What I don’t get is how no company seems to have worked out a legitimately good service and maintenance model for tech products. Fairphone hasn’t invented the wheel here. They’re going to make money on maintenance, parts and repair.

I would think there would be lowered costs involved in not having to push out a new product every 6 months and market it to customers who just bought something less than a year ago.

Selling you a gadget for $ 1000 every two years will always be more profitable than selling you one very five years and doing service in the meantime.

Are you aware that the current version of iOS is supported by the phones Apple released in 2018? And they're still releasing security updates for the prior version, with support for 2017's iPhone 8?

A battery replacement from Apple itself for an iPhone 8 is $69. You can get third-party replacements for less. They actually offer battery replacements going back to the 5s (released in 2013) and screen repairs going back to the iPhone 6.

A decade of first-party hardware support for the most likely to fail components in a phone is pretty hard to square with allegations of "planned obsolescence."

Perhaps the easier argument is that they try to create a sense of urgency to sell people what they don’t need.

Hmm, I wonder what the latest iPhone would look like if Apple were on a once every two years release schedule instead of annual. I can see arguments for the same, better, and worse.

they try to create a sense of urgency to sell people what they don’t need.

Do they? Yes, they certainly advertise what's new but they're not primarily targeting customers with last year's phone. I recall seeing previously that the average time to keep an iPhone is three years. On Apple's iPhone 15 product page, I found two spots where it called out direct comparisons to previous iPhones: "A17 Pro GPU is up to 70% faster than the GPU in iPhone 12 Pro" and "iPhone 15 Pro has up to 6 more hours video playback than iPhone 12 Pro." They're targeting upgrades to the newest flagship at people with the flagship from three years ago. Of course due to the long support for iPhones, that three year iPhone will inevitably end up in the hands of another user, where it will continue to live on, so there's nothing at all wasteful about upgrading. It's not even wasteful to upgrade every single year because those year-old phones are still used. It's only when the phone is irreparably broken or hopelessly, legitimately obsolete (due to still rapidly-improving technology) that it's then recycled (and Apple has developed special robots to make extracting the rare earth metals viable at large scale).

I wonder what the latest iPhone would look like if Apple were on a once every two years release schedule instead of annual.

I think it would look exactly the same as it does today except that it would include two years' of innovations and changes rather than one, but would also mean that if you needed a new phone before its release, your only option would be an increasingly dated model. Customer: Hi, I'd like the latest flagship. Store: Here's the best technology that was available 20 months ago.

I also think it's worth noting that Apple pretty much single-handedly slowed the release schedule for phones. Prior to the iPhone, Nokia was releasing roughly a dozen barely-differentiated models per year, spread throughout the year.

I think it’s entirely possible that they chose to compare to a 3 year old phone not because they are only targeting those upgrades to people with 3 years old phones, but because it would sound a lot less impressive for them to specifically market the much smaller incremental improvements over last years phone.

It should also be noted that Apple admitted at one point to purposefully slowing down older iPhones too, which very clearly was done to get people to upgrade. If that’s not planned obsolescence I don’t know what is.

You talk about them as if they are some benevolent entity, when that’s just very much not the case.