I am asking out of curiosity and nothing else: what use cases do you have that motivate you to get a new phone every year? Do iPhones get notably better with every release? I'm guessing camera or storage would be big ones?
Well, with this last one they finally made the telephoto 48MP. Also, vapor chamber is nice. I don't know if the 18 will have enough for me to upgrade, and it might even have a reason for me not to upgrade (removing gestures from Camera Control). But so far it's been every year, because I've only been using iPhone for a couple years, and my first was a refurbished 15 Pro Max.
The 17 Pro (non-Max) only comes with up to 1TB of storage, but that's still more than my 15 of before.
I'm not parent but a counter perspective - the only three motivations I have are:
phone dies
camera vastly improves (imo it's been on a decline since the Nexus 6)
phone is too slow to use
I'm on year 5 of my Samsung s21u that I can replace the Samsung ux slop with asop ports
It is not for anyone but Apple, because they control the source code and full remote code execution access to your device at a higher privilege level than you as the supposed owner have.
Including custom ROM devs like the GrapheneOS team or the LineageOS team? That's a lot of trust you're putting in a company that only has their own profit at heart.
So you believe dictatorships are a good idea when it comes to technology control.
My question is then the same of anyone who prefer to give up freedoms to centralized seemingly benevolent dictators: What happens when you are told you can no longer do something you were previously allowed to do, that is only in the interest of the centralized power?
The linux ecosystem is a peaceful and effective system of anarchy with no central authority. Pretty much the exact opposite of the Apple dictatorship.
I am a Linux distro maintainer and my team and I do whatever we think is best in our distro, even including patches and defaults Torvalds did not approve of, because our goal is security first and his is compatibility first. That is what we mean when we say "free" in free open source software. Torvalds can do whatever he wants in his branch, and we can do whatever we want in ours, selectively taking the bits we want.
Want to modify the operating system on your iPhone? Want to use Tor globally for privacy? Want to use an external NFC/USB smartcard for secret management or authentication? Want to use a browser with an engine other than last gen crippled webkit? Good luck. Apple did not extend those freedoms to you.
You have no freedom on that device but to install binaries Apple blesses and use it the way they intend. Apple does not produce free software or give their users freedom over their devices because they want maximum profit and control.
After Trump's re-election, I figured that there's not much difference between using a cheap Android from Chinese OEM, or an iPhone. Both will give away my information if the totalitarian government (Chinese or American) requests so. I don't really have particular preference on whether it's the Chinese or Americans spying on me, so in the end it all boils down to price. Chinese Android devices deliver same level of performance and features as Apple for 1/4 of the price.
Of course if I really cared about privacy, I would just install GrapheneOS or LineageOS on supported Android device, so no Apple in that case either.
