I'll go contrarian on this one: I have bought a new iPhone every single year since the first one. It was like $650 back in 2007, and for the last couple years it's been $1700. (I always buy the maxed out model, even though the cost of the extra storage is a ripoff. But I usually sell it or bequeath it to some family member when I upgrade, and a year later the extra storage always seems in retrospect like the right move...)

So that's a lot of money, and the cost is significant for most people, even us software engineer types.

But: nothing I have ever seen in my life (including computers, where my adult life has so far seen me go from a 16 MHz 68020 with 4MB of RAM to a 3 GHz 10-Core Intel Xeon W with 128GB of RAM) has improved anywhere close to as rapidly as the iPhone. I feel like smartphones are one of those under-appreciated ways that "life is getting better" that's hard to quantify, but more evenly distributed. Wages may be stagnating for some swaths of society, and fascism and apartheid may be resurgent, but smartphones are getting massively better for everybody.

I had an epiphany a few years back, when I glanced at the baby monitor and saw the nice old lady who helps us clean our house on Saturdays. I happened to notice that her iPhone was the same model as mine at the time, the iPhone 7 Plus — and that she was swiping through some child photos (presumably her grandchildren back in the Philippines).

Now, she works full-time, but has a side hustle doing weekend cleaning for families like ours, where both parents work and have young kids. We pay her the wage she asked for, which I think is roughly prevailing hourly wage for this kind of thing in our area, and probably isn't that much different — adjusted for inflation — than in 2010 or 2000 or 1980 or 1960.

But holy fucking shit, her iPhone is different! She can make unlimited free (FaceTime) video calls back home to her kids, or grandkids. She can get their latest photos, and see them on a big ultra-highres screen. She can point her camera at shit and see it translate (sloppily and drunkenly though it may seem)by the latest trained-model "AI" app from Google. Etc etc.

I myself also benefit from all those things. I am not even a heavy phone user — I mean I am, I use my phone dozens of times per day, but I prefer not to use it. Almost everything it can do, my big-screen(s) computer can do better, so I always use a computer if possible.

Even so: I use it to take a lot of photos/videos, and view those. I also read books, listen to audiobooks, read Twitter, or read this website. I don't use Slack on it, unless there is some important emergency or weird case at work (but then, I am glad I can). I view and edit notes, which might be shopping lists or E2E test notes or whatever. Oh and I use it to check my internal security cameras (which double as baby/child monitors).

Every single new generation of phone makes many of these things massively better.

So like... "waste of money"?? It's obviously subjective, but... to me buying a new car is a waste of money. Any new car. When my wife was pregnant with our third child, we bought a new Nissan X-Trail for like $25,000 and I was like Ugh what a waste of money this is like 15 years of the latest smartphone...

(Well I mean, I was like that in my mind... not being the one who was actually pregnant, I said something like, "Sure, let's do that!" :-P )

YMMV obviously — if you just want a phone to make calls and send texts, then sure. But if you actually use your smarphone a dozen or more times per day, I think there are a lot of things that many people spend money on (cars, clothes) that might better fit the "waste of money" label.