I have an iPhone 13 mini, the last <5" flagship phone you can buy. I'm not particularly tied to the iPhone ecosystem, but when this dies, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I bought my S10e for 450AUD ($300US) on clearance six months after it was released. I've replaced the factory rom, and the battery once.

There's nothing on the android market like it, it's only slightly larger than the iphone 12/13 mini that's also discontinued. Small phones with all the bells and whistles aren't made anymore by anyone. I will be very sad when I can't get parts.

Oh, I didn't even notice why I keep postponing upgrading my out-of-line phone that can't even get new software from the play store anymore. But yeah, it's because I dread of looking around trying to decide what I'll give up to get a headphone jack.

Former S10 owner here. It had an audio jack, and an SpO2 meter (which is useful to a family member), and FM radio (used it a lot when doing farm work). The S22 has none of those, and it is heavier. Feeling so cheated by phone ~~makers~~ grifters is making me very careful with any of my next purchases. It's as if the market has reached a peak and the only thing they can think of is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

I also loved my S10e. Unfortunately the mainboard on it died few few months ago.

I bought Sony Xperia 1 V to replace it. It has a 3.5mm headphone jack and a MicroSD card slot. The build quality is excellent but I'm a bit worried what the software support will look like in a few years.

Eventually you'll just have to upgrade because the phone is too slow. I had to upgrade from my galaxy S8 earlier this year because it slowed to a crawl, my wife commented on how slow it was every time she used it. I had it for 5 years. I still hate not having a headphone jack, but having 5G and an insanely fast phone made it worth it.

Also a S10e user here. I've been eyeing the Asus Zenfone 10, but it's unfortunately not available in the US for most mobile networks here. Truly a shame that not many are making small phones, and those that are are not paying attention to the US market.

And new phots are super expensive. You are paying more in the phone than your work notebook, something is terrible wrong with that.

I loved my s10e, although the camera glass (or rather plastic) cracked during the first months from basically placing the phone on flat surfaces. Otherwise the form factor, dimensions, audio jack port, photos quality were excellent.

My galaxy s10 rocks. I guess the battery has had almost 1000 charging cycles and is still performing good enough. I like the smaller than average size and weight, the smooth and snappy scratch resistant screen. Speaker sound is quite decent.

I don't see how I would benefit from things like 100Hz or more screen refresh rate or even tinier pixels. 5G, I would not use since that would increase the amount of wireless data so much that i'd need a more expensive plan.

I guess a lot of phones in use are sitting on a 'more than decent' plateau. It's a good thing.

I'm pretty sure almost every mainstream phone nowadays has wireless charging. The iPhones do, Pixel phones do, etc.

I'm not upgrading from my Pixel 5A. It has a fingerprint reader and I can unlock it from my pocket. It has a headphone jack. Every new phone has taken these things away. Very disappointing.

Still with SD cards and headphone jacks? The world has moved on, my man.

> Imagine how pissed the car industry must be now since most people drive cars for 10-15 years instead of replacing them once per few years like iPhones.

They have been for years, Western markets have been saturated for years - that's the reason why especially the German carmakers shifted all their attention towards China, the only place left that has enough wealthy people to afford their cars.

> Note the negative tone about having our phones actually work longer, last longer and be usable longer without draining our money just to keep the threadmill rolling.

Indeed, it's a really positive development. Finally this market is pretty mature and one can buy something that isn't completely unsable within a couple of years of purchase.

My family of three phone users just upgrades our phones to whatever the lower end pixel is when they break (due to some accidental damage). Despite the horror stories, these phones have always been fine for us.

The last remaining barrier to this strategy (limited security updates from Google) is finally going away, so the future for "replace it when it breaks" looks even better.

That is what EVs are for. Replace the battery every few years and replace your car whenever a new incompatible plug standard comes out.

I'm starting to get nostalgic for the early days of smartphones (2008-2014 or so), back then every year the phone you upgraded to was miles ahead of the previous generation device. I remember walking into the Apple store a few weeks after the iPhone 3GS came out and being blown away by the performance compared to my iPhone 3G.

Phones have gotten way better since then but they also became boring and commonplace. Back then all the power users either jailbroke if they were on iOS or installed CyanogenMod if they were on Android. My 3 fondest memories of that time were:

1. Getting BiteSMS on my iPhone 3G: BiteSMS was an alternative SMS app that offered quick replies, something the native messenger didn't offer until a year or so later. I felt so cool at school when my friends saw the pink logo on my dock instead of the green one.

