I’ve been upgrading to each new iteration because if you sell your old one and it’s the last one, it generally pays for your upgrade and your phone is “free” or inexpensive. If you don’t, you’ll pay. (I HAD to get the last one, though - a dropped repaired phone just never had the same battery life for me and it was driving me bonkers. But normally, that’s why I do it.) So I’ll be ponying up.
I don’t even bother with all the Craigslist business - don’t want to have to set up public meetings and all - so I know I’m losing money but Gazelle pays $315 for average condition iphone 5s with 32GB, and I’m eligable for an upgrade with AT&T .
ETA - that might have been unclear - I meant that because of the price drops with new phone announcements the older models just don’t sell for very much, so for me it’s been cost effective to keep up with upgrades and sell my old phones.
If you buy a 16 GB 5C on contract, you pay $99. If you buy it outright, you pay $549. That means the phone company is paying $450 for you, or roughly $20 off your phone bill every month.
I don’t get the “exact same rate” part. You mean you can’t get those rates without a contract in the US?
Just on the last part? You’re worried that your fingerprint data is held in encrypted form on the phone. Have you held the screen of your phone up to the light any time recently?
As for the launch… well AAPL stock has done its customary crash, off 2% yesterday and another 5% today so far. So investors aren’t too impressed.
For me? Well, I had an iPhone 4 for two years then when the contract ran out last month I upgraded to a 5. I like the added speed and lighter weight, but I don’t like the bigger screen. Maybe I’ll get used to it, but the disadvantages (MUCH more difficult to type accurately, less comfortable to hold and operate one-handed) far outweigh the relatively minor advantage of being able to watch 16:9 video with no letterboxing. I really have no idea why anyone would want a bigger screen than even the 5. Buy an iPad, people! I want to be able to use my phone one-handed. (No, not like that.)
Plus I preferred the 4’s glass-backed design. When I sold my 4, which was kept in a case, it was flawless after two years. Not a mark on it, apart from a tiny scratch on the mute switch.
After four weeks, in a case, the 5 already has lots of tiny pits in both the aluminium and the glass on the back. Partly I think due to the design of the case (a Griffin clear-backed one which let dirt in the back, and has since been ditched), but also just much less durable materials.
In two years’ time maybe I’ll upgrade to the 6, shortly before it is superseded by the 6S/6C/whatever.
I am really looking forward to iOS 7 next week though. It looks really slick. The more screenshots of it I see, the more antiquated the iOS 6 design looks. Do we really need glossy 3-D buttons in 2013? We know what buttons do by know; they don’t need to look “clickable”!
That has never been the case for me, or anyone else I know. Downloading even a free app requires me to enter my Apple ID password. Maybe there’s a setting somewhere that I’m unaware of.
I think I misunderstood your original post. When you said “I’m torn between always being on a contract, and using my phone for longer” that implied to me that you were asking if you should sign a contract the moment your previous contract expired, or use your phone for longer on a monthly basis. Here in the United States you don’t need to sign a new contract every two years - you can continue to use your phone as long as you like and are guaranteed the same rate once your contract expires.
I’ve got an Iphone 4S and was holding off my 2 year upgrade for the announcement only to be really underwhelmed.
The only thing that makes me want to upgrade is that the fact that what I pay for my monthly plan doesn’t go down if I don’t upgrade. (It’d be kind of cool incentive if cell phone plans did that).
That’s a really, really… peculiar way to look at it.
You’re paying your provider $70-100 or more per month, or $1,700 to $2,000 over the life of the contract, for a service that is essentially costless to them. In return for you locking yourself into this payment total, they are paying a steeply discounted price on the phone for you, amounting to perhaps 1/5 of your payments to them, or more likely, 1/10.
They are NOT doing you any favor; if you buy your phone outright you can get cheaper, shorter-term (down to month-by-month) service contracts and save hundreds to $1,000 or more on your two years of cell phonage. You just can’t walk out of the store for $0-100 out of pocket.
My new contract in the UK does exactly that. The monthly bill is split into the cost of the service (£22) and the cost of the phone (£20). Once two years are up, the phone is paid for, so if I don’t want to upgrade then I just pay for the service from then on, thus cutting my bill by almost half. If I do want to upgrade then I just start paying the monthly cost for the new phone instead.
Similarly, I can choose to upgrade early if I want, by paying the remaining balance outstanding on the phone cost (£20 x however many months are left), and then start paying the monthly cost of the new phone.
It’s a newish tariff from O2. I don’t know why it has taken so long for such a simple system to be put in place, really.
Could be. Or it could be that I do it so frequently that it just uses the last time I entered my password as within the window of permissible uses.
In any case, that doesn’t at all address why you think that NFC is a big deal to anyone; I have yet to see a merchant or service provider that uses NFC for transactions.
You’ll have to point out where I said that NFC (or the lack of it) was a big deal. I merely said that it was odd. It doesn’t have anything to do with my decision to purchase or not purchase this phone.
Having my Oyster card (for London Transport) built in to my phone would be useful, for one example. I’m not techie enough to know whether NFC in a phone is similar enough to RFID in a smartcard for this to be easily implementable, though.
I don’t get it. You need $40 of phone service, voice calls, data, whatever, a month, right? And you’ll pay $40 for the same amount of service whether you’re on contract or not? So it’s either:
$960 over 2 years for 24 months of phone service OR
$960 over 2 years for 24 months of phone service PLUS $400 off a new phone?
Clearly. What you need to do is shop past the front window or first page of your phone provider, and compare the offerings of all providers in your area.
You will find that there are service options far cheaper than the top-line, let-us-give-you-a-phone offerings. So it’s not a matter of paying the same monthly rate; it’s a matter of paying less and having the freedom to change plans and providers any time you feel like it. You can also shop for the phone from the cheapest provider on eBay or the net, saving more money on everything except This Week’s Hottest Model. Or even there, sometimes.
that window is 15 mins or thereabouts. maybe you’re using a cracked phone, so everything is free and doesn’t require passwords? because otherwise, what happens if someone picks up your phone and buy a few $1000 apps?
re: entering passwords when downloading apps, sometimes it asks me for it and sometimes it doesn’t. I have certainly gone more than 15 minutes between downloading apps and it still doesn’t always ask for the password. It just seems random.
The Oyster Card is a contactless payment card that opens the barriers on the London Underground and takes money from the balance on the card based on where you enter and leave the system. It also works on buses.
You can also now use contactless debit cards to pay bus fares (but not Tube fares). This has caused a bit of fuss where people hold their wallet up to the reader and it takes money from their debit card instead of their Oyster card.
As I understand it, the RFID technology in these cards is essentially the same as NFC. There was a plan to accept NFC mobile phone and debit card payments on the Tube in time for the 2012 Olympics, but that didn’t happen, because among other things it seems the technology wasn’t fast enough.
I can envisage a system where rather than holding the Oyster card up to the reader on the Tube, I just swipe my phone over it instead. But would I need to have my finger on the fingerprint reader as I did so? That would probably cause delays. Better to have a similar system to contactless bank cards where no additional authorisation is needed for small purchases of only a few pounds. Or alternatively you could “pre-approve” the payment by touching your finger on the sensor before your journey, and then it would allow payments to be made for, say, a 30 or 60 minute period.
Edit: Eyebrows, I know it doesn’t require a password for updating apps you have already downloaded. Is that what you’re thinking of maybe?
What you need to do is shop past the front window or first page of your phone provider, and compare the offerings of all providers in your area.