It’s not as if the hardware features on the 16 Pro are groundbreaking — a slightly nicer camera, a slightly nicer display, a slightly nicer battery life, and a $600 upgrade fee. No, thank you, the software features are what make-or-break the upgrade.
Phones nowadays are made to last years, even 6+ years easily. So the update this year is not for the people who bought it last year but for people with an iPhone X or 11. They will see major improvements. But it’s silly to update (any) flagship phone every year.
Okay, but then, why upgrade to a 16 Pro instead of the much cheaper 15 Pro? The price difference applies there too — there needs to be some reason to get the newest, most expensive one. This generation it is not hardware.
Well this applies to everything then. Why buy the latest AMD or Intel CPU or Nvidia GPU ?
Some people upgrade from iPhone X to 15 this year because it’s cheaper. Some have an old iPhone and just want the latest model to go for 6 or 7 more years.
Even incremental upgrades like this year are welcome. Before there was an S model every other year. This year it’s the « iPhone 15S pro ». Slightly better and more powerful. The other thing is, I think it’s pretty hard to say « well last year model was good enough, we’ll go on a 2 year cycle this time ». It could send the wrong message to investors so they’re trapped in the race maybe ?
Usually because there’s some advantage — you actually need/want the performance offered by Zen4 over Zen3, you need four-cycle AXV512, you have a target framerate in a game, you need RTX or CUDA14… because if you don’t, obviously buying older and used saves you money and you don’t need the new stuff anyway.