2. Hacking Multitasking on the iPhone 3G: IIRC when iOS 4 came out alongside the 3GS, the 3GS has multitasking but they never backported the feature to the 3G. When I jailbroke iOS 4 on my device it gave me the option of enabling multitasking. Once I enabled it I realized why Apple didn't backport the feature, the 3G was so down on power compared to the 3GS that it completely crawled to a halt if you had more than 2 apps running.

3. Around 2011 I got a Samsung Galaxy S2 and after installing various ROM's and quite a bit of hacking I got Google Wallet to work on the device. I remember the first time I tapped my phone and paid for something it felt like magic. Now we all take it for granted with Apple Pay and Google Pay but back then there were barely any terminals to even tap your phone so getting to do that felt like black magic.

I'm on Apple's yearly upgrade plan and still don't bother. I'm not interested in a device larger than their mini form factor, and they keep a) killing the mini and b) making their devices larger. At the moment the mini I have is better than their SE offering. So why bother updating my phone?

And as you say, everything works fine enough for me, so there's no pressure for me to move off my stance.

One issue is that your Pixel 5 won't get any more security updates (past October 2023). My wife's Pixel 4A is in the same boat - perfectly fine except no more security updates. Doesn't matter much right now, but will gradually start to matter over time.

Reading this thread reminded me to check my Pixel 5 (primary phone, purchased new just over 3 years ago) for updates. And to my surprise, there was a Android Security Update available which, now that it has been downloaded and installed, is dated Nov 5, 2023! Maybe that'll be the last one this phone gets, but maybe not.

Anyway, I'm perfectly happy with my Pixel 5 (aside from slightly declining battery performance, it's "as good as new"); I even bought a "excellent" refurb'd Pixel 5 9 months ago to use on a second/backup line (I was also thinking to use one or both for anticipated trade-in's on Pixel 8's, but with nominal updates all in the rearview mirror, Google's trade-in value has declined to negligible, so I plan to just keep using the 5's; the cost of the 8 vs it's value add was not compelling). 8GB RAM and 128GB of local storage is plenty for my needs, and I certainly don't want a bigger phone!

As the technology matures, you don't really need to upgrade it every year. You can already see that the updates in phone are incremental. For a person updating their phone every 3 years, it's a big update but that's not the case anymore for a person upgrading their phone every year.

I basically ran my Galaxy S9 into the ground before replacing it last January. I replaced it with a Xperia 1 III because I didn't see the point of paying a extra $500 to get the IV. The new phone runs noticeably smoother than the old phone, but not by a game changing amount, nor by the amount one would have come to expect from about a 5 year leap forward in technology.

The processor is faster when compared to a 2017 phone and the camera is much better when comparing images side by side. I wouldn’t have noticed but I put a Motorola Android 2017 next to a iPhone SE 2020 and it became very noticeable.

And yet I still bought the 15 pro. Slightly faster and lighter with slightly better camera!

> want a reasonably sized phone

I think that's the biggest problem. If you accept >6" screens, you'll find a phone that hits most of those criteria. But if you want a smaller phone?

iPhone 13 mini from 2021 or Pixel 4a from 2020. And I still would call those large, one-handing those screens is uncomfortable even with large hands.

You want an actual small phone, around 5", like the early iPhones? Fucking XZ2 Compact from early 2018. At least Linage still supports it...

Phone sizes nowadays make me furious. I bought a Pixel 6 one year ago, because "on paper" it looked similar to my Pixel 3a. Just 1mm here, 1mm there. But it actually feels way much bigger and heavier in reality. Impossible to conveniently use it with one hand. (Not possible to verify at shop how it would feel, because all shops have those large anti-theft thingies glued to the phones).

Effectively, the Pixel 6 became my "tablet" at home (or a "camera" when travelling), and I still use Pixel 3a as the default on-the-go phone.

We desperately need 3.5-4 inch phones. My iPhone SE with 4.7 inch screen is too big to use comfortably (I can’t reach the opposite corner with thumb and I am a male with average size hands) and I also have Unihertz Jelly 2 which is 3 inch screen, which is smaller than you’d want, but not unusable. Where is the middle ground? The first iPhones with 3.5-4 inch screen were if a PERFECT size! Why can’t we make nice things anymore?

