A new smartphone in the US is $600-800 off contract.

In my own experience: that puts it in line with (A) my car which I purchased and titled for $500 last year, and (B) my workstation which cost $1200 without peripherals.

Both my car and workstation are, unsurprisingly, modular systems that can be useful for years or even decades with proper care.

My retired work-station is still in use as a file-server, and that machine is 8 years old. My car is 300,000 miles young without a single major mechanical fault.

---

So from where I'm standing: $600 is a rather sizable chunk of change that I'd much rather spend on a system that's _not designed to be disposable._

I can't even find a current-gen smartphone that I'm remotely interested in purchasing. The "smaller and lighter" you speak is not so much _smaller_ but _thinner._

I don't need, or even desire a 1080p screen on my phone; despite being interested in other current gen components like the latest round of cameras.

You can't make the physical package and smaller than the _gigantic displays_ these phones are being equipped with. I would sooner part with $600 for an iPhone 4S-sized "endo skeleton" with current gen "RAM and CPU modules" and a slightly smaller battery. A tradeoff that's possible when you're dealing with modules... but a financial disaster when you're trying to design a mass-market phone to compete with the Android flagships.

Marques Brownlee aka MKBHD and even he admitted that's not the case anymore.

Good phones are getting more and more expensive. A flagship used to cost $700 5 years ago, now it's $1000+.

Cheap phones are getting good, but not at the rate that good phones are getting more expensive.

> For what it's worth I'm still daily driving LG G2 and it's legit still fast, sure sometimes it's a bit sleepy but it's still more then usable!

A quick Googling tells me your phone is from 2013 and can only be updated to Android 5. Your phone is either:

* horrendously out of date and insecure

* using a custom ROM (which I, for one, and many others probably too, don't want to do)

* not used for any kind of internet facing activity (another thing that I and others don't want to do)

Also, you probably have a very low bar for usability and speed. With modern OSes and sites, that phone would probably be extremely slow and laggy for my (and many others') usage.

Your phone uses a Snapdragon 800 which probably has 10-15% (maybe 20-25% if I'm being generous) of the performance of a modern Snapdragon. Phones are not desktops/laptops, where performance levels plateaued in 2005.

This is my parents. Between the two of them I bet they average 3 new phones per year, because they keep buying cheap Android phones, but they just can't bring themselves to spend more, even though it'd actually be cheaper and then their phone wouldn't suck. Plus because they keep buying Android and all these cheap phones run on different major versions and with different vendor customizations, they're constantly having trouble with wildly different UI for even basic things like the phone "app".

I can’t speak to whether you’re any of those, but I can say this. Anyone spending significantly more than that (I’m included in this category) is either:

- Buying it for the quality of its camera (me again, not that I’m an especially avid photographer; I almost exclusively take pics of my pup)

- Some mix of spending too much or not realizing they’re in one or more categories below (some large majority, I’d wager)

- Doing a cost benefit analysis that favors spending more upfront for a longer-term investment (me again again, although my phone ownership lifecycle has shortened significantly; it’s still beneficial because my hand-me-downs benefit loved ones)

- Married to the software (me once again, much moreso on mobile than on general purpose computers these days)

- Enthralled by compute power or some other hardware particularity (o_0 I’m probably just getting old but I mostly don’t get this… okay I’m amused that my phone is more powerful in many ways than its current high-end laptop companion)

I wouldn't know, I won't pay above $30 to $40 for a phone or above $10 per month for my cellular plan. While a phone/smartphone is insanely useful, I just don't think the price is justified.

I think this is a terrible mindset, personally. There is so much waste, these are perfectly good phones but everyone is convinced to do a 2 year contract lifecycle.

> Which one is more economical over time?

My sub-100USD android apparently. What the heck kind of math do you have going on for "economical?"

Ironically, me.

I changed the battery last year, it costed me 13$ (~12 euros), it is as good as new.

