Should we be celebrating this, or even talking about it as if it's remotely sensible? Even putting aside that mobile software is designed to undermine your personal interests, getting a laptop that's good for a decade (or more) and then churning your phone less often is likely a win on straight device cost.
Who defines sensible? For most people, a phone is a far more sensible purchase than a laptop. How many sub-$500 laptops have cellular modems? How many sub-$200? How much of the technology that people realistically use day-to-day requires a laptop?
I’d even question your premise that phones churn more frequently than laptops, especially at the budget end.
The point of my comment was to talk about what is sensible?
Your comment just seems needlessly dichotomous. I'm talking about having multiple devices, such that you aren't beholden to any single one. Nobody "requires" a laptop, just like nobody actually "requires" a phone. But if you're using up all your buy-stuff-online time looking through a tiny screen and tapping out search terms like Morse code, rather than being able to comfortably compare skus/stores far and wide, it's likely that you're drastically overpaying. I'm willing to believe this is a trap many people fall into (eg why else is Amazon always pushing Subscribe and "Save"), but we shouldn't be normalizing it as if it's effective rather than pathological and extractionary (cf Vimes's Boots).
And sure, the same trash-treadmill dynamic exists in the low end new laptop market with poor hardware and poor software (eg MSWin also pushes an upgrade treadmill). But this is kind of a weird Schrödinger's argument in a thread about a phone that costs $1,000 - someone who doesn't have enough resources to buy anything beyond a phone, yet also spends an outsized amount to have the latest flagship. My larger point still stands about the longevity of good product choices, but they require research and actualization - once again, the kind better done from a laptop or desktop rather than a pocket porthole.
More and more of societal services “require” a smartphone. I went to a baseball game where it seemed like it was required to install their ticket app (might have been an offline workflow available).
For someone with a limited budget, a phone seems wildly more valuable than a laptop.
