The dust has finally settled after Apple’s yearly iPhone event. The company once again revealed its yearly iteration of the most popular smartphone, as well as a few other knick-knacks, together with the long-awaited folding iPhone Duo.

At the event, the narrative is the same year after year. The new iPhones are the best, and everything is immeasurably better than your old phone, even if you bought it last year. Every aspect of the phone is better, faster, stronger, and generally you HAVE to buy a new one.

That being said, do you really need the new model? Your current phone is supposedly so much slower, you could think it’s getting to be unusable. So how come up until the event that wasn’t the case, and in your day-to-day it works just fine?

Improvements only on paper

The numbers Mason, what do they mean?

It’s obvious that smartphone companies, Apple among them, want you to buy their products, and not because they care for your experience. The more you buy, the more money they make. Simple as that. If the smartphone producers can convince you to upgrade your phone every year, they’re making all the money, but are you really getting the benefits you are paying for?

We all know the infamous Apple graphs. The gains are always huge. The CPUs are faster, the photos are better, and the screens brighter and more detailed. However, look at the fine print, and the narrative quickly comes apart. Some gains are compared to the outgoing generation, some are against the competition, and sometimes you get no reference point at all.

The confusion doesn’t stop there. Let’s stop at just one of these metrics, the CPU speed. Claims of much better single and multi-core performance are great, and they are also the easiest to verify. The question remains though, do you really need these gains?

If you take them at face value, a 15% performance improvement sounds hard to pass on. That being said, ifyou translate it into your day-to-day, the numbers begin to lose any meaning. Your current phone can open an app in a heartbeat, or load a website in a fraction of a second. So, will doing that 15% quicker make any measurable difference? A 15% increase in speed was noticeable when loading a page took 10 seconds, not a few milliseconds.

You don’t have to go that fast

This cutting edge is not that useful

Smartphones’ current limitations are rarely caused by the lack of processing power. The biggest limiting factor is, essentially, the user. People don’t need more processing power because they use their smartphones mostly for calling, texting, browsing the internet or scrolling social media. Nothing that demanding really.

Sure, sometimes you find a game that, in order to look its best, can utilize your phone’s full power, but even these apps are optimized to use on a variety of different hardware. Developers want as many people to play their game as possible, so they cannot gatekeep that experience from everyone but the owners of the newest, fastest models.

So, if not for your common daily usage, what are these improvements for? Usually they go towards two things, picture and video processing and, lately, AI functions. And here, once again, the question arises, are these really worth buying a new phone for?

Cool features. Too bad I’ll never use them

Do you need what you’re getting?

Let’s tackle the elephant in the room first. AI is, to put it lightly, a controversial subject. I’d argue no amount of money should convince anyone to use it in the first place. However, even if you choose to use it, you don’t need a dedicated CPU with specialized cores dedicated to the AI. There are plenty of cloud-based AI assistants that will work on your phone whether you have the newest NPU or not.

When it comes to image processing, the situation is a bit different. Higher resolutions, bitrates and detail require more power, and additional post-processing can strain even the fastest processors and graphics cards. Add to that the trendy AI-assisted functionalities, and you might really need all the processing power the fastest chips can offer.

Post-processing needs all the power it can get, but do you really need that post-processing? Take a look at photos taken with flagships from 5 years ago, and you’ll find they look great. What’s more, they often look more natural thanks to the lack of modern overprocessing, like sharpening or compositing.On the hardware side, wide-angle lenses or telephoto zoom lenses have been present in phones for years, so switching to a new device rarely adds any game-changing improvements as well. The additional megapixels also sound cool, but at some point the gains stop being distinguishable without using a microscope.

In the end, most of the new features that phones introduce every year are, essentially, fluff trying to convince you to buy something you don’t need. You get a new phone, check out the new stuff once or twice, and forget about it. The core functionality has been there for years. I don’t mean simply calling, but things such as great cameras, 4K recording, speedy performance, awesome LED screens and other modern necessities have been there for years.

There comes a time to retire

Upgrade when you need it, not when you’re told you need it

For the last 5 years, I’ve been using a phone from 2021. Finally, after 5 years, I had to switch. You’d think 5 years is a decent time to own a phone, but I could easily go longer. The performance was still good, the camera was still excellent, and overall it did everything I wanted it to do well enough. I had to switch only because it fell out of my pocket and the screen completely shattered.

So, a 5-year-old phone is quick enough to handle every daily use you throw at it. If that’s the case, should you ever switch? Well, there are some signs that are generally considered good times for upgrading.

• The applications you need are no longer supported or available on your device
• Your phone doesn’t receive security updates anymore
• You’re lacking necessary everyday features
• The battery is barely holding on to the charge
• You’re feeling hardware limitations