Look at your phone; what do you see? You should probably see scratches and cracks like most teenagers’ phones. I dropped my phone last summer, and because of how karma worked out, I shattered the top and bottom corners, with a crack connecting the dots. I was faced with two options: either beg and cry for a replacement or stick it out. My last phone got corrupted and had to be replaced within the last year, so I’m stuck with the latter option. Sticking it out has opened my eyes, and I no longer am the consumer sheep that let’s those big companies make decisions for me. I realized that unless your phone is unusable, never buy a new one.

What companies like Apple won’t tell you is that you are a pawn. You are meant to keep feeding them money for “upgrades”, which in most cases prove to be superficial.

Your phone is as powerful as it will ever need to be. Even the weakest out of a group of modern cell phones is miles better than what you need to be productive. Can your phone run Google Docs? Pack it up boys, you’re good to go. While processor and computer upgrades are nice, what exactly do they let you do that you couldn’t do before? Let’s say I’m on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and it’s sinking. This is already a relatively bad situation for me. Let’s call this situation “the iPhone 7.” That water is doing a pretty good job; it’s drowning me, destroying anything I had with me, etc. Now put another tiny hole in that boat. Let’s call that hole “the iPhone 8.” Sure, I guess there’s technically more water than there was before. I have a counterpoint. I’m still going to drown. That hole didn’t speed up the rate at which my boat was sinking by any noticeable degree.

These phone upgrades always tout better screens. Who doesn’t love a nice clear picture to watch videos or browse the internet? So let’s pay $1000 just to raise the pixel count by a minuscule amount. And now, you could be paying for a lower resolution than the one you had. The iPhone XR was recently released, and it has a 1792 by 828 resolution. For comparison normal high definition (HD) is 1280 by 720, and within the last decade, most HD products have been increased to 1920 by 1080. So it’s already trailing behind most televisions and monitors you can buy for relatively cheap prices today, and if you had either the iPhone 8 Plus or an iPhone X before the XR, that’s a decrease in quality. The funny thing is, reviews have come out saying you can’t even notice the resolution drop during daily use. The even funnier thing is, I thought my normal iPhone 8 was 1080p before I started researching resolutions for this article. Most people cannot tell any difference between these resolutions when the phones are this small anyway, so why should you pay for a slightly better or sometimes slightly worse display?

Display doesn’t matter if you have no photos to look at anyway. Let’s see how the cameras stack up between the recent iPhones as well. Before I get into the nitty-gritty, let me say that if you have any interest in professional photography, you probably already own a professional camera. Camera phones are great for taking pictures on the go, but we still have a few years before they even get close to a professional camera. I know this because here on the Zephyr staff we’re not supposed to take photos with our phones; you need a professional camera. So buying a phone just for the camera doesn’t make sense yet. However, I’ll give these phone companies credit; these cameras get noticeably better with each iteration. The cameras process light better and produce higher quality photos. But why can I take 4K quality photos and videos on a device with an 828p display? I could plug them up to my computer, but my computer isn’t even 4K. And if I was trying to take professional quality photos, I would use a professional camera. It’s this weird feedback loop of confusion I don’t understand, and it gives me a migraine.

Obviously if your phone needs to be upgraded, no one is going to stop you. You are the only person to really know when it’s the right time to get a new phone. My point really boils down to the fact that technology has gotten so good, nothing matters anymore. It’s like pouring water into the ocean; you’re not accomplishing anything, and you look like an idiot. So for now, I’ll stick with my cracked iPhone 8.