alt Hacker NewsPart of the point and usefulness is having a stable target for developers to aim at, that they can test performance on. Also, most phones these days are roughly equivalent from the end-user perspective to ones from 2 or 3 years ago, the only difference is increased waste. So... no, no thank you.
Does anyone want to buy a phone every few years? No, I don't think they do.
You don't have to buy it with each iteration, but at the same time if I'm buying one, I don't want to buy hardware that's many generations behind current one.
If I build a new PC myself - I don't have such problem. With laptops - it's a bit behind (usually one generation for AMD with their APUs approach). I don't think anyone complains that there is a choice.
And somehow above doesn't prevent games being released that can scale according to the hardware and aren't tied to a specific hardware generation target. So I don't really see why this has to dictate handhelds to have way slower refresh cycle.