Apple iPhone owners are hanging onto their phones for longer and longer, and aren't interested in this year's super-expensive upgrades, according to a survey of US iPhone owners conducted exclusively for PCMag.com.
Of the 650 iPhone owners surveyed, only 18 percent said they planned on upgrading this year. Sixty-one percent said they wouldn't pay more than $599 for a new iPhone, and 69 percent said they expect to hang onto their next phone for two years or longer.
But given that 37 percent of people say battery life is their chief complaint about existing iPhones, one of the top results in our iPhone testing might convince them to upgrade—the materially longer battery life we're seeing on the new iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max.
A New Phone Every Year? Not Anymore
While the tech press writes about iPhones like people get a new phone every year, that's just not the case. According to Statista, most people hang onto their phones for between two and three years. Statista sees that number going down in the future, possibly as the 5G transition brings radical new capabilities each year from 2020 to 2024.
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Those radical new capabilities aren't coming right now, though. This year's new phones are generally just bringing more cameras at a high price, and that may not be enough to coax $1,000 out of potential buyers' wallets.
That may change next year, if the rumors about the 2020 iPhones are true. Next year's phones are rumored to have a new design and to use 5G networks, which will be much more widespread by September 2020.
So there are probably a lot of people with older iPhones hanging onto them or picking up the lower-cost iPhone 8 and XR to save their pennies for a rumored blockbusting 2020 release. We'll have to see next year.