At his Bear blog, Herman Martinus wrote about being forced to upgrade his seven year old iPhone to the latest one. He felt the switching cost was unnecessary and expensive for basically the same Apple phone despite the huge jump. I had similar feelings when I recently looked to upgrade my four year old iPhone 12 mini.
All iPhones are basically the same; they do all the Apple things. Apps for web surfing, messaging, and taking pictures are covered. Oh, phone calls work too. What else do you really need?
In Herman’s case, going from an iPhone 8 to an iPhone 16 didn’t seem to him a big improvement. I used an 8 Plus for three solid years and can say it was a great smartphone. Going from that to the 11 offered few, but nice, upgrades to me…
Yet when recently shopping to replace my too-small battery-weak 12 mini, I was bewildered by the lack of value in newer models for what their price tags asked — and that was for refurbished iPhones. With a budget of around $400, I could hardly upgrade at all! Between a 12 Pro and a 13 regular, I got the former for the extra camera, memory, and LiDAR. I mainly needed a bigger display and longer battery life.
Had my budget been $1000, I could have bought a new iPhone with more bells and whistles, making it seem like a better upgrade. But in the end, the core functionality would be the same, so it wouldn’t really be worth the cost.
I get where Herman is coming from. It’s hard to justify a new iPhone purchase when older models do the same core tasks. In his case, he had replaced his iPhone 8 battery to give it more life. Technically, his phone’s hardware was in perfect working order, but Apple chose to no longer support it with software updates, which made it obsolete. But hey, Apple is happy to offer you a newer model so it can sell more hardware — it’s just business.
This is basically why, after being all-in with Apple for four years, I switched to Google and Android. My family shocked me on my birthday with a Moto Razr 2024 that was new and on sale for $450 — within my stretch budget by the way. And it had all the bells and whistles (I blogged about here) of newer iPhones that I wasn’t willing to pay for. Plus, the Razr came in my favorite color and is a flip with a full cover display, making it like two phones in one. Talk about great value.
What’s more, there are many budget and mid-range Android phones that pack great features for less money compared to iPhones. Both Google and Samsung offer nice choices.
But if you must stick with an iPhone, I wonder why not choose the iPhone SE 3? Apple currently sells it new for $429 and it does all the Apple things and all the smartphone tasks most people need. And in Herman’s case, he could have stuck with Touch ID, which he seemed to prefer, since the SE 3 is the same design as the iPhone 8. But he wanted a phone that would last another six to seven years; the SE 3 has a five three year old CPU in it and looks to be replaced next year with the SE 4.
Good phones became cheap, and cheap phones became good or good enough. The smartphone is a mature product — even some budget models are quite capable and impressive given their price point. Check out the Samsung Galaxy A series or a Moto G series in the $250 price range. You might be surprised.
Update: Corrected SE 3 CPU age from five to three years old.
No comments:
Post a Comment