Now it might be that my Android phone is Chinese as well, so it actually costed me less than 10¢ a day. Even if I had to replace my Android smartphone, I could have changed it 3 times in the past 7 years and still spend less than buying an iPhone that lasted me 7 years.

I could still easily sell it for 30-40 euros, making it even cheaper.

It's inexplicable when there are alternative phones available for 1/10 the cost. Why would you choose to take on a $40/mo expense when you could buy an entire fully functioning low end Android phone for $40?

> And so on and so on. I pay more upfront to save a ton down the line.

But my example is that I'm paying less upfront than my neighbors. They are the ones buying iPhones and name brand cereal with SNAP while I'm over here using cheap phones and eating generic brand cereal. It just seems paradoxical is all I'm saying.

What is 'shitty' about a '£300-tops Android phone'? I never paid more than ~€200 for a new phone, my current 'daily' phone is a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 pro from 2018 (running a de-fanged Google-free Android distribution) which still runs 2-3 days on a single charge and runs all apps I care to use. I don't consider this a 'shitty' phone in any way.

If all you care about is texting, making calls, playing the occasional game[1], browsing the web, doing mobile banking, listening to music, watching videos, using social media, responding to work emails, viewing the occasional PDF, word processed document or spreadsheet sent over email, screencasting to a TV, using the device as a mobile hotspot, testing software you write for phones ... and a few more less frequent things (Like using employers paging app, employers internal systems) ... then you don't get any additional value spending more than $400 on a phone.

Don't ask me what you can do with a phone that costs more, because I haven't yet seen anyone do something on their phone that my <$400 phone cannot do.

[1] Wordle, for example, is insanely popular right now.

Because an iPhone doesn't run Android. Android sucks. You couldn't pay me to own an Android phone.

Where, if I may ask, do you get such a good deal?

How many more months of security updates do you anticipate receiving on that device. Are security updates a priority for you?

(Written on my $450, in 2016, 4 year old iPhone SE, which I am considering upgrading for the new $450 iPhone SE in 2020)

In my world too but most smartphones sold these days in fact do not have removable batteries by design. You don't know this?

>Buying a new (crappy, what do you expect for 50 Dollars?) phone because your perfectly working one isn't supported anymore is NOT satisfying and not a solution

That $50 phone is just as good or better than a phone sold 3 or 4 years ago.

>I feel that you're a bit lost. You want to save a bit of money

No dude... I buy a new phone every two years to have a faster one, better features (camera), and better security features (fingerprint reader). Lucky me, I can afford it. My secondary phone is a 2 1/2 year old Nexus 5 which still gets security updates and will for many more years via custom ROMs. Security updates were not the reason I bought a new phone.

Sorry, you don't really seem to be up on current smartphone technology to comment on this intelligently but philosophically I do agree with you.

And yet my car’s entertainment system is massively enhanced by my phone.

Meanwhile I can still buy an iPhone new for $450 with 128GB storage, and an expectation to receive security updates for at least 4 years.

The annual insurance on my car is higher, and I use my phone for many more hours per day, and these days, need it a lot more than I do my car.

For the first week, at least. Then they start to accumulate cruft and slow down, eventually becoming barely usable.

I've experienced it in the past. I see it happen for my friends and family. I decided some time ago to save up that $750 - $1k and go for the high-range phones, so that I can use them for two or three years without daily frustrations.

The top-most commenter is right. Phones are used even more frequently than cars; for many, even more frequently than other types of computers combined. It's one of those things it's not worth to cheap out on - like a mattress or an office chair.

(Now, of course part of me is happy for the mid-range phones costing what they do, because this is why high-end phones cost $1k and not $10k.)

Is it great, or is it simply a case of poor financial management and/or contract incentives placed by bullying cell phone companies like Verizon to lock people into paralyzing contracts?

I am skeptical that a $600 iPhone is affordable to the masses when you factor in the insanely expensive cell phones plans that they're attached to in order to make the up-front costs seem affordable at the time of purchase.

You assume it costs nothing to maintain software for old phones.