Nokia, Microsoft put on brave face as Lumia 925s parachute into Blighty

Re: @Kristian Walsh

Well, I started by knowing what the fuck "working life" actually means, if you'll pardon my French. Working life is how long the device is expected to remain fit for purpose. It has nothing to do with how many owners it goes through, or how often you personally toss your current phone and get a new one.

The first principle is that if other headline specifications are kept equal, a device's Mean Time Between Failures will be proportional to its component cost. Longer-lasting components cost more: always have, always will. In other words, the more expensive devices don't wear out as quickly.

Second, cheaper devices have lower headline specifications. Lower specifications within a product family mean that it will run out of support updates sooner than a device with more storage, faster CPU, more RAM, etc. Again, the more expensive device lasts longer, in that they remain able to do more of what the latest devices can.

This has nothing to do with how long you personally keep the device, but for how long the device remains usable to somebody. (I was also referring to using it for applications, because any smartphone is still usable as a phone/email/calendar long after it can't run new apps.)

The fact that you can sell a top-end smartphone on eBay three years after launch implies that someone is willing to buy it, and then use it. So that's your three years of use, plus another one or two from the next owner. That's what I mean by a longer working life.

It's a lot harder to sell a low-end device for the same kind of percentage return, which implies that there are fewer buyers for it, even at the lower absolute price, and the primary reason for this is that the device would be of less use to them.