iPhone Retirements Coming in at Slightly Younger Ages
iPhone Retirements Coming in at Slightly Younger Ages
An ongoing question among iPhone followers and analysts is, how long do iPhone owners keep their phones? That can’t be known for certain until some point in the future, so we focus on recent past experience to help predict that future. Periodically we update these figures and now can share the latest data through the December 2024 quarter.
Over the long-term, iPhone buyers have kept their phones for a longer time. Except for the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the holding period steadily increased since 2014, when CIRP began tracking this data.
In the most recent quarter, we saw a slight change to that trend. There were more iPhone buyers retiring “younger” phones compared to earlier quarters. Specifically, 36% of iPhone buyers in the twelve-months ending December 2024 reported having their previous phone for two years or less, compared to 31% in the twelve-months ending December 2023 (Chart 1).