Comment by 0x457
6 hours ago
Well, lets do math:
- from this thread: iPhone 17 pro max would be $1199 to buy (~1273 with tax) or $34.99 for 24 months totaling $839.76. So would cost 433.33 at the end of the lease to keep it
If you upgrade your phone every 1-2 years then what you pay for the phone is something like "full cost - optimistic trade-in value". I see no reason not to do if you know you going to upgrade.
I don't understand this mindset. I get that people who are going to upgrade to the latest flagship phone every 18-24 months will probably do better with this, but realistically... those people are fucking insanely financially irresponsible (and if you can afford it - no shade, I guess, its your money - lord knows I burn lots of cash on hobby projects of my own, although I tend to buy things that are actually projects, and not just glitz...)
But there's just nothing to run on phones built in the last 5+ years that actually puts the hardware through its paces (in the phone form factor, laptops and desktops I'd be lot more forgiving on). The cameras aren't really getting better. The battery capacities seem to be mostly "the same". There's just no practical "reason" to justify the expense at this point (and I'll fully acknowledge this wasn't always the case - there was a period there in the early 2010s where phones were getting better rapidly and upgrading was a big deal).
They're basically buying an expensive piece of jewelry that they'll throw away in 24 months. Like... just buy a cheaper model and get some real jewelry. At least that could be passed down at some point instead of becoming e-waste.
> I get that people who are going to upgrade to the latest flagship phone every 18-24 months will probably do better with this, but realistically... those people are fucking insanely financially irresponsible
This is not remotely true. I buy each and every flagship iPhone every year on or near release day for cash. I have done so every release since the first iPhone came out.
Each September or October my old phone goes into a desk drawer forever, or is wiped and gifted to a partner or close friend. I do not recover any of the costs at the end of the 12 months.
In total, it is way less than $200 per month. That’s not “fucking insanely financially irresponsible” by any stretch of the imagination. $2k per year is a trivial amount of money for the most-often-used computer in my entire life. It pays for itself in the first few weeks of the year.
Separately, I spend another 10-20k per year on computer software and services, because it assists my business in making many times that in revenue. Hell, even my hobby AWS S3 account is like $35/mo and that’s like the same as the lease payment for the flagship iPhone Pro under this program.
Upgrading each year brings real performance benefits, despite your claim that phones don’t materially improve each generation. Whether or not that is worth replacing it before it breaks or not is a separate conversation, but let’s not pretend that upgrading annually is exactly equivalent to lighting $2k on fire. Anyone who participates regularly in US “bar culture”, for example, is spending more each month on drinks than I spend to carry the latest flagship iPhone, and nobody is claiming that eating out three times a month or going to the bar with your buddies every Friday night is “fucking insanely financially irresponsible”. Tech is so cheap now that it’s a trivial amount of money in the grand scheme of things.
(You’ll probably flip when you hear I replace my $7k work laptop every 12-24 months, too.)
Furthermore, I’m not even an extreme outlier. I know people who regularly buy the flagship iPhone for their entire family, in cash, every year. It’s a bit spendy if you’re not using it for business (but who isn’t, in 2026, where every single thing you do is an app) but it’s still simply not that much money in real terms when you consider it’s well under $2k/year/device. Hell, a nice lunch for two people at a decent restaurant even without alcohol is pushing $100 in most cities.
Yeah I'm on the same page - I spend a couple hundred bucks on a low-end-of-midrange android phone every few years (usually because I broke the old one by doing something stupid like walking into the ocean with it in my pocket). I can't fathom why I would want to spend 5-10x on a flagship to do... what exactly?
My current phone (Motorola g34) runs all the games fine, and that's probably the heaviest thing people use phones for. I do take photos, but like I'm not running a photography business, and social media compresses them to shit anyway so the quality is perfectly fine.
So how much annually do you spend on your hobbies, anyways, if you're going to declare getting a new phone every two years "fucking insanely financially irresponsible" :p Glass houses and all that, right?
People spend more on their daily coffee than they would upgrading their phone every two years. Significantly more.
I mean... what kind of hobby is owning the latest phone? Especially when the latest phone is barely an upgrade over the previous one.
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LLMs are set to.increase hardware demands a lot. Although I don't necessarily think this is related to the program change.
I know this comment is deep in a thread, but to me it looks like they simply prefer to own the whole apple device payment cycle and not use partners.
BNPL has been a huge bubble outside the traditional credit bubble, this is the same. It doesn't seem like a big divergence excepting that it gives them a contact point and a stick with which to prod customer into a new phone sooner.
For me, the primary value of my phone is the camera, and the telephoto on the iPhone Pro Max models has gotten significantly better in the 2.5 years since mine was released.
Were it not for the camera, I could have stopped upgrading 10 years ago.
My point is, not everyone values the same things you do. The new Siri AI only runs on 15 Pro and higher, I think. New features do arrive in newer phones.
iPhone 17 Pro is binoculars and also eliminated 16 Pro battery anxiety.
Value in being part of the discussion for a whole year every year too. You realllly have to care about stuff like these factors though (or hate investing your money or have too much).
This is exactly where I’m at. Want a higher zoom. I’m about three years old now and feeling it.
Mine is about three years old now and I want a better camera.
This math is what lead me to the iUp program in the first place. It's effectively a guaranteed 50% trade-in, which came out to about $200-300 in actual money that I was theoretically sacrificing in exchange for not having to worry about the cosmetic condition of the phone or weirdos on ebay.
And it came with AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss. I stopped using a case. I lived free.
I’ll never stop using a case. Too clumsy, too careless. 2-3 days without my phone would be manageable but why?
My screen is cracked, and I still prefer it over a case. Just a personal preference, I think.
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