Depreciation value or resale value – whatever the words we use results into one price down for our actual goods but wait here the good we are talking about is “smartphones”. According to a study by Priceonomies, all smartphones do not depreciate equally – iPhone can be sold for 53% of their original price, while Androids can only be sold for 42% and BlackBerries for 41% on average after 18 months of purchase.
Priceonomics says “We examined all iPhone models and the 70 most popular Androids and 30 most popular BlackBerry models. We split phones into five different cohorts (newly released, 1, 2, 3, and 4 year-old phones). We then calculated which phones had the best resale by cohort, as well as which platforms in aggregate tended to retain their value the most.” The highest quality phones should have the best resale values over time and crappier phones should depreciate the fastest. The evidence is clear – the winner is the iPhone, they added.
Priceonomics money saving tips:
- There is a diamond in the rough among Android phones. Pre-paid Android phones are relatively inexpensive and hold their value extremely well. The Motorola Triumph, HTC Wildfire, and Samsung Exhibit 4G, for example, retain 86% of the original value on average. These phones appear to be a much better value than the expensive Android phones that are typically nationally advertised.
- Skip those extra GBs on your iPhone. An additional 8GB of hard drive costs you an extra $100 upfront but only adds $10 to the resale value of your phone. The secondary market doesn’t value extra hard drive space on an iPhone, so get the one with the smallest amount of disk space.
- Whenever you get a new phone, sell your old one. If you’re breaking your contract, you can use the proceeds to pay the early termination fee. If you’re eligible for an upgrade, you can use the proceeds toward the fee for the new phone.
- It’s cheaper to break your contract than buying phones without a contract. Even with a $350 early termination fee, it’s usually $100 cheaper to get a subsidized phone and break the contract than buying a no-contract unsubsidized phone. Carriers want you to sign a contract so they create an incentive to do so.
