No, you aren’t spending more money on your iPhone.

With Apple’s recent price increases on the iPhones, many fear that they are being forced to spend more on their phone, year after year. However, this might not be true.

Image by Pixabay on Pixabay.com

While once iPhones were $99 on contract, or $649 outright, they’ve now increased to a whopping $999 for the base model iPhone X. However, you might not be spending much extra at all, after Apple’s recent change in software philosophy. iPhones have always been praised for their longevity on software updates, with the iPhone 4s being given five major OS upgrades, a feat accomplished by few, if any, Android devices. However, with each software iteration, the iPhone 4s became more and more sedatary, lagging and freezing while completing even basic tasks. That has changed. Today, even the iPhone SE, which released at $399 and can be found for as low as $99, can run iOS at a buttery smooth pace with some extra processing power to spare. It can even run some pretty graphics intensive games, despite being almost 3 years old. Compare to the iPhones of yesteryear at 3 years old, and you’ll see we’re getting a pretty sweet deal.

“We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhone devices with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologise. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify a few things and let you know about some changes we’re making.” — Apple

Why?

Since the debacle on intentionally slowing down older phones with worn batteries, Apple has gone and taken a complete 180 on how it’s software updates affect older phones. While traditionally iOS updates slowed phones down, the latest updates from Apple have actually drastically improved performance for older phones. While it doesn’t prove that Apple was intentionally bogging down older phones, it does show that Apple is spending more time optimizing their operating system. Fortunately for the consumer, this means that older phones are now performing better than ever, with phones going as far back as the iPhone 5s performing perfectly well. However, don’t be fooled by this apparent graciousness from Apple. This change in attitude is a direct result of Apple being called out over it’s slowing down of phones, and is part of Apple’s new strategy — they’re aren’t giving you extra performance for free.

Since the A9 chip, Apple’s chip technology has been leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, allowing for faster performance. As a result of this, as well as the new software updates, phones are being kept for longer, with many retaining their iPhone 6s’s. This is evidenced by Apple’s past reluctance to change the form factor of the iPhone from the iPhone 6 onwards. The iPhone 6, 6s, 7, and 8 all shared the same basic shape, only changing for the iPhone X, priced at $999. Gone are the days of easily identifiable ‘latest phones’ — a lot of Apple’s new phones look essentially the same. Thus, in order to keep iPhone profits high, Apple must extract more profit from each unit sold, rather than relying on a large number of units being sold. While once people would upgrade once every year or two, the introduction of newer software updates and more powerful chips, as well as diminishing returns has seen people hold on to their phones for longer. It is no longer the status quo to upgrade every year — Apple seems to anticipate that people will keep their phones for up to five years, as shown by the five year old iPhone 5s being upgradeable to iOS 12. However, unlike the iPhone 4s, which was upgradeable for a similar amount of time, the iPhone 5s remains perfectly usable on it’s final OS.

Should you buy the latest iPhone?

The gains are no longer made in the fluidity of the homescreen or the snappiness of the multitasking screen.

In the past, the answer was obvious: buy the latest and greatest. Each passing iPhone came with such a large upgrade that buying the previous years iPhone was a consolation prize at best, and a disappointment at worst. However, with smartphone technology maturing, each new iPhone (and smartphone in general) comes with iterative upgrades. They’re nice to have, but non-essential, and the performance gains aren’t night and day like they once were. I remember well back in 2012 where swiping back and forth repeatedly on the homescreen was a measure of the speed of a phone. Smooth? Probably a new iPhone. Choppy? Probably an Android phone or an old iPhone. Those days have long gone — any iPhone you can buy today on Apple’s website (and many you can’t anymore) can perform most if not all tasks perfectly well on the latest OS. The gains are no longer made in the fluidity of the homescreen or the snappiness of the multitasking screen. They’re made in how fast the phone will export a 4K video at 60fps, how fast it can download a 500Mb file, or how quickly it can export an entire song in a WAV file in Garageband.

If those things aren’t important to you, you’re probably better off buying something a little older. The iPhone XS and XS Max are the Koenigsegg of phones — they’re engineering masterpieces, and definitely nice to have, but you can do almost everything you can do on them with a lesser model. In fact, the iPhone XR is every bit as fast as the iPhone XS and XS Max, with the same A12 Bionic chip. Combine that with less pixel pushing, since the display is lower resolution, and you get great performance and battery life, something you don’t hear often with phones. At a steep discount compared to the iPhone XS and XS Max, the $749 iPhone XR is a great option, if you’re willing to pay the price. However, things don’t stop there. Last years iPhone X (second hand) and iPhone 8 ($599) lineup are nothing to scoff at, with chips that rival even the most powerful Android phones. They’re not the latest, sure, but they have similar performance to the latest phones, and many of the same features. As always, the latest features are reserved for the latest phones, but do you really need those features? I can count on zero hands how many times I wished that my iPhone 6s had a notch. Best of all, all of the phones that you can buy on Apple’s website right now will last you a minimum of three, if not more years. Assuming five years of software updates the oldest phone in the bunch, the iPhone 7, will last up until around the end of 2021. Not bad for a $449 phone.

Conclusion

The $1099 price tag of the iPhone XS Max may be hard to swallow, but it certainly isn’t the only option. Thanks to the increased longevity of later iPhones, last-generation phones are now a real contender for the best value iPhone, with the iPhone XR the current champion, even though it seems nobody is buying it. It’s hard to sell longevity, but the older devices have taken a real leap forward with the onset of Apple’s new software updates. However, should you bite the bullet and spend the $1099 to get an iPhone XS Max, you can be safe in the knowledge that it will last a lot longer than the $549 flagships of yesteryear. If you’re buying a more expensive phone, but less often, you may not be spending any more on your beloved iPhone after all. Just don’t go buying any $49 power bricks.