{"id":12239,"date":"2015-09-11T08:11:32","date_gmt":"2015-09-11T12:11:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=12239"},"modified":"2015-10-14T15:53:48","modified_gmt":"2015-10-14T19:53:48","slug":"getting-a-new-iphone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/09\/11\/getting-a-new-iphone\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting a New iPhone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/tech.kateva.org\/2015\/09\/things-to-do-when-selling-old-iphone.html\">John Gordon<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/tech.kateva.org\/2015\/09\/things-to-do-when-selling-old-iphone.html\">\r\n<p>Among other issues, Apple has longstanding problems with their customer identity infrastructure and how it intersects with their device registration, DRM rules, and messaging systems. Under iOS 8, for example, there appear to be 4-5 different authentication channels for Apple products even when a user has only one AppleID.<\/p>\r\n<p>Which is why, in the course of moving the kid&rsquo;s iPhones around, I made a list of the steps I take when deactivating an old iPhone (for sale, disposal, or migration to the backup stack).<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imore.com\/how-buy-iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-united-states#slide3\">Derek Kessler<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/www.imore.com\/how-buy-iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-united-states#slide3\">\r\n<p>The complication comes from AT&amp;T naming the plans with numbers that don&rsquo;t match the months you&rsquo;re paying &mdash; they&rsquo;re the number of months after which you can trade in for an upgrade So while the Next 12 plan divides your payments over 20 months, you&rsquo;ll be eligible to trade in for an upgrade after 12 months. See? Not that confusing.<\/p>\r\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\r\n<p>With all Next upgrades it&rsquo;s a trade-in &mdash; it&rsquo;s rent-to-own. You&rsquo;re paying equity into the phone, and you can trade it in for a new phone partway through, or you can keep paying and in the end the phone is yours.<\/p>\r\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\r\n<p>A 2-year contract will cost about $50 more [than Next] over the long haul, but that the phone is still yours at the end after putting $500+ into it makes the old way of doing things mighty tempting.<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>If you plan to update your phone frequently, purchase on the Next 12 plan. It has the lowest cost to upgrade (either by waiting the requisite 12 months or waiting at least 2 moths and paying off the remaining balance to 12) of any of the Next plans (Next 12: 60%; Next 18: 75%; Next 24: 80%), and while you&rsquo;ll pay more per month, you&rsquo;ll pay less per phone.<\/li>\r\n<li>If you plan to upgrade every other year, don&rsquo;t bother with the Next 24 plan and go for the traditional 2-year contract. It costs you about the same over 2 years, but in the end you get to keep your old phone instead of having to trade it in. Or you can trade it in for an additional rebate. Yes, it feels weird to be recommending you buy on contract, but the match checks out.<\/li><\/ul>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>However, it looks like you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macrumors.com\/2015\/06\/05\/apple-store-iphone-att-next-only\/\">can&rsquo;t buy<\/a> an AT&amp;T phone with a 2-year contract from Apple&rsquo;s online store. You don&rsquo;t want to get the 2-year contract if you aren&rsquo;t going to upgrade when it&rsquo;s over, because you&rsquo;ll still be paying an extra $15\/month for nothing.<\/p>\r\n<p>Update (2015-09-11): <a href=\"http:\/\/lifehacker.com\/how-often-should-you-upgrade-your-iphone-an-experiment-1729328617\">Whitson Gordon<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/lifehacker.com\/how-often-should-you-upgrade-your-iphone-an-experiment-1729328617\"><p>But I always wondered whether it was more cost effective to sell your old phone early, while it still had value, or run it into the ground. Which saves you more money in the long run?<\/p>\r\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\r\n<p>Looking at those numbers, it seems that it&rsquo;s most cost effective to sell your phone every three years or more, but just by a nose. Doing so will save you around $100 (plus tax) over the course of six years on Swappa. If you use my Cragslist numbers, it comes out closer to $160. Even more interestingly, selling your phone every year and every two years is pretty darn close to equal. So if every three years is a bit too long for you, you might as well upgrade every year and have the latest and greatest!<\/p>\r\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\r\n<p>Most of this math hinges on one very important fact: you should sell your phone using a site that doesn&rsquo;t take a bunch of extra fees.<\/p><\/blockquote>\r\n<p>Update (2015-09-12): <a href=\"http:\/\/tidbits.com\/article\/15914\">Josh Centers and Adam C. Engst<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/tidbits.com\/article\/15914\"><p>It took us hours to sift through the carrier sites to put together these lists, and frustratingly, it&rsquo;s difficult to make exact comparisons, due to the carriers offering differently sized data plans. Nonetheless, here are our conclusions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n<p>Update (2015-09-25): <a href=\"http:\/\/macperformanceguide.com\/blog\/2015\/20150914_1438-iPhone6S-upgrade.html\">Lloyd Chambers<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/macperformanceguide.com\/blog\/2015\/20150914_1438-iPhone6S-upgrade.html\">\r\n<p>A year ago I wrote What does an iPhone 6 Plus cost?, in which I showed how no matter what you do, AT&amp;T will nick you. There exists no good deal; all deals are variations on the same pricing in which you end up paying in full for the phone (or more), one way or another.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n<p>Update (2015-10-14): <a href=\"http:\/\/workstuff.tumblr.com\/post\/130293056930\/the-huge-catch-in-the-iphone-upgrade-program-that\">Adam Fields<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/workstuff.tumblr.com\/post\/130293056930\/the-huge-catch-in-the-iphone-upgrade-program-that\">\r\n<p>\u201cBecause the iPhone Upgrade Program isn\u2019t tied to a single carrier, you don\u2019t need a multiyear service contract. If you don\u2019t have any carrier commitments, you\u2019re free to select a new carrier or stick with the one you have.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>[\u2026]<\/p>\r\n<p>Except - that\u2019s not the case. As Apple has now revealed on their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/iphone\/LTE\/\">LTE specifications page<\/a>, the two phones are not cross-compatible. The AT&amp;T phone works on AT&amp;T and <em>only<\/em> on AT&amp;T. The \u201ceverything else\u201d phone doesn\u2019t work on AT&amp;T at all. And by \u201cworks\u201d, I\u2019m talking about LTE service. It\u2019s 2015 - you can\u2019t say that a flagship iPhone (or any recent iPhone for that matter) is really functional without LTE service.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Gordon: Among other issues, Apple has longstanding problems with their customer identity infrastructure and how it intersects with their device registration, DRM rules, and messaging systems. Under iOS 8, for example, there appear to be 4-5 different authentication channels for Apple products even when a user has only one AppleID. Which is why, in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[132,182,558,984,140,31,904,85,1273,224],"class_list":["post-12239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-carrier","tag-drm","tag-facetime","tag-find-my-iphone","tag-imessage","tag-ios","tag-ios-8","tag-iphone","tag-iphone-6s","tag-itunes"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12239"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12556,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12239\/revisions\/12556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}