Steve Litchfield

We've been hearing about the phone world 'plateauing' for years. I've been the one proclaiming the concept, since about 2020 - and I'm absolutely right. But 'plateau' is perhaps not what you thought it was. After all, a true plateau is just that - flat, whereas the meaning in the phone world is subtly different. What is DOES mean is that the days of significant year on year advances in phone technology are long gone.  Any phone from 2020 will work just fine today, whether iOS or Android-based. Its performance will be 'fine', its camera putting out photos that are 'fine', its speakers and microphones 'fine', its battery life 'fine'. And so forth. Whereas once (pre-2015, say), there would be compelling reasons to trade your phone in after even less than a year, in order to get the shiny new model that was evidently better at something important, in 2025 there's almost no reason. In fact, we've reached the point where it...

The titular question is one we debate often on podcasts and the like. The most obvious answer is 'Yes', of course. Any smartphone made in the last five years will be waterproof, can run anything you care to throw at it, its screen will still be fine, the cameras eminently good enough for what most of us 'snap', and so on. So for uncle Joe and cousin Betty, and probably for you, the reader, tech plateaued some time ago. With the likes of the iPhone X onwards, the Pixel 5 onwards, the Samsung S10 onwards, even if some niche security updates have now stopped, they still run up to date apps and have updated middleware - they'll do the job for everyone. And with the tech from such flagships rippling down to mid-priced phones and even really budget options,  even examples from those worlds in the last few years are now perfectly useable and long-lived. (True, in most case, you'll need a case these days, but that's a given.) Making for a short blog post. But talk t...