A Cry for Help

I have Apple stock, so I urge you and all your friends to go get in line now to buy an iPhone.

That said, there's just no way I can justify getting one. I have T-Mobile, so there wasn't much chance I'd switch to AT&T anyway, but I was thinking about it. Then I did some math and figured that even with the cheapest monthly plan, you'd be out over $2100 when your contract expires in July 2009 (2 year contract is required to even put music on the iPhone). And this is assuming that you bought the 4GB model and fought the temptation to buy any of the eventual upgrades over those two years.

Compare that to my admittedly 2001-era cell phone usage: I have 300 minutes which I never come close to using in a month, and I pay $36 per month including taxes. My phone doesn't have a camera, but I got it for $30 on eBay. I'm long past any contract expiration date I assume I once had. So in July 2009 I'll have paid a little more than $900 for the purpose of calling and texting. This takes into account the inevitability of me going swimming with my phone in my pocket and/or tripping over some rocks on the beach and falling directly onto my phone (not that I have any experience with these things…)

Now, I won't be listening to music or watching movies or taking pictures or surfing the net with a beautiful specimen of industrial design. But I will have $1200 to subsidize a new digital camera and maybe a 7th gen iPod with hopefully some of those tasty iPhone features (please!). And a new iMac. And a new bike. And this book that no one bought me.

Of course, if the iPhone lives up to the hype, maybe AAPL will make me enough cash to not care and I'll get an iPhone too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.