I’ve been using an iPhone 8 Plus since it came out in 2017. Thats six years - I got my first mobile phone in about 1995 and my first smartphone around 2002, and this is by far the longest I’ve had the same phone - smashing my previous record of 2 years.

Before my 8 Plus, a 2 year old iPhone was always irritatingly, frustratingly slow. I wasn’t buying new iPhones because I wanted a new phone - it was because I didn’t want to use the old one any more. (At least, thats the way I remember it...) But in 2020, when my phone was three years old, it just didn’t really seem worth upgrading - other than the battery not holding a charge for a whole day any more- so I just got the battery replaced to squeeze another (I thought) year or two of life out of it. That also happened to be about the same time that Apple stopped selling the iPhone 8 - I figured it wouldn’t be long until it would inevitably grind to a halt as new phones got faster and new OS features made the old phones slower - as they had been doing in the past.

It’s another three years later and I’m struggling to get through the day on a single charge again. (Its not even lunchtime, I haven't gone out and used GPS or anything "high drain" and I'm already below 50% charge.) But apart from the battery, even now it’s still mostly “fine” for day to day use - sure, it has slowed down a little, but it’s a minor irritation when it occasionally freezes for a second or so. The difference is that it’s now at its ‘end of life’ - iOS 17 won’t run on it, which means that this is point where things in general are probably going to stop working.

(If you phone is ‘just’ a phone, then thats not really a big deal - but I’m deep into the whole Apple ecosystem, which means that there will be apps/app updates that have a minimum OS requirement, cross-platform features that will only work with my iPad/Macbook when everything’s on the latest version will stop working etc. eg. I’ll have to choose whether to update my Notes database to use new features on my iPad/Macbook, or keep it behind for phone compatibility) Basically - headaches are ahead.)

So, if you’d bought an iPhone 8/8 Plus on the very last day you could get one from Apple, you would have got three years of life out of it. That’s kind of interesting.

Also... is it really ‘end of life’? Sure, iOS17 won’t be available... But before the iPhone 8, I had an iPhone 6S- which never got support for iOS 16… but iOS 15 is still getting security updates (it just got one last week.) I don’t know how long that will continue, but I would guess that iOS 16 will be getting security updates for another year or two. So, maybe there are 7-8 years worth of life in an iPhone 8? That is honestly something I find astonishing - I know that there’s a perception that Apple have a ‘planned obsolescence’ strategy, but the reality seems to be significantly different.

That means I’ve got six years of usefulness out of what was originally an £800 handset - that works out as an average cost per day of about £0.36 over its lifespan (to date). Apple’s general pattern with phone release cycles is that last years ‘standard’ phone gets £100 knocked off its price when the new one comes out - which sounds good, but a £700 handset that only lasts five years works out as a £0.38 cost per day - an effective price increase of 5%. (Getting a 2 year old handset means a £600 phone for four years - £0.41 per day, or a 12% price increase.) Plus, it means you never get the benefit of having the latest phone despite effectively paying more - which is something quite difficult to put a value against.

(Yes- this is how I justify spending £800 on new iPhone when my current one is still more-or-less working OK. And yes, I know that I’m post-rationalising a decision that I really made months ago.)

So, is buying the latest phone and keeping it for as long as possible the most cost-effective way of buying iPhones? Probably not - there are other things worth considering.

First, you’ve also got the top-end Pro model as an option- that only stays on the market for a year, so you don’t get the “same phone for cheaper” option. What you can do (at the moment) is get the same phone for cheaper - but refurbished, but not until two years later. Last year, the Pro shifted from being (broadly) “the same, but with a better camera” to “the same, but with a better camera and next years ‘standard’ CPU’ - which means it should have an extra years worth of ‘full’ iOS support.

But its a £200 price premium - so the Standard model will cost £0.37 per day over 6 years, versus the Pro’s cost of £0.39 per day over 7 (a 7% premium.)

(Thats all assuming that the current lifespan stays the same - I think there’s a limit to how much more performance can be squeezed out of a modern CPU. The iPhone 8 used a CPU manufactured on a 10 nanometer process - the iPhone 15 Pro is on a 3 nanometer process, and the limits that chip manufacturing are hitting up against now are more to do with the laws of physics than the economics of the manufacturing process. But I’m pretty sure that Apple will be planning other features to make up for it - whether thats something like more CPU cores, more GPU cores, more memory, more storage - or some other feature entirely... I’m still holding out for something like the power of ChatGPT coming to Siri, but thats another subject...)

If you’re the sort of person who manages not to scratch, chip or generally knacker your phone over the course of a couple of years then there is also the trade-in value that is well worth considering - that changes the equation. (Despite my efforts, I’m not that sort of person - I don’t even like using a case - so I’ve not spent much time on that particular spreadsheet.)

(There is also the SE model - similar internals, with an older handset design/camera etc. Not for me though - I want a better camera, even if the Pro camera for an extra £200 is outside of what I can justify to myself.)

But if you’re thinking about long-term value of phones, there is another factor worth considering - as Ben Thompson at Stratechery.com points out, inflation means that the value of currency changes over time; my iPhone 8 plus cost £800 when I bought it, and a brand new iPhone 15 costs £800 today; those aren’t the same prices!

Here are the real prices of iPhone’s over the last three years (rough calculations via this site, with 2020 as a baseline):

Item	2020	2021	2022	2023
2 year old iPhone	$499	$477	$441	$422
1 year old iPhone	$599	$572	$530	$507
New iPhone	$799	$763	$707	$676
iPhone Pro	$999	$954	$883	$846
iPhone Pro Max	$1,099	$1,050	$972	$1,015

So - apparently - my £800 iPhone 8 Plus in today’s money would cost £1,013. Which is interesting, because I still can’t bring myself to break the psychological barrier of £1,000 for a phone (I’m old enough to remember when the handset was “free” and you only paid the monthly network cost...) - but it turns out that, in todays money, I already have.

Anyway - its new phone day today, and its a long time since I’ve written a blog post about new phones.

Some Random Nerd