TL;DR – How To Never Pay Full Price For An iPhone Again
The simplest way to buy iPhones for less is to buy a refurbished model. This is what I’ve been doing for the past 8+ years, and I’d never go back.
- You’ll save 40% to 60% on average and the phone looks and functions as good as new.
- You can go higher with storage; 1TB and 512GB models suddenly become more affordable.
- Pro and Pro Max models from 24 months ago cost less than the new base model.
Here’s a secret most Big Tech companies and retailers don’t want you to know: new phones are a bit of a scam.
Modern iPhones – which means: anything released in the last several years – have more processing power under the hood than anyone needs. You do not need a new phone.
Aren’t refurbished phones a little, well… janky?
Most people think that, but the reality is completely different. Providing you buy them from a legit refurbished retailer, the phone you get will look as good as new.
There are grades (read more about how they work here), so a Grade A phone will look brand new and a Grade C might have some scuffs and bumps.
The higher the grade, the more you pay. I tend to go for Grade A because I like my phones to look as pristine as possible. It also helps with their resale value when it comes to upgrade time.
Since 2019, every phone I’ve owned has been refurbished.
I started with the iPhone 12 Pro, then moved to the iPhone 13 Pro, and now I’m running an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
This is the simplest way to buy iPhones for less.
Smartphone Evolution Has Basically Plateaued
There’s always plenty of noise online about new iPhone models, new chipsets, updated camera tech.
But if you look past the marketing hyperbole and the shills on social media, like actually LOOK at the phones and the tech inside them, you’ll see that very little changes between generations.
The camera inside the iPhone 15 Pro Max is better than the base model iPhone 17’s and it isn’t noticeably far behind the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s either.
A professional photographer might be able to spot the difference. You could use a specialist benchmarking tool to see the difference in performance between Apple’s older chipset versus its latest.
Most people, however, will notice basically nothing in real-world usage.
An iPhone 15 Pro Max is perfect for professional content creation on platforms like YouTube. It runs rings around the newer iPhone 17, and yet because it’s refurbished it retails for less than $500 in most cases.
Go with a refurbished base model and the savings are even more impressive; the iPhone 15 with 256GB of storage is arguably the best value phone in the world right now; you can get one for $455 which is incredible value for money.
Convinced yet? You should be. I’ve been in tech journalism for 15+ years and the case for buying new phones has NEVER been weaker.
Smartphones are massively over-powered for what most people use them for: you don’t need laptop-grade specs to browse stuff on TikTok and send messages on WhatsApp.
The only real magic at play in the phone market right now is that Big Tech companies like Apple and Google have managed to persuade millions of people to buy brand new phones at hugely marked-up prices.
And phone prices, in case you didn’t get the memo, are only going one way in the near future: upwards!
You’ll Pay For AI Even If You Don’t Like It Or Want It
The chief culprit behind these ever-increasing prices? You guessed it: AI.
Artificial Intelligence is Big Tech’s new growth strategy, the thing that will power its next decade or more of growth.
This is why Big Tech is now obsessed with shoe-horning AI into everything.
The fact that most people want nothing to do with it (data suggests 46% of people feel extremely negative towards AI, after all) has yet to register with companies like Meta and Google and Samsung.
AI is also responsible for why phones are getting more and more expensive. Increased demands for memory have driven up the prices of everything that uses memory, from consoles to laptops and, of course, phones.
Supply cannot keep up with demand.
AI servers are power-drains and everybody’s favorite LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini require an ungodly amount of memory to work effectively with current levels of usage. As money pits go, AI is one of the biggest in operation right now.
If you want to get out of this cycle for good, pay less for your next phone, and NOT pay for AI features and AI’s ongoing, massive R&D costs, the choice is simple: get a refurbished phone.
Once you’ve got one in your hand and have used it for a few weeks, I guarantee you’ll never buy a new phone again.
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