Smartphones lifespan

In January 2011 I bought my first smartphone. At that time, it was still uncommon to see people walking down the street with a phone like we do today. There were already some gadgets around, such as handheld game consoles or music players like the iPod, but it was more common to see people killing time with magazines or small books.

It was also very common to change phones more frequently. On one hand, they were easier to damage, and on the other, every year a new smartphone came out with much better specifications. I ended up changing phones quite a lot as well. How much exactly? I made a timeline table. I love timelines!

It’s easy to see how back then I switched devices relatively often. The first four had an average lifespan of 11 months. Then OnePlus came along with an average of 29 months, more than double, which was surprising.

I was comfortable with that, but right after that came a turning point. I switched to iPhone. I didn’t really want to. Moving from Android to iOS is an odyssey. However, my OnePlus 5’s screen broke right before a vacation trip, so I was given a used iPhone 7 that already had 20 months of use. It still worked very well, and surprisingly I adapted to it and used it for another 23 months, giving it a total lifespan of 43 months.

I loved its size, so I replaced it with an iPhone 12 mini, which depreciated after 27 months. Now here I am with an iPhone 15 Pro, which has already outlasted the previous one and is still working very well.

Going back to the chart, I really like seeing in perspective how long each phone lasted and how much I can expect the next one to last. I know it’s not easy to have this kind of information to do that, but what can I say, I love writing down data and analyzing it later.