphones are becoming a mature market.
Relatedly, a lot of carrier-based phone subsidy systems seem to have expired in the last couple of years. At this point, consumers are (mostly) bearing the full brunt of direct device cost, and a lot more consumers are taking market costs into account with replacement timing.
The 1-2 year replacement era seems to be at its end, and I think we're likely looking at a time where people replace phones more in line with desktop/laptop purchase cycles.
That alone would already be a good reason to hold on to a phone until it breaks. And after Apple removed the headphone jack, I'm also keen to keep a phone that still has one.
This is definitely the first year where I have absolutely no interest in getting a new phone. I used to be able to do without an upgrade, stretching it. (I had an iPhone 4 about 6 years after release) But now I'm fine with an S7.
Seems like only cameras are worth upgrading for nowadays.
This is exactly where I'm at as well. I have a 6S (and a 6 for work) and, for what I use them for, there are plenty fast enough. I really wish the camera was better, and this will drive me to upgrade eventually, but there really isn't a phone on the market that I see and think, wow, I want that.
That's definitely pretty crazy. I wonder what this means for progress on connecting the "next billion". Also, I hope it comes as a signal to VC money to shift out of the era of low hanging "everyone has a smartphone" fruit.
The smartphone golden era may be coming to an end, pumped for whats next.
Just looking at myself, I have a OnePlus3, launched mid 2016. It still feels like "my new phone", can't believe it is already 1.5 years old. Everything is just good enough and the thing is still blazing fast in everything it does. I got regular updates, it's on the latest android (for stock Rom users) and it was among the first batch of phones to be supported by LineageOS 15.1. I see no reason for a new phone in the near future. Before I always got the itch at about 2 years (ok, I did use mostly budget phones before like the Moto G), now I see myself easily on this phone for another 2-3 years.
I'm still rocking the original Oneplus One, with a Jan 2018 LineageOS installed.
I've been browsing stores to find a replacement phone since this one is getting older. Amazingly, I couldn't find anything vastly better in terms of screen, responsiveness and camera, even if I desperately wanted to justify a new toy. There are no new hardware features that OPO doesn't have.
All the apps that I want to run perform flawlessly. The camera is nearly on par with the OP5 camera, a phone specifically marketed on the camera quality (my wife has one so I could test it).
I ended up replacing the aging battery about a year ago, and continue using it.
I feel the same, will probably replace the battery at some point, feels good to do. In the same vein, I know people putting ssds in 2011 iMacs, thoroughly cleaning them and feeling like they have a new, modern computer again. It's a big win for sustainability. It's too bad that in this age, where hardware can live pretty long, repair-ability is at an all time low (not a coincidence no doubt).
I use an iPhone 6 purchased Mar 2018 (it was obviously released earlier) and see absolutely no reason to upgrade. I nearly did late last year because of slowness, but thankfully someone determined the actual cause. Apple’s throttling based on the battery condition. Just waiting to have my battery replaced now and see no reason why I can’t use this phone well for another year at least.
I'm on a Fairphone 2, which they're supposedly hoping will last five years. I'm curious whether I'll make that, but so far so good - and v1 lasted me three years, even though they were aiming for just two themselves.
In any case, I can easily replace the battery and the screen, so is hopeful.
There's an illustrative example in the UK right now.
A meat supplier called Russel Hume has just gone out of business and their product pulled from major chains.
Basically, they ordered meat according to their expected needs only to suffer a downturn in expected sales. So they cut future orders but had a glut of stock which they tried to use over an extended period. Meat has a lifetime associated with it. (Although it can be extended slightly if you pay for bacterial analysis to re-certificate it).
It appears Russel Hume pushed the margin too far.
That's what even a small downturn in your supply pipeline can do.
I'm at "peak phone". I can't go to a dumb phone and I'm locked into apple and google's ecosystems, but I am underserved by them and actively working on moving away from them. I've been buying small computing platforms and testing out PCIe LTE modems as well as playing around with the LimeSDR LTE[1] networking getting ready for 5G mesh networking with the next model.
I want to carry a brick that I control in my backpack or pocket and use my own input and display devices[2][3]. I don't need another $1000 light up rectangle / digital leash. I haven't played a mobile game in years, none of the apps on my phone are increasing my enjoyment of the tool. Basically it's there for banking and so I can check Slack if if I'm running errands and something else happens.
I made the decision to start working on the DIY phone project when I found out the iPhoneX used the primesense depth camera on the front. It's 100% for more tracking and advertising stuff without any of the cool AR/Depth stuff that I want. Also potentially SUPER creepy social control when you have thousands of high detail copies of everyone's face because they posted them with goofy masks on them. As if the instagram to Deepfakes pipeline was too complicated. Then google mothballed Tango a couple weeks after I got a ZenPhoneAR.
