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His comments on ewaste and mining are relevant but the rest is old man shouting at clouds.
We had smaller phones. Apple even tried to reintroduce them a few years ago. Very few buy them. They are still around if you look but no one wants the compromise. A larger screen uses a little bit more power but provides room for a much larger battery. People use their phone instead of a compact digital camera so are willing to put up with camera bumps.
I think the general criticism that new models fail to break ground like they used to, but have barely slowed down their release schedule or extended their support, is also a valid one.
But the author barely touches on that before getting distracted by "phones are too big," which they then come back to a further three times in unrelated paragraphs.
or extended their support
But support has massively increased in the last few years. A year or two of software updates used to standare, now Samsung and Google are doing 7 years (I'm not sure if apple has done an announcement but it looks like iOS 18 will run on the 6 year old iPhone XR)
That's fair, although I don't feel it's changed much for iPhone, past the first few models where the hardware improvements were most dramatic. 2011's iPhone 4S had five years of major updates supported. The 5S (2013) had six. The iPhone X (2017) is probably on its last major version at seven years. That's a slow improvement, which still deserves recognition I suppose.
Apple was way ahead of android manufacturers for ages, they've just caught up now. That's where the biggest changes are
Phones are essentially like cars now. Nothing new, just serves a purpose
That's kinda the exact opposite with EVs being more like early phones where every new one makes the old one look stupid.
They have greatly improved their support. New Samsung phones come with a 7 year update promise, while up until the Note 9 you got 2. Not to mention that a phone doesn't become useless the second it looses update support.
Also about the yearly hardware "updates". Thats exactly what they are. Slight updates. If anyone is still stupid enough to upgrade every year its on them really.
I'm a fan of manufacturers releasing yearly upgrades as a consumer. It means the old model always drops in price quickly.
Re: "Fail to break ground."
What do you want? Cpus are as fast as needed for phones and Moore's law is dead. Cameras are restricted by the physical limits of optics. Everyone is rightly making fun of ai being put in everything.
Tech plateaus. You can't break physics with money.
Pretty sure they said what they want in the second half of the sentence. Slow the product release cycle to match the pace of technological progress. Hard to imagine it happening in a market-driven world, but a slower release cycle would incentivize more affordable, longer supported products without having to change anything about physics
But as someone else said we got that with an increase of support from a low of 18 months for the 2011 Google Galaxy Nexus to 7 years with the current Google Pixel 8.
It would be worse if they made minor fixes to the screen, cpu and camera but kept calling it the Pixel 5. Consumers wouldn't know what they're getting. We had that nonsense with game consoles where you had to look at serial numbers to know if your Xbox had been fixed.
I think one of the biggest problems is how many different phones there are, like 1000s of different models, but they are all just variations of the same basic hardware. And we hardly recycle the stuff we produce that goes unused.