Wondering what is the cheapest way to buy into apple and still ride the wave (not buying obsolete tech)
1- Buy and sell: Buy the latest at Apple price (not inflated ebay price), sell the used device.
2 - Buy and hold: Buy the device and hold on to it as long as you can, cry as improvements are not longer meant for you, eventually retiring the device for a new one.
I have friends who always want the newest, so I buy a year old phone from them. I keep it for at least two, usually three years - towards the end I stop updating the OS.
Little resale value then, so I repurpose them. One went away to be a toddler toy, one is filled with music and permanently plugged into an alarm clock (also used for Internet radio). I’ll do that again for the guest room.
Moderator Action
While you can do a certain amount of math to factually calculate the costs, overall this seems like more of an advice and opinion sort of thing.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
I’ll have a crack at the math:
New generations seem to come out annually.
Current NZ pricesfor 16GB 6S (current model) - $1,079, last year’s model $889 So only $190 to upgrade with on the buy and sell option. The 2013 model 16GB 5S is listed for $654 and the 2012 iphone 5 for $469 so let’s just assume a straightline $200 drop each year.
This means it’ll take buy and hold 5 years to get ahead of buying and selling each year.
As an aside I’m staggered by these numbers I’d have guessed a much higher drop in price from year to year but at least here in NZ old iphones are worth a lot more than I thought.