A new way to buy phones
Recently, I had dropped my phone, and the screen shattered, like absolutely shattered, causing the screen to blackout. $100 later, I had it fixed only to have the entire phone die on me due to a motherboard issue, which I could have guessed was coming sooner or later by the fact that the phone kept dying on me.
Now, I had a dilemma. Should I do the same thing I did when purchasing this phone and buy it at full price, or should I buy the previous generation phone at half-price? The tech nerd in me said to buy the latest model, the Pixel XL 4. Complicating things even further was the Pixel XL 3a at about $100 lower and the soon-to-be-released Pixel 4a at $350. Having looked at the specs of the phone, I realized that it would probably come down to the Pixel 3a or the Pixel 3. I didn’t care that much for the 4a because I needed a new phone, and Google’s notorious for having teething issues on newly-released phones.
I wanted to get this out of the way. I could not wait for the Pixel 5 just for the 5G. I feel like even a year in, 5G still seems more like a gimmick than a useful feature. Now, buying a 5G phone would probably be a waste of money. Because I bought a cheap phone at a low price with last year’s flagship features, I still am only one year later than everyone else, and I managed to save quite a bit of money. When it comes time to upgrade this phone (hopefully later than three years from now), 5G should be more relevant and useful than it is today. More MVNOs should offer it as a standard feature by then, and it should be battery efficient as 4G phones are today. There will also be more proliferation in 5G bands by networks, and more support for the various 5G networks by phones. My phone was the generation of Pixels to support the 600 Mhz band, which was released nearly two and a half years after T-Mobile purchased the 600Mhz spectrum.
5G will revolutionize the world, but not immediately. 4G didn’t transform the world because of the increased speeds but the things that people made from those increased speeds. For example, Uber and Lyft would not have been made possible without the bandwidth that 4G provides. People consider Uber/Lyft to be revolutionary, which would not have been made possible without 4G. Still, it didn’t arrive without widespread 4G availability, which 5G is not and will not be for a while.
Therefore, after thinking through all of this, I decided on the Pixel 3 XL. At $450, it was a nice phone. It’s not the best looking phone, but it gets the job done. It’s not the Pixel 4 with Face Unlock or any of the new fashionable features on that, but it still had a great camera, and being a few weeks in, I don’t regret it. It was bigger than I expected, but I have big hands, so that does help in that regard.
So, my new strategy for buying phones is to buy a flagship at near budget rates, in the Pixel line-up that would be the Pixel 3. In the Galaxy line-up, that would be the S10 series. I’m not sure what I would get because they still don’t quite fit the term budget (I’m looking at approximately $500 for that moniker). Samsung says the S10e can start at $350, but I have no clue where to get one for that price. In the Apple iPhone series, that would be the iPhone XR and maybe the 11. The iPhone XR starts at $599, which is nearly half the $999 sticker price for the latest iPhone 11 Pro.
Every year each company does release a new model, but nothing these days are that revolutionary. They are more or less incremental, or they’re getting features from the uber-expensive phones. For example, next year’s Samsung’s mainstream phone will get features from this year’s S20 Ultra or Galaxy Fold. Therefore, buy a flagship phone at a low price and save the money for something else. If I replace a phone every two years under this new scheme, it will cost about $1000 rather than $2000, a savings of $1000 every six years. Not much amortized over time, but that could be a new TV every six years or a new console every three years just from the savings alone. My advice is to save money and buy something else with the savings that you also really want.
