Should You Use Apple Upgrade Program For iPhone 14? | Apple Care+, Hidden Costs, & More

So the video on how to buy an iPhone 14 that was released on Friday performed very well over the weekend. There's a lot of positive feedback and whatnot, plus a ton of questions in the comments, so I thought I'd edit it. a little bit of the second part because in answering questions I realized that there are some other things that I probably could have put in that first video, so definitely check it out and then consider this as an appendix with some additional tips and some additional ideas. The general treatise of that first video was: if you're going to

upgrade

your phone every year, every two years or every three years, I kind of gave my opinion on the most efficient way to do it, if you're going to

upgrade

one year, just buy the full price of the phone and then trade it straight to Apple or Best Buy or t or whoever, if you want to last two years then a carrier fee is probably your best option, they will give you three years but you can buy it at the end of two years and, interestingly, it is a

more

efficient way to get and operate a two-year update on a phone or, at best, if you are going to last three years, do it with the carrier. installments, the phone is basically free, a new phone free every three years at that time, but other than that, a couple of things were asked about the Apple upgrade

program

itself and I have to say something similar to the following and some Of those plans I'm not a big fan of the Apple plan, the Apple plan basically forces you to pay the full monthly price of a phone in perpetuity, essentially the big difference when you're browsing these trade-in offers or these deliveries.

The offers differentiate what is a trade-in and what is an exchange and the difference is that a trade-in does not give you anything back for the phone, you are only giving the phone back to the people who were renting it. To you, a trade-in means that they will give you money for it and you really want to operate your phone upgrades in a way that makes it a trade-in and not a delivery, so Apple's upgrade

program

is just a trade-in on you. You literally pay the full price of the phone divided by 24 for 12 months and then you have the freedom to go back to Apple, return the phone to them, and start a new installment on a new phone so you don't get a trade-in.

You don't get any kind of discount and the other part is that you are required to enter Apple

care

Plus, so Apple's upgrade program doesn't just pay for the full monthly price of the phone or the full price of the phone divided by 24 monthly. in perpetuity, but you are obligated to use Apple

care

plus, some people may be okay with that. I'm not a big insurance person, but in any case, Apple's upgrade program, if you look at a base iPhone 14 pro max, is in the order. For $54 a month, that's six hundred and fifty dollars a year if you upgrade your phone every year, whereas if you bought the phone outright and then upgraded that model a year later with Apple, you'd be spending three hundred and eighty dollars. out of pocket to upgrade every year, so there's a pretty considerable difference there and then also by just buying and trading, you're not locked in to anyone, you're not beholden to anyone, it's your phone, it's yours, you can do whatever whoever you want, make your choices, so yes, Apple's update program, next.

I'm not really a fan of any of those programs and I will say that if you value insurance on your phone, if you're the type of person that randomly tends to break it, damage it, drop it. all that kind of stuff and you want some kind of coverage Applecare is really good for Apple devices; However, if you have a better buy near you, I highly recommend that instead of paying Apple for Apple Care independently, on every device you can buy, go to Best Buy and become a Total Tech 200 member. dollars a year at Best Buy gives you total technology, gives you a lot of benefits and other things at Best Buy, like longer returns, faster shipping, extra benefits, just like you were shopping. appliances and other

more

important things from there, but it gives you Apple Care Plus on every Apple device you buy and you don't have to pay to add it individually to those devices, so I've been seriously considering this for our household, there

should

probably already be We've done this from the beginning when Total Tech was implemented, which is essentially paying to be a Total Tech member and then buying all the Apple devices that we would buy in our entire home at Best Buy and having that coverage. in it, it would be all the phones, all the tablets, all the Mac Air Pods, Apple TV, any of those devices, everything would be covered under that umbrella and if you take the value of that for $200 a year, all that extra coverage you know when something is damaged. we have kids that use devices and it starts to make a little more sense instead of again having the individual bear the individual cost of Apple care with Apple on each device, but still, I'm still not a big insurance person. .

