Unless your phone is severely underperforming, you can sit out one, even two upgrade cycles

In the next few days we’ll be bombarded with a bunch of new phones from the likes of our favorite manufacturers. ASUS will be releasing their ZenFone 4 series of phones in the Philippines on August 19, Samsung will be announcing their Galaxy Note 8 on August 23, and LG will be unveiling their V30 during IFA, not to mention HMD Oy and the newest Nokia flagship phone.

In the midst of all of these announcements, many of you are already thinking of upgrading your daily driver for the newest, shiniest thing that’s on the horizon. But the big question is should you? Should you sell your current phone and spring for the next flagships that are slated to come out in the next few days?

Short answer is, not really.

Read: People take their time in upgrading their smartphones–here’s why

That’s a weird thing to say coming from someone that reviews phones and gadgets for a living, but hear me out. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that unless you are still using a featurephone, a smartphone that’s severely underperforming or just hella old and has the scars to prove it, you don’t need to upgrade to the latest and greatest tech.

As processors and hardware become better and better, the performance gaps between top-tier models have been closing, fast. If you have last year’s flagship and want to upgrade to the latest and greatest, you might want to hold off a little bit more. Processors are so fast nowadays that barring using benchmark tests as basis for speed, you won’t notice the difference when using a phone as a daily driver that has a Snapdragon 820 (or 821) compared to a phone that’s using a Snapdragon 835.

If you bought a phone in the past year or so, you might want to think about sitting this upgrade cycle out. Technology nowadays is iterative, meaning that there’s only small leaps in technology and features as each year passes. Processor speed, camera performance, battery life, etc. – there hasn’t been a huge amount of technological leap in any of these that necessitates a yearly smartphone purchase. Your Samsung Galaxy S7, LG G5 or even your Huawei P9 are still great phones – you don’t need to replace them yet.

So take a long hard look at your finances and current phone if you think you need to upgrade. Chances are, you don’t.