The Best Smartphone May Be the One You Already Own (Premium)

After evaluating several new smartphones this season, I've elected to stick with my existing handset. And while my reasons for doing so are my own, I'm not alone: People are holding on to their existing smartphones for longer than before, triggering a sales collapse that extends across the industry.

Meaning, this isn't just about Apple, though we seem collectively obsessed by any bad news about the consumer electronics giant. But as the market leader, Apple is correctly seen as the bellwether for the rest of the smartphone industry. And in this case, the industry is absolutely following Apple in a downward trajectory.

Consider Samsung, which sells even more smartphones than Apple: It's been warning about soft sales all year, and its most recent flagships---like those of Apple---have been met with a distinct lack of excitement.

Unlike Apple, however, Samsung has been very upfront about the issues it faces. Samsung president Dong Jin Koh even went so far as to discuss these problems publicly during the firm's Note 9 announcement back in August.

"You inspire us to push through barriers to make the Note better every year," he said, gesturing to the on-location and virtual audiences of Samsung's users. "It's not easy every year, frankly speaking."

Apple's admissions about this same problem are made more subtly. It finally developed a version of iOS---to cheers, no less---that doesn't make older iPhones run slower, a strategy it employed in the past to trigger hardware upgrades each year. Apple didn't do this out of altruism. It did this because the market demanded it: Its customers, like all smartphone users, are holding on to their existing handsets for longer periods of time. And if their experience degraded over time, as it had in the past, many of those customers would jump ship to Android.

Many will blame higher prices, but I don't feel this is the key factor, or trigger, for the changing buy habits: Instead, higher prices are a reaction to the situation. But higher prices have absolutely exacerbated the problem, and reinforce the decisions that consumers were already making. They just don't need to upgrade.

No, smartphone sales are slowing or even falling for three other reasons.

First, the market is saturated. If you think about the iPhone growth curve, you'll see that Apple was able to expand beyond a single carrier, and then beyond a single country, and then to emerging markets. China and India came---and, some argue, went---offering gigantic bumps. But those opportunities are gone. The "next billion," as the industry fantasizes about endlessly, isn't a single country anymore, but rather a dispersed group of people, spread across the planet, in remote and isolated areas. They'll come online eventually. But not in a huge wave.

Second, smartphones are more reliable than ever. As we see with the PC, smartphones never really stop working, and even a years-old Android handset or iPhone can run all the apps any use...