I think people are a warranty person, I guess they have an extended warranty. I think a lot of people overdo that stuff on their devices and on their electronics. Insurance is very important in your life. Absolute life insurance. Disability insurance. Health insurance. All those kinds of things you want. To insure your cars, you want to insure your home, but when we're talking about devices that cost a few hundred dollars or even a few thousand dollars, people end up spending thousands and thousands of dollars on extended warranties and insurance, and if you stop buying those Things are essentially self-insured on the rare occasion that something can go wrong or break and need to be repaired or replaced.

I think in the long run you will come out much better saving money than buying these things. Guarantees for every single thing you can buy in life and it is very telling that each of these stores, each of these places, always want to sell you these guarantees. They don't do it because they want to be your friends. We're doing it because it's a massive profit area for those places that sell you those policies to sell you those warranties, so they're off the soap box, but again, if you want Applecare on a bunch of Apple devices and you have access to Best Buy Total Tech 100. that's the way to do it, a couple of people in the comments asked about t-mobile because I had commented more specifically about 18t and verizon, looking at it, t-mobile looks very similar, they are offering trade-in deals up to a thousand. dollars and they have similar payment plans, so as far as I understand, almost everything I was talking about

should

apply equally to t-mobile, there are many other smaller independent operators, so if you take the general concepts I'm talking about and Looking at some of the details about those specific carriers, I think you'll probably find pretty fair deals.

There are a couple more comments on the idea of ​​What if I have a much older phone and when I say older phone? Speaking of something that's more than three years old, like I talked about, if your phone is a year, two, three years old, you can really qualify for these insider deals and these insider trade-ins, but if you have something that's much older than that, the values ​​really fall off a cliff, you no longer qualify for these huge thousand dollar or close to a thousand dollar trade-in deals, so so be it, I think if you have something much older you're just going to have to take the hit, you have to start over, put up the money to get an upgrade, but then in the future, seriously consider that it's not really working in your favor anymore, I think keeping a phone for more than three years, three generations.

Of a device today it has many features, a lot of power, a lot of capacity and all that. I would find it difficult to keep a phone, I think potentially for three years, but it's not old, but it's not very old once you get to four or five years, that's starting to get pretty old, three years is the sweet spot to achieve the most efficiency in terms of these deals and how they work and all that, so if you think you're going to last more than three years with the phone today, I would actually recommend that you limit yourself to three and do these carrier deals, takes the 36 months, basically you will be able to do it from the first onwards, you will basically be able to update your devices. essentially free, actually again it doesn't work in your favor to keep the devices for four or five years, three is the maximum and then the last kind of addendum that I wanted to put in the video above is the idea of ​​also keeping in mind that when you're upgrading , there are a couple of

hidden

costs

, potentially three

hidden

costs

, each new phone activation on a line with a carrier can cost you like 30 or 35 dollars, so if you're upgrading annually and all that, that's going to be added to your upgrade. price the other second, even when you do these trade-in deals and these privileged business deals for all this money, no matter what you do, they will always charge you tax on the full price of the phone, so the sales tax depends on your state. it can vary of course here in Michigan it's six percent so on something like an iPhone 14 Pro it's another sixty dollars or for a Pro Max 66 dollars and then the last hidden cost to think about is a case.

I think it's no surprise that Apple even goes from 13 to 14 and every year they manage to change the sizes of the phone, let's add a millimeter here, let's remove a millimeter here instead of keeping the same chassis, so if you had a good case after about a year and it was still in good shape and you updated the phone. At best you could remove that case from the old one and put the case into the new one, which is usually never the case, pun intended, so yes, depending on what cases you use and where. You buy them, you are buying an Apple leather case or a Magsafe item.

You could pay 40 50 60 for a case the dimensions of the phone, wouldn't you know it? Turns out it's different enough that that old case really is. It's not going to fit, you'll have to buy a new one, so an individual phone upgrade comes with a cost on the order of about 150 between activation, potentially sales tax, and whatever new case may be necessary, so There are some additional ideas. Check out part one, which goes into a lot more detail on the one-, two-, and three-year ideas and takes advantage of carrier swaps and all that. If you have any more questions, feel free to post them here in the comments.

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