According to a new report, Google’s 2025 lineup of Pixel phones unsurprisingly includes five new devices in line with this year’s batch.
According to a new report, Google’s 2025 lineup of Pixel phones unsurprisingly includes five new devices in line with this year’s batch.
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If you’re upgrading your phone every year, that is a personal choice. Plus, most people who do that trade-in/sell their old phone which gets used by someone else.
Trade ins and selling old phones doesn’t really reduce e-waste. What reduces e-waste is manufacturing less phones.
That’s empirically untrue. If people are selling their used phones and not keeping more than one phone (which definitely happens, but is unrelated to this point), then the exact same number of phones would be produced as if everyone bought new and only put them in e-waste when they were broken/obsolete.
Are you stupid? Let’s say we have 1000 people and they all want the latest phone, all manufactured phones get bought and everyone sells their old phones. And phones don’t break.
Scenario 1: Every year 200 new phones get released.
Scenario 2: 100 phones get released (to better stimulate the real world because someone is going release a phone anyway, but you can also imagine 200 phones releasing every 2 years as the numbers will the same for every even year).
It literally cannot be empirically untrue because what I said is mathematically true. Let’s say that in both scenario 1 and scenario 2 at the end of year 50 they decide to throw away all phones and never create another phone again. In scenario 1 there would be 10 000 e-waste phones. In scenario 2 there would be 5000 e-waste phones. The more you create the more waste will come down the line. If you want less waste, make less phones.
And before you go “but recycling?” only about 20% of e-waste gets recycled and the recycling process doesn’t recycle all the waste.
It’s like people really think “reduce reuse recycle” is LITERALLY ALL IT’S GONNA TAKE. 1 year upgrade cycles are just as bad as fast fashion for how quickly they produce GARBAGE.
Why would you make your scenario supply constrained? Your argument is simply if we sold less phones, less would go to e-waste, and duh. That wasn’t debate, it was whether releasing new phones every year was wasteful vs new phones being released every 2-3 years.
Your scenario also assuming people buy used or they just don’t have a phone. People who buy a used phone generally do so instead of buying a new phone.
Since you’re so incapable of thinking for yourself I’ll go through it again with everything you mentioned. Same prerequisite except now everyone has a phone and excess phones turn instantly to waste, or do you need a point by point explanation on how excess supply turns into waste?
Scenario 1: Every year 1000 new phones get released.
Scenario 2: Every 3 years 1000 new phones get released.
As you can see. Even with supply meets the demand exactly you generate waste if you release a new phone every year. If the supply exceeds the demand it generated waste. I don’t see how it could be made any clearer beyond also going over your comment point by point.
Because how do you create a secondary market that would buy used phones? I could’ve gone with “people are poor” but that is much harder to put into an example. The supply constraint itself doesn’t matter, but I did my best with the new example.
Nope. My argument was that if we made less phones less would go to e-waste. That also covers unsold phones that go straight into waste as evident from my new example.
If you release a new phone every year you manufacture more phones. I guess technically you can manufacture the same amount of the same model for 2-3 years as you would manufacture yearly new phone. But that makes no sense from an enterprising point of view because you reach market saturation and the phones simply don’t get sold, you’re just manufacturing a loss for the company. Even if you manufacture the same model yearly you’re still going to manufacture them less (due to demand dropping) than if you made a new model every year.
If you paid attention you would’ve noticed that in both previous scenarios 800-900 people bought used phones and only 100-200 people bought brand new phones. I did that deliberately because you argued that reselling the phone has an effect when it really doesn’t. At the end of the line the person who bought the last used phone throws their current phone away because you can’t sell that to anyone. Which means as long as phone is manufactured regardless of whether it gets sold or not or resold or not, eventually it will go in the bin as e-waste. The best way to reduce waste is to not produce excessively like we’re doing right now.
I don’t know why you are soo hostile. Are you okay?
Your new scenario is still supply constrained. No one gets a new phone for 2 out of 3 years.
How about you make an example where supply actually matters.
Yeah but new phones that go unpurchased don’t just magically get unmanufactured. I ONLY buy used phones, but that has literally no impact on the garbage production that comes from companies releasing a new model literally every year.
The sheer number of old phones that are still new-in-box on the secondhand market should be enough to exemplify that fact. We are WAY overproducing tech, and the “model a year” framework is throwing fuel on that particular fire.
Those aren’t unpurchased new phones though. As you point out, they’re discontinued, discounted and sold.
I was only trying to refute that, “Trade ins and selling old phones doesn’t really reduce e-waste.” I’m the same as you, buying used phones, and if I didn’t have that option I would be buying new phones instead.
yeah, reckon we’ve both been getting a bit semantic lol
i can’t speak for the original person, but my whole thing is regardless of consumer practices, manufacturerers are gonna keep making more and more phones every year, and they’re already making too many. those NIB phones on ebay were purchased, but not to be used. until they get sold, they’re just closer and closer to trash every day.
trade ins and buying/selling used DOES make a difference, it’s just hard not to think it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the massive amounts of electronics that end up getting discontinued, discounted, and sold to resellers hahaha
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I completely agree with your comment. I was only responding to the claim, “Trade ins and selling old phones doesn’t really reduce e-waste.”