Keeping up with the Joneses. The mindless pursuit of stuff. And experiences.

 

B. CFO. 

The topic of phone upgrades came up on the  web today and I was inspired to explain my take on buying new phones every year. Or not. My readers sometimes think of me as a person who spends and makes impulse purchases and, where cameras and lenses are concerned that's somewhat fair. But in every other regard I am quite the financial conservative. 

We're hardly early adopters of most trends. I'm using a perfectly good Apple iPhone that I bought years and years ago. It's the XR, a model that was introduced and purchased in 2018. Apple is on record offering support for the product through 2025. Seven years. After that some upgrades in firmware and software will not be relevant to my model. I paid something like $899 USD for the phone. If I keep it for the rest of this year I will have "invested" about a little over $10 per month to own and use the phone. It's still highly functional. Since I understand batteries pretty well I'm happy to say that the battery life indicator shows that the original battery is still at 92% of its delivered spec. Not bad after 6.5 years of daily use and near daily charging.

I use the phone mostly for its Map function, texting, mobile email and actual voice conversations. I do have a number of apps that are useful to me but very, very few of them have anything to do with photography. I have two banking apps, the Whole Foods/Prime app, the weather app, the stock market app and the calculator app. All the apps work really, really well. I use the camera feature mostly to deposit checks into one of the two banks. I also use the camera feature to record documents to send to various requestors. I don't use the phone camera for photography, per se, because I have so many other cameras, the operation of which I prefer. 

I can't recall using Siri for anything at the moment but I do use it when my iPhone seamlessly connects with my internal combustion engine car via the ever reliable, CarPlay. The product, the phone, has done and continues to do EXACTLY what I bought it to do. And I'm quite happy with that. 

I have missed the following upgrade cycles: iPhone 11, iPhone 12, iPhone 13, iPhone 14, iPhone 15 and iPhone 16. That's six upgrade cycles. At an average of $1,000 per upgrade I have saved about $6,000 since my purchase of the XR. That's a lot of money. If you factor in the same lifecycle discipline for my spouse, whose phone I also bought, it's a family savings of about $12,000. Half the purchase price of an acceptable, used electric car. Wow. Until this moment I never thought about it that way...

My CFO always tells me, re: Apple, "If you love the company and think the products are good then buy the stock, not the toys." 

Had one followed my phone buying pattern and used the savings to buy Apple stock instead of continually changing phones you would have seen a basis return of nearly 140%. About 20% per year since 2018. But even more appealing would have been the stock split of four shares for one in 2020. And those 4x shares grew faster after the economic recovery, post Covid. But wait! One has to also factor in that during the entire time I've clung to the XR Apple has paid quarterly dividends on its stock. By not reflexively buying phones before they cease completely to be supported one could conceivably have saved, across two phones and two users, and re-invested at least $18,000 --- when factoring in the stock appreciation. Three quarters the price of a used and quickly depreciating, used electric car.

We don't really use our phones as mini-computers or entertainment centers, we have products we use that are optimized for those uses. But the thing we value most in the iPhones is not the camera or the apps, or the kindly but sometimes confused voice of Siri, instead it's the advanced security offered by Apple's products and systems. It's possible that we could save money and get more features from a phone not running Apple's software but almost certainly we'd be giving up layers of security. More so as we opted to use more and more Android based apps. That could be a hefty penalty to pay for a bit of novelty disguised as technology. 

I'll replace me XR iPhone when security updates and patches are no longer available and when I do I will understand that I've gotten great value from my phone while saving prodigious amounts of money at the same time. Funny how that works...

While Apple's products have gotten better and better over time, and their new processors are light years ahead of those in the competing products (which should give me tremendous potential benefits over their competitors) the real secret to "keeping up with the Joneses" has been to also buy the company's stock. The phones are good but the stock is better and has grown by 159, 281% since 1984. An investment of $1,000 USD in 1985 would be worth over $250,000 today. Not a bad return at all. And a return like that would allow one to upgrade phones as often as they'd like without breaking a sweat or eating Ramen. Imagine if you had invested ten thousand dollars in 1985.... As some people did. And then were smart enough to hold onto your investment over time.... As some people have.

Funny that when some people concentrate really hard on one product category the tunnel vision created by that focus makes each small "pro or con" become magnified all out of proportion. Product features seem to become existential. But really? All the phones are just appliances and most of them do a decent job. Some with more security and some with less. Buying them frequently mostly boils down to consumerism and personal choice. Great if you can afford it but not mandatory for continued, successful existence.

Just sayin.