do i have to buy my iphone from apple to purchase applecare

Do i have to buy my iphone from apple to purchase applecare upgrade#

IPhone SE packs the most powerful chip into the most popular size iPhone at the most affordable price.

Do i have to buy my iphone from apple to purchase applecare upgrade#

It’s no wonder annual upgraders are a small group: As this column illustrates, early upgrade plans can be confusing and, in some ways, intimidating.Apple iPhone SE Lots to love. Piper Jaffray, the investment firm, estimates that only 10 percent of iPhone owners are annual upgraders, though it expects that number to grow to 75 percent by the end of 2018. Data from multiple research firms suggests that consumers on average still wait at least two years to upgrade to new smartphones. It remains unclear whether many consumers will want to upgrade every year. If you are an accident-prone iPhone owner, Apple’s early upgrade plan with baked-in device insurance offers great value. Note that Apple’s upgrade plan, which includes insurance, is cheaper than AT&T’s without insurance, and just slightly more expensive than Verizon’s leasing option without insurance. If not, consider leasing through AT&T or Verizon. T-Mobile and Sprint offer the cheapest leasing plans, so if their networks near you are strong, go for one of those. So which early upgrade plan should you choose? First check the coverage maps for each phone carrier to see if the network is good where you live. In this situation, you had the option to upgrade early, but you ended up waiting two years before upgrading and paid no premium. You can just continue paying your lease for eight more months until you own your phone.īy the time the 2017 iPhone comes out, you can sell your current iPhone and start a new lease for the brand-new phone. So let’s imagine that in 12 months, an iPhone 7 comes out and you are not excited about it.

This program gives you up to 20 months to pay off the phone and own it. Let’s say, for example, you subscribed to AT&T’s Next 12 annual upgrade program. If you are happy with your current phone, you can keep it until you have fully paid it off, at which point you own it you pay nothing extra to do so. In the past, you would typically have had to wait two years or pay a stiff fee to upgrade early.Īn important point in all of the early-upgrade plans is that you are not forced to keep leasing new phones every year. Our conclusion: The plans can be good for those seeking the freedom to upgrade, as long as you have leased the phone for a certain amount of time or paid it off entirely. If owning a device fully costs less, that raises the question of who these early upgrade plans are suited for. That makes owning a device outright cheaper than the leasing plans. But you also have to consider that after you have paid off a phone, you can sell it.įor example, if you bought an iPhone 6s for $750, in two years you could probably sell it for about $175, reducing the overall cost of ownership to $575, or $287.50 a year after you’re done paying for the device, the equipment cost is removed from your phone bill.

If you were to fully purchase a $750 iPhone and use it at least two years, that would amount to $375 a year. So how do those early upgrade plans for a 64GB iPhone, which we now know cost from $321 to $450 a year, compare to owning a device before buying a new one? With T-Mobile’s early upgrade plan, you make a down payment of $99.99 for the 64GB iPhone, and pay $27.09 a month for a year before being able to upgrade, with the cost over the year coming to $425.07. Verizon’s early upgrade plan totals $374.88 in leasing cost over a year, while Sprint’s iPhone Forever program’s total cost for a year before an upgrade added up to $321.24.

Over the course of one year, that’s $438.96 to lease the phone.įor AT&T’s annual upgrade plan, called Next 12, you would pay $37.50 a month for 12 months before getting the option to trade in for the next iPhone. Under Apple’s iPhone program, which includes coverage from its device insurance program, AppleCare Plus, you would pay $36.58 a month for a new 64GB iPhone 6s. People would typically have to wait two years to pay off the rest of the phone before earning the privilege of getting another device at a subsidized rate. In the past, smartphones plans worked like this: You would pay a one-time down payment for a phone and sign a two-year contract, which included the costs of wireless service combined with the remaining cost of the device. ”They are a good thing, if you understand them correctly.” “There is nothing forcing you to go for an early upgrade,” said Toni Toikka, the chief executive of Alekstra, a company that analyzes phone bills and helped The New York Times with the calculations. The plans can also be beneficial even if you don’t intend to trade up to a new device every year but want to reserve that option - in other words, you can take advantage of these plans just for flexibility. But we also found that the extra costs of leasing are reasonably low, making early upgrades ideal for tech-loving consumers with disposable income.