Smartphones are, by far, the most overrated and needlessly fetishized tech mankind has ever produced. It in baffles me why people need the "new" version some months after the last version was released. I mean, is the new iPhone version whatever really going to do snapchat, instagram, and facebook (which is where your typical smartphone addict spends most their time) better than the last iPhone version?
As Mono said, tech doesn't move that fast anymore. You can still speedily surf the net with an eMachine running XP on Pentium 4 from 2005. There's no reason an iPhone or Galaxy from like 2013 (looking up specs) with a dual core at 1.3 GHZ and a 1GB of ram shouldn't do anything and everything outside of demanding CAD work, gaming and streaming 4K content (which makes no sense to do on a phone in all cases). Do people really need that animated emoticon that badly or something?
Samsung is guilty of this planned obsolescence , as well. I still have a Galaxy 5, and it slows down after every update and sees a reduction in battery life. And since these pieces of are basically walled gardens, you really can't do much to "tweak" it in order to run faster. Factory resets don't work nearly as well as a fresh install of an OS on a computer, for example. Can't upgrade any components, overclock anything, etc, etc. You're just forced to buy a new one when the supposed old one is "obsolete." And I refuse to do that, since the kind of applications smartphones are actually good for (re: not gaming, video watching, music playing) can be handled by a toaster.