You don't have to have a memory that goes back that far to remember when most of us were buying new phones every couple of years or so. That hasn't been the case for a while, and it's not just phones. What's changed, and what are manufacturers doing to try and get us to splash the cash now?
One obvious reason people may not be replacing their devices as often as they did is a purely financial one. They may have less money to devote to "nice-to-haves". This will certainly account for some of the shift here, but definitely not all of it.
Revolution becomes evolution
When smartphones, smart TVs, smart speakers and other similar devices first hit the market, the benefits of them were so obvious that huge numbers of people were immediately sold on the idea. However, given the technology was in its infancy in each example, it genuinely was the case that very rapid improvements were being made, so if you replaced these things a couple of years later, they were leaps and bounds ahead of what you had before.
However, this can't last forever. As the years roll by, progress becomes much more evolutionary than revolutionary, and in the case of the devices above, the incremental annual updates are increasingly hard to differentiate from last year's model.
This leaves the respective marketing teams with a problem. How do they convince people that it's worth shelling out again for what's basically the same as what they already have? They were successful in this mission for a bit, but people can only be fooled so many times. Promise them the world and give them a new phone that would be hard to tell apart from their old one if it had a new battery in it enough times, and they'll stop believing you.
This, in turn, creates a big conundrum for the manufacturers. It would be fine if they could just forget about the thing they sold you as soon as you've bought it, but people expect these devices to be updated to support the latest services and receive security patches for many years. This means paying developers to write code for things that haven't been on the shelves for years, so they coudn't be making any new profit from them even they wanted to. Where is that line where a company can say "Sorry - we've supported that for long enough. You need to buy a new one now"?
Microsoft currently find themselves in this situation with the shift to Windows 11. Some of those still on Windows 10 are wondering, with some merit, why they should spend money on a new system that isn't a whole lot different from what they're already using. Microsoft, on the other hand, will be thinking "We haven't had a penny from you for that operating system for 10 years or so. We can't keep maintaining it forever". Microsoft is far from the only company with this problem, and are in fact one of the more generous with their support of older versions. Pick any technology company you like and you'll find customers somewhere between grumbling and furious about their devices becoming obsolete.
Let's do the obligatory AI bit
Anyone that has paid even the smallest amount of attention to the world of tech devices the past couple of years or so can't fail to have noticed the latest push to get you to buy the latest shiny thing because you feel you want to rather than because you grudgingly have to - AI.
Everything comes with AI now. No matter what device type, the marketing team will find some way to shoehorn a reference to AI in there. Sometimes this will be a genuinely new feature. Sometimes it will be something it already did that they're just calling AI now. The beauty of "AI" is it's so all encompassing that for most people, you can get away with it as a synonym for "It does something clever" regardless of what the actual technical details of that feature are.
Will AI revolutionise all these devices? Eventually, yes. Is that happening yet? Probably not. There's certainly a few clever tricks it can do right now, but not much that you couldn't live without. The danger in pushing this revolution too early is that people will dismiss it as more hot air when it genuinely does come. For now though, it's probably still safe to continue the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra. Although I did just see this really good deal in the sales...