How the phone industry tricks us into upgrading

There is something dishonest about the way phone manufacturers promote their latest models. The advertised improvements, if there are any at all, are slight and the increased price includes the billions spent on advertising to persuade us that the phone we bought only one year ago is now a museum piece.
That is the trick of the modern phone market. It does not simply sell a device. It sells dissatisfaction. Each year the same show begins again. A new model is announced with great confidence, polished pictures and serious voices telling us that this time the future has arrived. It is faster, thinner, lighter and more advanced than the last one. But for most ordinary users, the changes are insignificant. A little more battery life if you’re lucky, a slightly better screen maybe, a modest increase in speed and perhaps one or two new but unnecessary features which you’ll never use. These are refinements, not revolutions. Yet the advertisers dress them up as though they are indispensable improvements.
The aim is plain enough. You are made to feel that the fully functioning phone already in your pocket is somehow lacking. A device that still makes calls, sends messages, checks email and runs ordinary apps is treated as if it were a worn coat that ought to be thrown away. This is not because the phone has failed. It is because the industry’s exorbitant profits depend on persuading people that replacement is necessary and wise. The market creates an artificial need and then claims to satisfy it. Most people are not professional photographers or serious gamers. They do not want constant novelty. They want a phone that works, holds its charge reasonably well, is not too heavy and lets them do the simple things they need each day.
The Android I bought three years ago serves me as well as the latest model. In daily use, the difference is frequently so small that one suspects the real advance is not in the phone but in the methods used to advertise it. Large sums are spent on launch events, glossy campaigns and endless media noise, all to make each new release seem like an event of global importance.
The cost of advertising is passed on to the buyer, who unwittingly pays to fund the next advertising campaign, which will tell him the phone he just bought is already obsolete. That, in my opinion, is nuts. This constant exaggeration also cheapens the word “innovation”. If every new model is called innovative, the word loses force. Real progress becomes harder to recognise because the public is trained to expect drama at each launch, even when the changes are slight.
The result is a kind of commercial fog in which small adjustments are presented as if they were the equivalent of inventing the wheel. Replacing your current phone if the old one no longer works is logical, but upgrading every year, or every other year, because the market has decided to move on, isn’t. If a phone is still reliable, safe and fit for ordinary use, then replacing it is to surrender to advertising pressure. That is why our old phone remains a sensible choice for most of us.
The latest model may be better in a few respects, but the question is whether those differences matter enough to justify spending so much money. For most everyday users, they do not. The old phone still does the job. The new one simply does the same things with better publicity. The mobile phone industry thrives on this cycle of expectation and dissatisfaction.
But a three-year-old phone that still works is not a problem to be solved. It is a useful object being talked into obsolescence. And that, in the end, is what I object to.

Karim Easterbrook The writer is a Former Cambridge School Principal and Author