Yup, originally had Nexus One, found out it couldn't be upgraded after a couple of years because of the decision to make the installation space so small. Upgraded to Nexus 4. Battery expanded like a blowfish after a year. Bought a Nexus 5. The Gorilla glass wasn't as durable as my clumsiness confirmed. In between the 4 and 5, bought a Nexus 7 (I think, it was a pad device), it's display stopped working almost 1 year to the day.

Back to the Nexus 5, after dropping the 5 accidentally and destroying it, upgraded to a mid-range LG phone. Wow. It was great. Still works like 5 or 6 years later though 2 years after buying it, LG announced they would exit the smart phone business. That was a blow.

The LG will works but is slow now so the only option left was a Samsung phone, mid-upper range. About a year later so far so good but I had to disable a thousand crap apps they install and revert a thousand more crap default settings. Worse than buying a new Windows PC which is why I use Ubuntu Linux on my PC.

As people go longer between upgrades, phones depreciate less, the phones become more durable and better supported; their price sensitivity ought to go down not up.

I also don’t see all that much reason to wait when you can always get an old model of phone. I also see tons of competition at the mid-range of the market anyhow.

A few months ago I was looking exactly for that and I settled on the Pixel 7a (with GraoheneOS, clearly). I am very happy with it!

Just buy a new iPhone with a carrier subsidy, and use it for 4-6 years probably replacing the battery once during that time.

No, there still is a reason to need to replace a perfectly good phone, and it is purely software related. Manufacturers stop supporting their OS for phones, leaving you with something obsolete with lots of security holes. App makers enforce a minimum version of Android.

Even if you can unlock your bootloader and install a new version of Android OS, you will still get screwed over by SafetyNet, good luck installing any banking apps.

I read somewhere its similar to the singer sewing machine story.

They kept adding new features every year but once most people who had a sewing machine sales tanked.

It would be nice to have full LIDAR based 3D scanning on phones, one for better imaging and two to provide datasets for 2D to 3D LLMs.

The last couple of times I upgraded, bloat in maps navigation was reason enough to upgrade to a faster phone. I don't want a sluggish UI while driving. Hoping Google doesn't cram much more ads or junk into the maps app or Waze.

> I can't even customise the home screen as much ( Literally cannot remove a link to Chrome and other google apps ).

Uh... I'm not following here. You definitely can. What are you trying to do, exactly? It's true you can't uninstall the apps, because they're in the ROM. But you can absolutely use whatever you want on your home page.

I was in a similar boat. My Galaxy S9+ was in its 5th year when I learned about the security update stoppage. I went for a midrange Pixel 6a that approximates the flagship of 2018. I'm not sure if this is due to getting used to the Samsung UX style after 9 years, but I find some choices Google made to be less intuitive or smooth, though I've gotten used to it. The only thing I maaay look for in my next phone which I don't currently haven't yet had is a 120hz refresh rate - but I might not want the extra power draw. So I'm satisfied. The extra battery life is a huge QoL improvement.

Just take the Chrome icon, hold it with your finger a sec, and drag it to the top of the screen where there's a box that says "remove" or something like that. That works for me on my Pixel

I upgraded my P20 pro to a Samsung S20FE, and it felt like a downgrade. My wife took over my P20pro, and she's still rocking it, more than 5 years later. The screen is cracked in a corner, but the phone trucks along like nobody's business.

That was a seriously underrated and good phone. I'm 2 years on my Samsung and I hate it so much.

I had two P20s, probably my favourite phone I owned. Both died from water damage after about a year, which never happened to me with any other phone - not sure if I got unlucky or they have a particular design flaw here.

I don't understand this issue. I also have a Pixel 8 but I don't use chrome, so it's not on my phone.

This doesn't absolve Pixel phones from having a horrible launcher, but Nova launcher has been a savior.

Long press the chrome icon, drag it off the screen, it's gone. Tested on pixel 8 just now.

On the same boat. 13 mini is just the perfect size. No feature missing, no need to upgrade until it dies.

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with the latest SE model. Absolutely do not want a phone the size of the new flagship models. Prefer touchid to PIN or faceid, which rules out the minis.