So there’s a new iPhone about to launch.
It’s not that different from the one I’ve already got (iPhone 14 Pro Max).
The camera is slightly better.
There’s a different finish (Titanium).
Oh, finally I don’t need to carry a lightning and a USB-C cable (for the S22 and the iPad). If you squint really hard, you might be able to pretend this is an upgrade.
What else?
Oh, you can make photos that will work on the $3k+ Vision Plus device. That’s pretty nifty.
There’s also the latest version of iOS coming – which gives some more features – that, again, if you squint, will feel special. Even though we’re already getting them with our existing iPhones.
Yeah.
Not too impressive, is it?
But I’ll upgrade. I like having the latest.
What’s the cost of the latest?
Well let’s assume I can get about 700 GBP for my old iPhone. In fact, let’s reduce that to 600, just to be safe.
The new iPhone 15 Pro Max (along to the right and down) is at least £1,200 GBP.
So the true cost is approximately 600 GBP per year, to always have the latest – because I’m already in the ecosystem. I’ve already sunk the other 600 GBP. So it’s effectively a 50 GBP per month cost to play the Apple game year-on-year.
I think that’s ok.
I get a lot of value from the device.
If you assume there are 4 weeks in a month, and 7 days per week, that’s a cost of £1.78 per day.
If you assume I get about 5 hours use of the phone per day, that’s a cost per hour of about £0.36.
It would be inordinately cheaper to use a generic £150 Android device. I could buy myself a new £150 Android device every quarter for the same money.
But it’s not the same, not to me anyway.
I am aiming to buy on Very.co.uk. I do love the UK “buy now pay whenever” service from Very. They sell a lot of Apple equipment in the UK because they offer very flexible “take 3” (split payments into 3 lumps) or 12-month interest-free terms.
Miss a payment or miss the repayment date and things get expensive, fast. So I avoid that. They have excellent logistics too.
The one thing Very doesn’t have right now is an iPhone 15 Pro Max – anywhere. They’re not even ‘in stock’ yet. I trust they will be, soon, Very. Don’t let me down. I don’t want to have to use someone else!
Good luck on your annual iPhone purchase….