Hi William! You make great point! I guess saying “we” is a pretty gross oversimplification when it’s actually “some of us buy every year but most of use buy phones around every two years or so”. I myself still have an iPhone 5S and it still works pretty well excluding the battery life, but they have already offered cheaper battery replacements if I’m not mistaken. I’m not really sure if my 5S is eligible though.

Also some sources says phone replacement rate are slowing so I guess that’s somehow a good thing that we are indirectly telling manufacturers to come up with some other game-changing features to get us buying again.

But back to your point, you are correct. Not everyone replaces theirs annually and absolutely no one has to. If they buy a new one, that’s cool, if not, also cool.