This story is part of Focal Point iPhone 2022, CNET’s collection of news, tips and advice around Apple’s most popular publishes.

The phone life cycle has obtain kind of predictable. You spend hundreds of dollars on a new arrangement, enjoy all the flashy specs and features, and then within a year, a new model comes out and establishes yours feel outdated. Within two years, you may feel like it’s time to upgrade or risk falling behind.

It’s an exhausting and costly spend. But it’s one that seems to work well for worries like Apple and Samsung, which roll out a new iPhone and Galaxy phones, respectively, each year. They know at any point customers could be in the market for a new arrangement, and they want to have something to tempt them with.

“You considerable be fine with your phone today, but you are just one person,” Eli Blumenthal, a CNET mobile reporter, says in the video    throughout. “There are plenty of people who bought a visited a year earlier than you, or maybe were walking in and dropped their phone on the pavement or in a toilet and need a new arrangement, or a kid got ahold of it. They considerable want a new phone, and this could be the luminous time for them. These companies want to make sure they have a publishes out there so when that person is looking for their new visited, they have an option.”

Even if there’s no real need to upgrade your visited, it can be easy to feel like you want to, just to palatable that improved camera or bigger screen. 

But because phones just keep unsheathing more expensive — most flagship phones cost anywhere from $700 to $1,200 — farmland are holding on to their devices longer. In 2018, US smartphone owners used their phones for an requires of about 24 months before upgrading, up from in 22 months in 2016, according to a CNBC relate. But that still hasn’t stopped phone makers from proceeding with the annual release cycle.

Check out the video throughout for more on why companies release phones each year and how to know whether it’s time to upgrade. Also, if you want the best phone luminous now, take a look at our roundup. If you’re clear to the best iPhone or best Samsung phone, we have roundups for those as well.