The True Cost of the 3G Upgrade
Jun 15, 07:47 PMGizmodo says:
Otherwise, $160 is a small price to pay—for us at least—over the course of two years to drastically increase your email and browsing speeds.
This is, sadly, wrong. The cost to upgrade is $579 for an 8GB iPhone 3G, $679 for the 16GB.
The true cost of upgrading is measured as the difference between not doing the upgrade and doing the upgrade. The upgrade cost is not the difference between the total costs of ownership.
- If you have an existing iPhone, you can keep with your existing equipment, voice and data plans. Setting aside the voice plan, this will cost you $480 (24 months of $20 data.)
- If you choose to upgrade, you will purchase a new iPhone 3G ($199 for the 8GB model) with data plan (24 months of $30 data and $5 SMS, or $840), for a total of $1039 over two years. Again, this assumes the voice plans are a wash.
- The difference between the two is $579. Add another $100 for the 16GB model.
Again: if, right now, you could purchase either the iPhone or the iPhone 3G, the straight comparison between the two plans would apply. But you can’t. Either you are upgrading from one to the other, or you are starting fresh.
Interestingly, if you are a Blackberry user, the cost to switch to iPhone 3G is actually much lower than the cost to upgrade. Your voice and data plans are equivalent, so the only switching cost is the equipment upgrade, and possibly a termination fee from another carrier. So you could be looking at a maximum of ~$399 (depending on your termination fee) to switch from Verizon or T-Mobile to the 8GB iPhone 3G.
But upgrading from the iPhone remains a more expensive proposition than you might think.
Incidentally, this is a great strategy for AT&T and Apple to adopt. Those who wanted the iPhone as a phone upgrade got it with phone prices; now smartphone and Blackberry users will get the iPhone 3G at PDA prices.
You know, that $69 AppleCare for my iPhone looks more and more attractive with each analysis.
(Gizmodo link via Daring Fireball)
