In 2017 my employer gave me £1150 to buy my own iPhone X for work. I knew I would not be working there forever and decided to start saving £10 per month in monthly saver accounts, 2 years later I left the company and they didn’t want the phone back as it was too old. Yay!
I continued saving every month in accounts ranging from ~4-8% interest and my most recent monthly saver just matured and my fund has reached £1121.64
I’ve also been really savvy with my mobile plans over the last 5 years, my current monthly charge is £6 but has been as low as £3, and has absolutely been less than £5 on average. So my mobile phone costs have been on average £15pm.
The iPhoneX is not getting software/security updates anymore, but there is nothing really worth having in this years upgrade:
- 120hz vs. 120hz with ProMotion
- MagSafe - meh!
- 12MP vs. 48MP camera with better low light
- 4G vs. 5G - but HD video streaming works perfectly on 4G.
Do I keep saving and ignore the upgrade again? Or am I silly for running a phone with no security updates because I’m not that interested in a better camera?
Either way I thought my little-by-little saving to get something nice and a little extravagant was worth sharing. The number of people with £50-£60 phone contracts is crazy.
Thank you! This was my thought exactly, I’m skimming MacRumors for the details of the 17 to see if I should start another fixed saver or buy one in September.
I really want to have as little impact on the world as I can and keeping a phone for a long time is frugal and planet friendly. My current one does need rebooting about once a week now or it loses network connection. But that’s only 52 reboots a year :)
I think I’m just going to start a new saver anyway, the chances of anything truly worthwhile is very slim.
My personal take is to go for last year's high-end hardware. Of course with modern tech, you lose one year of software updates/support, but often at 30-50% off compared to the latest generation.
With an expected usable lifespan of 5-7 years, this is a good deal.
I did plan on that last year but the 15 only dropped by about 10% (£100), so less than the value of one year of improvement for an 8 year lifespan device. I will keep an eye on this again as sometimes places like Costco have silly offers to clear stock.
You could probably automate that reboot using the Shortcuts app. I have my router at home reboot once a week for a similar reason and set it up on a schedule to reboot at 3 AM every Monday morning because I should never be up that late on my phone.
Automating would help so you don’t forget and doing during your sleep so you don’t notice the interruption. Only downside would be that you’d have to enter your PIN each morning instead of using FaceID, but not that big of a deal.
Ooh - I’m going to look into that! Thanks