Let’s get this out of the way, the new iPhones are crazy expensive. Sure many/most people never pay the actual ticket price, but they’re still crazy expensive.

When I look at new purchases I always start by asking myself how much utility I get out of a device/thing. Do I get $1000 dollars of utility out of a phone?

No I don’t. It probably costs me $1000 in produced value in a year because it keeps interrupting me when I’m trying to focus. Because despite my best efforts, I still fall in to looking at crap I shouldn’t care about in any fashion.

Now you’re going to tell me that almost no one pays the list price on a phone. They almost always get contracts and then pay some fraction of that price. I totally agree, but that’s also crazy.

I recently switched to Public Mobile in Canada from Bell, whom I had been paying for cell usage since 1999. In that transition I went from paying over $180/month for 2 phones with shared 3GB of data to 2 phones with 4GB each of data for $85/month.

I know compared to other countries we pay crazy prices for phone plans. This isn’t getting better any time soon so we have to live with it.

One of the trade offs I made when I went to Public Mobile is that I have to pay for my phone up front in cash. This is a better way to look at the transaction though. Instead of spreading out the cost of the phone over years, I have to bite the bullet up front and the new iPhone is just not worth it.

I’m currently happy on my 6S Plus, though now I’d prefer a smaller phone. I’m hoping that the software update to iOS 12 will in fact give me some speed back, but if it doesn’t I don’t care.

My upgrade will maybe be an iPhone 7, possibly an 8 but not the XS or the XR. They just don’t provide that much value in my life. I have better things to spend money on.