This year I'm doing the unthinkable (for me) – keeping my old iPhone again

The annual deliberation is coming, slowly but surely, into view. The industry scuttlebutt is that Apple will almost certainly soon announce its annual iPhone event sometime in early September, as it does every year, and we'll finally get to see the iPhone 17 family – but I'm trying to set my expectations.

To be clear, I don't mean that I'm trying to figure out exactly what to expect from the launch in terms of details and upgrades. There are countless writers out there doing just that, and you can learn anything you want from the past year of leaks about the phones (not least the much-anticipated iPhone 17 Air).

Rather, I mean that I'm mentally preparing myself to resist the urge to hit that pre-order button when it goes live on the Apple Store. I'm now in my second year using an iPhone 15 Pro, and there's just no solid reason to change it that I've yet been confronted by.

I'm expecting the iPhone 17 Air to wow me with a stunning design and unbelievable thinness, but when I held the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, I didn't instantly think I needed to have its level of slimness in my pocket. I use my phone for very practical reasons, and these devices are hugely expensive to upgrade, after all.

I also have absolutely no complaints about the 15 Pro's power – it never feels laggy or unresponsive, and I don't really game on it. That means I don't even push up against the limits of what it can do, to be honest.

The cameras, meanwhile, don't feel like they lag behind the competition even after nearly two years, and I'm never really displeased with the quick snaps I get from the phone. By comparison with my Fujifilm X100V, of course, they're pretty prosaic regardless.

In fact, there's just a single solitary reason why I'd consider getting a new phone right now – the battery life. It's not terrible by any means, but I've noticed things getting worse over the last six months, and my phone now says it has about 90% of its original capacity. Perhaps I'm just becoming hypersensitive, but it feels like less than that in real-time use.

That's the main bugbear I've got, and while I know that it's going to get under my skin in the next year or more, I can't pretend it's a good enough reason to spend a huge chunk of change on a replacement or upgrade. In fact, if I've really got my wits about me, I'll keep ploughing on until my battery capacity gets closer to 80% of its original charge, then pay for a battery replacement to basically go back to a like-new experience for a few more years.

Whether I can stick to that ambition isn't clear to me yet, though. At least by writing this piece, I've said it publicly; if I rock up with an iPhone 17 Pro in opinion pieces later this year, I'll be willing to hold myself to account.