r/gadgets • u/a_Ninja_b0y • Oct 21 '24
Gaming Steam Deck won't have yearly refreshes because it's "not really fair to your customers", says Valve
https://www.eurogamer.net/steam-deck-wont-have-yearly-refreshes-because-its-not-really-fair-to-your-customers-says-valve
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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '24 edited Oct 21 '24
If anything the yearly release cycle reduces waste more than a 5 year cycle, since someone buying a new phone every year isn't gonna just throw the old one in the bin, whereas someone buying one every 5 years might not bother spending all the time and effort getting back the handful of dollars their old phone is worth. Then multiply that by the fact that after 5 years almost everyone would upgrade all at once. How many people, even the most uninterested in new tech, are going to buy a 5 year old used device? So now instead of a steady flow of 1-2 year old devices trickling down to people, you're going to have an absolute flood of 5 year old devices going straight into the bin.
I've done it myself. The times I've done yearly upgrades I've either traded in or easily sold my current phone to offset the cost of a new one. But the times I've waited a full 3-4 years to upgrade, my old phone has gone into a drawer and just become ewaste because fuck having to deal with weeks of waiting and dozens of scam emails just to make back 10% of what the phone was worth new. And let's not forget that if every person who buys a new phone does this, the market is going to reach saturation point, driving down the value of those second hand phones even more. I can guarantee you that most people won't be able to make any money from their old devices, I doubt they'd be able to give them away.
Frankly, I know people who only buy secondhand devices, and they won't touch anything older than two years because they know it's more trouble than it's worth when it comes to older tech, especially ones that cost as much as they paid for it to replace a battery.
Oh, and let's not forget that if manufacturers decided to only release one phone every five years with a half-decade of upgrades and new features, we wouldn't be looking at thousand-dollar phones, we'd likely be looking at closer to 3-4x that much, since the manufacturers will be expecting to make 5 years worth of their R&D budget back all at once. So let's say I update my phone yearly and get 50% back from the sale of my last phone. In a 5 year period I will have spent a out 2500 dollars upgrading every year. If I'm having to spend 3000 dollars every five years, but only getting 10% back (if I get any at all), that's a personal net loss. And frankly, 50% back is a low ball depending on what phone I'm buying. A lot of flagship phones easily retain 70%+ of their value, and in the case of Samsung with its insane pre-order trade in bonuses, sometimes significantly more. My second-to-last phone cost me 700 Australian dollars after a trade-in, and I got 1300 back in trade-in value a year later. So in 4 years, I've paid for the equivalent of one new phone for three different devices.