Feb 2025
These days the iPhone is pretty much a mature product. I couldn’t care less for the micro features they announce each year. Innovation died with Steve Jobs.
I think my needs in a phone can be sufficiently abstracted to these three variables:
- Battery life
- Security updates
- It works
Almost every iPhone fits criteria 3, and criteria 1 can be fixed by just replacing the battery of your phone every 2-3 years. So really, the question when buying an iPhone is, how much per year of security updates?
We also need to model the cost of setup time for an iPhone. I’ve put in, modelling my time as worth $100 per hour, and it takes 3 hours to set up and order, so it costs $300 dollars to have to set up an iPhone more regularly than once every eight years.
And we are excluding the asset value of the iPhone when it hits the end of security updates, as the effort to sell is probably greater than the value of the phone itself.
| iPhone Model* | Price (AUD) | Expected Years of Security Updates | Yearly cost of replacement frequency | Estimated Total Cost per Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16e | 999 | 7 | 5 | 148 |
| 16 | 1399 | 7.5 | 3 | 189 |
| 15 | 1249 | 6.5 | 9 | 201 |
| 15 (used) | 1000 | 6.5 | 9 | 163 |
| 14 (used) | 750 | 5.5 | 17 | 153 |
| 13 (used) | 550 | 4.5 | 29 | 151 |
*Assuming 128gb of storage
It’s interesting how the iPhone 15 is more expensive than the iPhone 16 per year of security updates, if you buy it new.
So with the release of the new iPhone 16e, now is the cheapest time to buy an new iPhone in the next few years, if you mainly value security updates. It is likely worth it for anyone with an iPhone 11 or older given that the iPhone e-series is released so infrequently. If you model your time as worth less than $100 per hour, maybe a used iPhone 13/14 is also worth it. I’ve forgotten to model some things, but I think this gets the cost roughly correct.