Quote Originally Posted by Trafalgar View Post
Five or six years is pretty good for a smartphone. I remember reading somewhere that the average life of a smartphone is only 2 or 3 years. Understand that the profitability of the cell phone industry (and yes this includes apple) depends on people going out and buying new phones every few years.

And they are much harder to repair than laptops so good luck if you want to swap the screen or replace the battery on your own.
Changing screens is quite a common operation, there are like half a dozen repair shops within a five mile radius of me that will do that quite happily. Batteries, less so (probably because they're harder to damage).

The industry's profitability? Not my problem. I'm happy to pay a fair price for a decent phone, but having bought it I will keep using it for as long as I can extract any sort of value from it. Anything else would be borderline-criminally wasteful. Even my nine-year-old Android, the one with the forty-minute battery life, is still in use as a backup device.

Annoyingly, the old iPhone still has an amazing battery life. It's a full week now since it went dark, it hasn't been charged at all in that time, and yet its blasted alarms still keep going off...