The emperor has no clothes at this point. We don't need their phones and they don't want us to know it yet. I have a $300 Firefly[4] board that dual boots Ubuntu and Android and has HDMI in. I'm working on automating my control of an external iphone through HDMI and a hacked together capacitive touch overlay so I can control it with a mouse like stylus so I won't have to deal with the communication gap from iMessage being so wired up to my life. I'm pretty sure I can virtualize iOS or OSX with a bit of work to solve that problem too then just work on migrating out. There are starting to be very appealing X86_64 tiny computers like the LattePanda[5].
The walled media messaging garden between iOS and Android bugs the crap out of me. If I send someone a phone vid from iOS to android they get a thumbnail that looks like a 1996 RealPlayer DVD Rip.
I want an Ono Sendai but cooler, the tools are here now. Fuck the adslabs.
I think I've outlined a similar set of preferences myself, and this has been the on-the-road computing experience I've wanted to see for .... years? It's absolutely stubbornly resistant to happening.
I've been using an Android tablet for the past 2.5 years, and have absolutely hated it pretty much from the start. The best thing about it was Termux, but something (Memory management? App model? Hardware limitations? OS bugs?) keeps trashing that.
The apps ecosystem is abysmal. Arguably moreso on Android than iOS, for reasons I've iterated on G+.
The hardware ecosystem, most especially for peripherals, is similarly abysmal. Apple, at least, having a small number of specified form-factors has a set of offerings, specifically of folio-type keyboard-case systems, that work. For Android, I find that such products are specific to specific versions of a product -- say, the Samsung Tab of a given size -- the folio keyboard case that fits one will not fit others. This is beyond frustrating.
The quality of those products is also exceedingly limited. Logitech have failed me and failed me badly.
(I strongly discourage use of either Samsung or Logitech products based on my direct experience with products, support, and quality. Across multiple cases for both.)
Given (theoretically) wireless connectivity options, the notion of being able to carry:
1. A vox handset.
2. A mobile-capable display. Something that will fit into a backpack, messenger bag, or bike bag -- this does not have to be pocketable and actually preferably isn't. Women (or men who carry them) may substitute a purse.
3. Additional locally managed storage. Multi-terrabyte storage is available in card-deck-sized form factors (or smaller). This fits somewhere within the bag above.
4. A folio-style case (see illustration on link below).
5. An integrated full feature keyboard.
6. Ideally some sort of trackpad / mouse interface as well. Touch-interface is too constrained. See click-vs-drag ambiguity mentioned here: https://redd.it/5x2sfx
7. The ability to share work with a "real" system as well. I'm actually partial to Git-based, file-based synch, not via some "cloud" system. Problem of course being that several major applications, most notably browsers, handle this poorly.
8. A full and real userland and Linux environment. I've tried the rest. This is the best.
I'm sure there's a global market for about five of these systems, but that's how IBM started in the 1950s.
That's a thing? I grudgingly switched to a persistent surveillance device two years ago when the buttons fell off of my last feature phone and the new feature phones were enough worse that they were basically unusable.
Google Authenticator is the only app I actually need, it's required to authenticate for a whole bunch of services at work. My employer paid my iPhone, and future upgrades, so it's their call, but I'd be just as happy with something like Nokia 104. Assuming that I could get an Google Authenticator app for it, my employer could save $1000+ every 18 to 24 month.
You can write a Google Authenticator script that works on your PC you know. It's about 20 lines of code. Also there are many freeware apps available for PCs.
Or you could use a Yubikey to store the secrets, and https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-desktop on your desktop. That way you would still have a portable second factor, and it would be very very hard to extract the secrets.
The new camera technologies are, for me at least, a reason to upgrade to the current generation. I'm going to grab an IPhone X along with some telephoto lenses for my wife so she can stop taking both her phone and DLSR camera on trips.
I agree that, in general, the reasons for upgrading your phone are less and less. I don't know how new that actually is though, I was using my first generation ipad until a couple of years ago; Apple kit tends to last forever and a lot of new features came in software upgrades. Same with the Nexus/Pixel series in Android world.
Speaking for myself, I'm due to upgrade my phone - my contract is up, I have no balance owed - but I just don't see a need to. My phone is two and a half years old and it's hanging in there. It still calls, texts, browses and reads just fine. And the typically weakest link of all, the battery, is still holding a decent charge. I don't see any advantage to replacing it right now. I lost the comment, but someone else posted that they're at "peak phone" and I'm inclined to agree.
My Nokia N900 from 2009 still does all I want. Phone, xmpp, camera, video, calendar with CalDAV, web, email, sms, rss, ssh, emacs. Just ordered a new battery for 10 € instead of a new phone, because I had no idea why I should get a new device.
It's not surprising that the market would reach a saturation point; manufacturers are running short of ideas to improve their products, and even starting to resort to removing features.
Especially in the low-end/unbranded smartphone segment, I've noticed newer models aren't actually getting better. Several years ago they practically all had removable batteries, microSD, dual SIM, and a full complement of sensors; now it's nearly impossible to find such a complete combination anymore --- they're all missing one or two things.