The iPhone 15 reviews are in. They sound familiar! The phones are good. There are some camera upgrades and a few design tweaks. There’s a new cable, and the premium model has an extra button. As reviewers at The Verge put it, the iPhone 15 is “nice” but “not anything we haven’t seen before.” Similarly, the 15 Pro models are “just a bit better than the things that came before them in a lot of small but meaningful ways.”
Apple can expect more than 200 million people to buy one of these phones before the end of next year, and I’ll probably be one of them. I’m not too bothered by the incremental nature of the updates, because Apple’s yearly product upgrade cycle isn’t mine: like a lot of potential customers, my current phone is a few years old, doesn’t really hold a charge, and has at least three visible forms of damage. I don’t expect to be thrilled by three cumulative generations of “bit better” upgrades so much as relieved. I’m looking forward to my new phone, a little. What I’m not looking forward to is buying one.
Apple and other large smartphone manufacturers have spent the last decade refining their core products into sleek, similar slabs of functionality, reducing the decision to buy a new phone to a simple function of timing and platform lock-in more than comparative features or competitive pricing. When your time has come (courtesy of obsolescence, hardware failure, or a two-year itch), upgrade conventions, in which last year’s top-end model often effectively becomes this year’s base model, mean that — aside from selecting screen size, color, and storage capacity — you’re also effectively just buying yourself time.
It’s a fairly clear proposition, and either a small nuisance or a pleasant diversion, depending on your relationship with gadgets and shopping in general — a scheduled encounter with a finely tuned consumer electronics machine with luxury marketing tendencies. During this same decade, however, the financial services that support these upgrades — carrier payment plans, device insurance, and trade-in programs — have become a decision-making morass. Every few years, smartphone customers have an appointment with that machine, too.
Picking a phone is the easy part — it’s the rest that’s become a chore. For one, smartphone prices have crept to levels that ten years ago would have sounded absurd. The research firm Canalyis estimated the average sale price of a new smartphone in North America at $790 in Q1 of 2023, up from $671 a year earlier; the cheapest iPhone 15 is $800, the most expensive iPhone 15 Pro Max is $1,600; Samsung’s new Galaxy Fold5 starts at $1,800. More than ten years ago, in response to the high (for then) cost of smartphones, carriers, led by T-Mobile, moved away from the practice of subsidizing purchases in exchange for two-year contract commitments, shifting the cost of the devices more directly to customers, who instead bought them upfront or paid in installments with their phone bills.
This system had some advantages for carriers and customers — it was, at least, more transparent than hiding the cost of a phone in a bloated monthly bill. As prices kept rising, however, carriers gradually reconstituted something similar to the old model, only a bit more complicated, and with more ways for customers to screw things up. Wireless customers can still get new phones at steep discounts, or for “free,” but only if they meet certain conditions: that they can trade in their previous phones in like-new condition (make sure to check that moisture indicator!), but only certain models; that they’ll stay with their carrier for 24 or 36 months, during which their trade-in value or promotional discount is paid out via monthly “credits” to their bill; that they’re signing up for a certain and usually high-end plan, or in some cases activating a whole new line, or switching carriers. Here’s CNET trying to summarize Verizon’s options, for example:
If you want to get the full $1,000 off from Verizon, you’ll need to add a new line or switch from a rival provider and then sign up for its priciest unlimited plan called Unlimited Ultimate, which it just introduced last month. Like AT&T, you also need to trade in a phone and commit to a 36-month installment plan, where the $1,000 is dished out as monthly bill credits, and if you decide to leave Verizon earlier, you’d be on the hook for whatever is still owed.
That’s just the plan! Given how expensive these devices are — and how valuable trade-ins are — phone insurance, which was initially marketed as a way to protect yourself against catastrophic damage to a device that you didn’t pay for upfront now functions as a responsible way to preserve an investment, which, if you’re being really responsible, should only be seen outside of a protective case twice: on the day you buy it, and the day you sell it back. Maybe you get this from Apple! Or from a carrier. Or a credit card company. Or your homeowner’s insurance! Or from some other insurer. (This is probably the closest thing to actual comparison shopping customers do during a smartphone upgrade, now.)
The beginning-to-end conditionality and ballooning overall cost of smartphone ownership is turning them into classic depreciating assets and smartphone ownership into something more like car ownership, only with fewer trim levels, no particularly fun or even meaningfully different options, no cheap but functional old used cars, shorter upgrade intervals, and less repairability (although we’re seeing a little movement on that front). It’s a comparable set of burdens associated with the sizeable purchase, or lease, of what has become necessary tool.
I won’t argue with success, here — this system has worked out just fine for smartphone manufacturers and carriers — but the grind of the purchasing experience is starting to overshadow the diminishing thrills of each new smartphone generation. Adjusting for a spike in upgrades during the pandemic, smartphone owners seem to be holding onto devices for longer. With a similar pandemic caveat, iPhone unit sales have been ever-so-slightly slowing down, although per-unit prices are at an all-time high, approaching $1,000.
In contrast to its slick, tightly managed image — the yearly events, the well-marketed upgrades, the emphasis on clean design — the offstage reality of iPhone upgrades is full of uncertainty and friction. According to a report in Bloomberg last year, Apple might have a plan for this, too: to replace its pitch for every-other-year upgrades with a monthly hardware subscription, covering everything except the wireless bill. It would simplify things and could solve a set of problems that Apple helped create. It’s would also be a pretty good way to make some very big numbers seem small.
